Staples rips off Apple icons
Okay, so this really isn’t Plex related but I’m sure Apple Legal is gonna enjoy this. We were in Staples today and noticed the pictures below. I especially like how they use the Disk Utility icon for Virus removal. I’m sure this service is about as good as Best Buy’s optimization services.
Added Help Videos!
Just a quick note I’ve updated the Help section in Plex with an extra 7 videos today! Also included is a new Troubleshooting section which is aimed at helping get out of a bind. New videos include:
- Listen to iTunes Music
- View iPhoto Library
- Watching your shows
- Adding Last.FM Support (Thanks to Phunkysai)
- Adding Remote iPhoto
- Wrong Movies
- Missing Shows
Go take a peek, you might learn something!
Wordpress and Wiki Updated
We have updated both the Wordpress and the wiki to the latest versions. Let us know if you have any issues! (Oh and a new release is up now, Elan will be blogging shortly!)
Winged migration
Over the last few days we have been slowly moving to a new hosting provider. We started to slowly outgrow our previous host and thanks to all our users started to require more bandwidth! Just now I put the finishing touches on moving the last of our sites over and everything should work just as it did before, no loss of data. Total downtime was around 20 minutes. Hopefully we should see a little faster response now that we are on a faster connection.
I would like to thank liquidgravity.com for graciously providing a VPS for us to use. They were very helpful with the migration and quick to respond to issues. By all means, Check them out if you are in need of a host.
Also I would like to thank Cayce, who had been keeping our site up and running since we first started almost a year ago. He has put up with us crashing on his internet connection like that friend in college who doesn’t pay rent. Without his Xserve we would have never been able to setup trac, forums, wiki, blogs, www, etc. in the first place.
Maggie helps migrate plexapp.com
Mirrors!
So after getting presented with a rather large Amazon S3 bill we’ve put out a call for mirrors from our community. I’m shocked how many people came forward with offers to host our releases! As of this writing we have 16 mirrors with >10mbit/s upload speeds. We’ve also implemented some scripts to check which sites are overloaded at the moment and refer to other mirrors who aren’t under a heavy load.
Since we’re trying to do our rotations internally to balance things out if you want to link a download to plex in the future can you please use either http://www.plexapp.com or http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Downloads so that we can properly balance the load and ensure that the mirror is available.
I’d like to thank all the Plex users jumped on the opportunity to help out almost immediately!
Stop Spam, Read books
It seems all the recent attention Elan’s blog posts on the upcoming .7 have caused some problems with our wiki. Traffic was getting high and mediawiki was locking up. I took the afternoon to upgrade both our forums and wiki to handle increased traffic. One of the cool new features of our new forums is the inclusion of ReCAPTCHA which should help even more to curb forum spam while at the same time help digitize old copies of the New York Times and old books.
If anyone has any issues with the latest versions please feel free to contact me and I will address your issues.
Server outages
So after hours of working on simplifying settings last night this morning we found out that the main drive on our server had failed. Uggh right? So Cayce and I got a new drive, worked feverishly to get everything replaced. Our SQL database that holds the content of blogs, forums and our wiki was corrupted. We had to revert to previous backups for each of these databases. The following services were rolled back:
- Wiki – Rolled back to Sept 20 around 12:15 AM PST
- Blogs – Rolled back to Sep 20 around 12:15 AM PST
- Forums – Rolled back to Sep 20 around 1:42 PM PST
Wiki Updates
Over the last few days Jayman978, JeremeyMC and I have been working on getting our documentation online. As of right now there is a great “getting started” guide. Eventually we’ll have an in-depth guide with lots more information but for now this should get new users up and running. Please take a minute to read through the documentation, and feel free to edit things.
Also related to the Wiki I’ve added a complete set of Help pages on how to use wiki’s, (e.g. formatting) and other critical information. If you have any wiki questions go ahead and PM me on the forums.
Simon stakes out his new fort.
Migrated Blogs
Today got a chance to migrate Elan’s blog from his original host and old domain (http://osxbmc.com) to our server and new project domain (http://elan.plexapp.com). This should be the last of our services to move from old domains to our new name.
Developers and other team members are getting their blogs setup now. You should be able get periodic updates on what we are all doing on our respective blogs. Thus far they will be as follows:
- http://elan.plexapp.com
- http://ryan.plexapp.com
- http://isaac.plexapp.com
- http://enrique.plexapp.com