What's been happening since the move?

Well, I said that I'd be doing more work on DD now that my new job is away from computers and after the server move, so what have I been up to?

There's been a couple of things. Firstly I had to calm the search engine spiders down because the new server doesn't have such a stupidly generous bandwidth allowance as the old one. I have some thoughts up my sleeve for how I can significantly improve the response times for older entries and improve the bandwidth used by the search engine spiders. But that's not really all that important from you, the user, point of view.

Much more importantly perhaps is the re-introduction of the DearDiary.Net e-mail address for Plus! users. This is something I've been meaning to sort out for goodness knows how long, and I finally have the backend server architecture in place to be able to offer it again, and better still it'll automatically activate the moment you go Plus (or it will once I re-introduce it in the next few days :-))

If you previously had a DearDiary.Net email address and had e-mails in your Inbox they will still be there. They've travelled from various servers across the years. However, if you're not a Plus user you won't be able to access them. Sorry! If you become a Plus! user they'll become accessible again.

It's my intention though that probably in a few months I will have a purge of the old e-mail addresses for those users that haven't been Plussed for a number of months. I may even set up a policy of destroying the e-mail boxes of Plus users 6 months after their subscription expires, as there's a huge number of Inboxes with mostly spam in them for users who we haven't seen at the site for years.

So that's the latest. Unfortunately there will be some downtime required to bring the e-mail service back online since the new e-mail infrastructure uses the same database as the diaries themselves and will need to be migrated.

Your thoughts, as always, most welcome. I've taken into consideration the comments on the previous entries regarding where to spend my next efforts too 🙂

Have a good one,

Steve