We managed to speed up our weblog service slightly, although the performance problem is not solved yet. Besides that, we implemented a long awaited feature: the German language pack. Choose between English or German as your weblog language in the “Settings” section of you blog.
Today, we have successfully updated our weblog infrastructure to WordPress MU 2.6.5. Within the next days, we have to to some more small adjustments which should not interfere with your work on this service. Unfortunately, we observed a performance problem with the new WordPress version on our infrastructure which slows down the response time of our service. We try to solve this issue as soon as possible.
What’s new in WPMU 2.6.5. ?
Quite a bit! I quote the feature list from the posting “WordPress 2.6” in the official blog of www.wordpress.org:
A new standard layout
Version numbers of WordPress standard edition and WordPress MU are now the same
Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
Blgging with your iPhone
Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging–> See the link “Turbo” on the header of your dashboard
Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Tomorrow, December 18th, we will upgrade our Weblog infrastructure to WordPress MU 2.6.5.
The Weblog-Service will be offline tomorrow, December 18th from 07.00 until 17.00.
Yves Serrano overhauled the ETH WebCD compatible theme of our blog service. Navigation and layout of the static pages have been improved, subtitles are now optional.
Today our Weblog Service has been updated from WordPress MU Version 1.0 –> 1.3.3. Now the Weblog Service shares the code base with the most recent WordPress Version 2.3.3. The new WordPress MU offers a revised tagging system, UTF-8, more possibilities in the blog admin view,…, and a new widgetized ETH WebCD theme. The complete feature lists are available at the WordPress MU-Forum. Enjoy the new WordPress features!
Is there any chance of recovering lost ETH Weblog data posted between December 19 2007 and February 01 2008?
Below some suggestions which might be helpful for partial data recovery:
Internet data search:
Via Google Cache
Google partially caches pages belonging to Google indexed blogs. Example: enter “site: blogs.ethz.ch/oas” in the Google search form and the search will be restricted to blogs.ethz.ch/oas. Continue in “advanced search” and restrict the date to a 1-2 month period. The result may be the missing blog entries. Instead of clicking on the link click on “cached”, there you should now be able to view your data. In particular, archive pages are cached.
Web Archive
The “Internet Archive” can be found at http://web.archive.org. Enter a URL to see all its’ existing versions. However, the web archive is more effective when going back 1 / 2 year and more. In our case, it is unfortunately not very useful but I decided to mention it anyhow.
Copy data from an RSS reader:
If you or any other person have an RSS feed subscription for your blog, you may be able to use information from the RSS reader to restore the missing data (Benjamin’s tip). You can even post a delivery request for your missing blog entries on your blog.
Data search on your own browser:
Since it is possible that you have viewed your own blog posts on your browser you might still find them in the cache if the browser cache has not been emptied since. Maybe you know someone who has viewed your page, and your site might still be in their cache. Depending on your settings, it’s possible that only images and CSS files are cached, in which case you will unfortunately not find anything.
Firefox To find cache data in Firefox enter “about: cache” in the URL box. Then click on List Disk Cache to view a list of all cache entries. Click on any entry to see the cache file’s name and location. We recommend using Strg + F (or Apple + F) to search for your blog. Enter URL incl. year e.g. blogs.ethz.ch/myblog/2008. Listed below are two cache readers as examples (there might be other better ones)
Neptun-Windows DVD with Firefox/ScribeFire preconfigured
The ETHZ-Neptun Windows-Version 2.0.0.6 contains a Firefox Browser preconfigured with the ScribeFire extension. ScribeFire is a handy blog editor fully integrated in the popular web browser. FireFox 2.0.0.6 ML Neptun is available via ETH’s IDES system.
Yves Serrano has just released a new layout for the ETH Weblog Service.
This layout (WordPress Theme) is fully compliant to the ETH Web Corporate Design guidelines. The layout can be requested from our Weblog-Support for “Corporate Blogs”.
Of course! But how do I do it? The FAQ “How can I grant co-authors access to my web log?” describes the procedure for adding co-authors.
WordPress MU provides a practical and simple way to assign roles to people ranging from “Subscriber” to “Editor”.
We have found a good solution to an interface (XML-RPC) for ETH Weblog Service for external blog editors. We have tested various products such as Ecto, Mars Edit, and ScribeFire and found them to work flawlessly.