What's new, Boardoo?

Installation of the 4 SATA hard drives is complete.  While we had the cover off we decided to install an eSata connector so we can connect our external backup drive when needed.

Here are some photos from the delivery and initial-up of the new Procyon server.

It has been three weeks since the last Procon project update and since then things have moved along fairly well.  There have been some changes in both the size and scope of the project both of which are mainly due to the poor state of the economy which is fairly closely related to our ad-revenue performance.  The truth is while subscription revenue is doing fairly well our ad revenue is not and that has had a direct impact on the budget that had originally been developed.  Here’s what’s changed…

size

The total cost for this configuration would have been around $3,300 but through some preexisting purchasing arrangements could have been built for around $2,800.

Originally Procyon was going to be a 2U (2 rack-unit) dual-quad core server with 6 hard drives and redundant power as specified below.

• Supermicro SC822S-R400LPB 2U chassis w/ Redundant Power Supply
• Supermicro X7DB3 Motherboard
• (2) Intel E5440 Quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon Processors
• 16GB FB-DIMMs
• (6) Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM ES.2 Hard Drives

But economic relatities have forced us to scale back our plans and special “deals” from certain vendors have resulted in a change of hardware too.  Here’s what we are targeting now for hardware:

• Supermicro 6015V-MTB 1U server chassis with single power supply.
• Supermicro X7DVL-i motherboard.
• (2) Intel E5345 Quad-core 2.33GHz Xeon Processors (eBay)
• 8GB FB-DIMMs
• (4) 250GB Seagate ES.2 7200 RPM Hard Drives

We are currently estimating the build cost to be around $1,400 for this configuration with vendor discount however sourcing some parts on eBay may result in a further savings.

scope

Originally, Procyon was going to be strictly a forum server dedicated exclusively to our hosted forum platform.  After further analysis and examination of our infrastructure we have decided against this plan.  Instead Procyon will be used exclusively as Boardoo’s main web server for everything excluding Boardoo.NET web hosting.  Abbott will be repurposed as a backup web server while Costello for the short term continue to be our main database server.

Being the hardware geeks that we are, this project is still very exciting for us to be working on.   Some of the hardware is already here, some is still on order, but either way this project will be finished soon.   We’ll be posting pictures soon!

In just a few months we will be celebrating our 3rd anniverary, and while our momentum has slowed at times over the past year, it is now beginning to take off once again.  In the past few months we’ve added free blogs and free web hosting in addition to our really great free phpBB hosting offerings.  I think what makes Boardoo unique is the fact that we are able to tie everything together with a common client area that we call the Customer Support Center.  To make navigating our services a bit easier I have added a quick-jump box to the homepage which when logged in will take you to any of your Boardoo hosted services; Forums, Blogs, you get the idea.  It will probably be making some kind of appearance on other pages in the not so distant future.

What the heck is a PHP extension? Nothing that most folks don’t need to know, or care to know about, but essential to making any PHP powered website work.  PHP on Windows has always been at a bit of a disadvantage of sorts, especially when it comes to getting updates to some of the libraries that PHP uses.  Anyone running PHP on Windows along with MySQL 5.1 has eventually found that PHP doesn’t natively support MySQL 5.1 although the built-in MySQL support usually works fine.  Not content to put up with an endless series of warnings from several applications, I set out to create the ideal build-environment and start compiling PHP myself.  The result, a MySQL 5.1 client extension compiled natively for both PHP 5.2.8 and 5.2.9 that works great, suppresses warnings, and matches the version of MySQL that we use here.  I’ve made them available for download here for anyone running the latest MySQL 5.1 for Windows.

Project Procyon… I enjoy planning projects sometimes and this one is going to be a lot of fun, albeit a bit expensive.  Boardoo currently runs on 3 servers (ok, well 2 actually as Boardoo.NET runs on the third)  which is more than enough processing power for our current needs as well as some time to come.  That doesn’t mean that I am going to just sit around and wait until we run out of server capacity before I start planning for more.  This is where project Procyon comes in; when complete, Procyon will become the 4th server in the Boardoo fleet.  It will be the biggest, fastest, and most energy efficient server that we’ll own, and will be used to power only the hosted forums.  I’ll be making regular posts about the project when it officially starts taking shape in a couple weeks.

For the moment that’s all that I can think of; if you have not signed up for your free forum, blog, or web hosting account why not do it to and see what we are all about?  As always I welcome your comments and suggestions.  Thank you for visiting Boardoo!

