staff blogs

distributed.net staff keep (relatively) up-to-date logs of their activities in .plan files. These were traditionally available via finger, but we've put them on the web for easier consumption.

2010-05-08

New blogging system to replace plans

Filed under: Uncategorized @ 07:47 +00:00

This posting is mostly just a test, but it does have some mild informational value…

We’ve just finished replacing our old home-grown “.plan” file system with a more modern blogging system running on new server hardware.  Technically, we stopped serving “finger” requests several years ago, so this isn’t that big of a change.  All of the previous posts from our old “.plan” system have been imported and all old URLs should be automatically redirected to their new locations here at http://blogs.distributed.net/

If you subscribe to our RSS feed, then your reader might have re-displayed some older posts when it followed the redirect to its new location.  Prior RSS posts are being published with the same “PermaLink guid” so you might not see that issue at all, depending on your reader.

Users that are subscribed to our “plans” mailing list will continue to be able to read new staff blog posts, despite the obsolete name of the list.  However, the readability of some new  posts there may be impacted by the conversion of HTML to plaintext for that mailing list.

IRC users in our #distributed channel on irc.cuckoo.com should now also be receiving notification of new blog entries instead of plan posts.

Although this blogging system does support user comments, we’ re not going to enable them here quite yet since we are working on some other exciting improvements that would complicate things later.

Hopefully this revamped backend should make it easier for us to make more regular posts to our users.  Keep crunchin’!  ]:8)