15 Jan 2007 robogato   » (Master)

Advogato Status Report

A new rev of mod_virgule code went live today. See the changelog for the details. This upgrade required taking Advogato offline for about an hour to modify the XML database.

Until today, mod_virgule has stored timestamps in the XML data store that reflected the server's local time zone. The code then made assumptions about the time zone when rendering articles, posts, or RSS feeds. Prior to 3pm, 1 October, 2006, the server's local time zone was US Pacific time. When Advogato got transferred to our hosting facility, the new server was using the US Central time zone. This created a further complication because of the two hour time shift. Adding the blog aggregator made things worse because 99% of the incoming blog feeds use UTC timestamps.

Having to juggle three time zones on a regular basis was creating a bit of a headache for me. I decided it was time to get things under control before the code got so complicated that only a Time Lord from Gallifrey could understand it. So mod_virgule now uses UTC for everything. The code changes were relatively straightforward but normalizing Advogato's rather large XML data store was another matter. I wrote a Perl program that recursively scanned Advogato's 30,000+ XML files looking for timestamps in several different formats and adjusted them to UTC (which required a different offset depending on whether they were recorded before or after 3pm, 1 Oct, 2006). That's the reason for the brief downtime.

So, anyway, we're back up and everything should be working the same as always aside from being on UTC time rather than Central time. If anyone notices any breakage, let me know.

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New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!