Cb is back in business

Two weeks ago, I looked into why Cb was failing once more, as Cb was giving MySQL warnings, and the after that I cleaned up the list of active blogs. Several people reported that, for example, the Blue Obelisk RSS feed was down. Today, I found the cause of the lack of updates: the tags table had grown too much in size, and the Postgenomic.com software's SQL queries are not really optimised... So, our host (Dreamhost) renamed the table to fix the massive load on the MySQL server, causing the MySQL warnings, but also the lack of updates. I emptied the tags table, as the tags are not really crucial anyway, making the website show up nicely again, and hopefully making the update script not fail any more, either...

More SQL trouble #2

Like in August, there is SQL trouble again. Did not have time to study the problem earlier this week, but on it right now. These SQL warnings are typically caused by broken RSS/Atom input, and often a clean up from the list of active blogs solves the problem. (I'll soon blog the next in the series New Blogs, as there have been quite a few new blogs. But hey, it's been 8 months since the last in the series...

However, there was a considerable loss of active blogs today (11)... At the moment I do not know what happened yet, but www.chemblogs.org is down... Did the service stop? Or is it just a temporary problem? I hope this is not the end of the Rise of Chemical blogspace

More SQL trouble..

I'm not happy to report this, but we got another bit of SQL trouble... we had this a few weeks back too, but it solved itself then... not sure about now :(



I hope to get this solved shortly...

New Blogs #9

Has it already been 6 months since New Blogs #8?!? Time flies... 22 new blogs since then:

• Water in Biology (entry in Cb)
• NEBIOQ-UP (entry in Cb)
• Benoît Jacob (entry in Cb)
• MacinChemBlog (entry in Cb)
• NMR Analysis, Processing and Prediction (entry in Cb)
• Drug Discovery with Quantum Pharmaceuticals (entry in Cb)
• Homebrew and Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• Periodic Tabloid (entry in Cb)
• Tim Vandermeersch's chemical blog (entry in Cb)
• CSEARCH NMR-Database (entry in Cb)
• 1CellPK (entry in Cb)
• SimBioSys Blog (entry in Cb)
• Swain Library News (entry in Cb)
• some kind of blog (entry in Cb)
• A Chemical Sabbatical (entry in Cb)
• Lightnir's blog (entry in Cb)
• C&ENtral Science (entry in Cb)
• Daneel Ariantho's laboratory » Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• practical transmutations (entry in Cb)
• The Eccentric Chemist (entry in Cb)
• Chempedia.net: The Daily Molecule (entry in Cb)
• Philosophy to Chemistry to Elucidation (entry in Cb)

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HELP! MySQL optimizations needed

Chemical blogspace has been closed down; that is, they seemed to have locked down access to the database. As you might have noticed, I have taken steps to reduce the problems with the database, but these were mere temporary fix ups. The real problem is the database design and, in particular, the SQL queries. These are too slow. Euan, the original author of the software, has already been looking into the problem he himself is encountering too, for postgenomic.com it is. But, I do not have time right now to fix those slow SQL queries :(

Therefore:

HELP!

The source is available and email me for a dump of the database.

60 day old blog posts still important?

Last week some of you noted that the Chemical blogspace was no longer nicely updated every X hours. The code is not optimized for performance and the number of old posts (about 10k in 6 months!) made the update_posts.pl break down. Or really, the DreamHost service killed the process after taking too long. Fair; it's the online way to keep the systems from not breaking down over one website. I already had split up processing the first 75 blogs and the rest into two separate jobs.

So, now I made a more radical change, and deleted old posts older than 60 days. That's ancient history, not?

Blog Awards with two Cb candidates

There is a weblog 2007 award voting thingy, where two blogs participate in the Best Science Blog section which are aggregated on Chemical blogspace:

• In the Pipeline
• Sciencebase

The can use some help:


You have to hurry, the deadline is the 8th.