Ok, so things don’t always work out the way the way that you want them to, that’s one of those life lessons that we learn early in like.  You are probably wondering what I am referring to; in this case it was our failed experiment in moving Boardoo towards a social community encompassing our hosting product offerings.  It was a great idea, on paper at least; it looked sharp and had a lot of potential, but in the end it was you, our visitors who voted.  So in the end it was a mistake that cost us a lot; our traffic went down a little, but more importantly signups for our forum hosting service dropped dramatically, and we were never able to complete the rollout of our new image hosting offering.

We listened; about two weeks ago we rolled back to where we were in September of 2008, bringing back the old look, layout, and content, but we are not stopping there either.  Over the past week we migrated to a brand new phpBB virtualization platform abandoning our internally developed platform.  While this may sound like a strange move, it will be great for our clients as it moves our phpBB offering onto the MySQL database platform which allow us to begin offering imports of existing phpBB forums!  It also allows us to impliment a faster phpBB upgrade cycle, add 3rd party mods more easily, and also easier management of added languages.  The bad news; we had to temporarily drop all of the supported styles and languages as part of the migration, and with the current phpBB.com outage are unable to re-install them at the moment.

It’s not just about forums either, it’s also about Blogs.  A couple weeks ago we upgraded our Wordpress blogging platform to version 2.7 which adds a new administrative backend and brings in a wealth of bug fixes and some neat new features.  For the time being the Wordpress userbase is being kept seperate from the main Boardoo userbase but that may change in the future. We’ll be readjusting our storage limits for all of our blog plans in the coming weeks to make them even more generous.

Then there is web hosting; we silently rolled that out last fall and it’s been a big success.  We originally envisioned our web hosting as being ad-free, but the economic realities of the current economy have forced us to place ads on all free web hosting accounts.  Like the blogs, my plan is to make the hosting plans more generous by increasing the limits on all plans soon.

Ok, now for the biggest news of all; Boardoo is getting a new look, again!  We have gone through several design changes over the years, or rather the current year.  We launched in 2006 with what we’ve dubbed “Original Orange”, a look Boardoo has had for two years until our social experiment last fall during which time we went through two different designs.  After dumping the social experiment a couple weeks ago back to “Original Orange” Boardoo went while we sought out a new look that reflects the direction in which Boardoo is headed.  We have just finished an intense two week design overhaul of Boardoo and while you may not be able to see it yet, you may have noticed that certain elements of Boardoo may be looking a little strange right now.  Some elements we not able to be easily modified “offline” forcing us to impliment them in a way that may not match the current look.

Finally, with all of the changes we’re adding some great new features too. For our free web hosting customers we’re adding a one-stop place to read both PHP and MySQL reference manuals, we will be bringing back the Puzzle Creator and Glitter Text Creator from our social experiment, we’re adding an extensive glitter graphic library based on our free smiley/avatar plaform, and finally we’ve added a page rank lookup tool as well.  These will all be available tomorrow (Sunday) when we officially roll out the new look for Boardoo.

One final note; on Sunday 2/8 we will be discontinuing all sales, support, and development for all phpFox modules and enhancements.  All of these products have been worked on to the point that I’m confident that most bugs have been fixed.  These add-ons were all originally closed-source (Ioncube Encoded); but anyone who purchased any of these phpFox scripts will receive full source code for the product and a refund of 40%  of the original price.

It looks like Sunday is going to be a busy day!

There is one thing at Boardoo we don’t have, but I have always wanted to see us do and that is image and photo hosting.   I’m a big amateur photographer and offering such a service is essential for me for near daily use.  I currently rely on outside services for that and look forward to being able to use Boardoo instead.  Around July of this past summer I began to develop a truely unique image hosting experience with features and capabilities that are either not found, or found on one site.  Unfortunately time constraints and the need to work on other aspects of Boardoo shelved the project for the time being.

It still is shelved for the time being, but to at least get us started with image and photo hosting service I have decided to reactivate a license that I had for a commercial software package that will allow us to do just that and be up and running in time for the Holiday season too.  It has taken a  couple days of development and testing to ensure complete integration with the Boardoo environment as well as to integrate with the Customer Support (and Billing) center.

We have a little more testing to do before the official launch but the service is on track for launch sometime this weekend, most likely on Sunday.  Keeping with the spirit of Boardoo’s free service offerings we will offer a free image hosting plan as well as two higher levels of service:

FREE Plan

250 MB Disk Space
1 GB/month Bandwidth
No Branding On Images
Our Branding On Your Pages
Create Slide Shows
Create Auction Galleries

Standard

1 GB Disk Space
5 GB/month Bandwidth
No Branding On Images
No Branding On Pages
Create Image Portfolios
Create 360 Spins
Create Slide Shows
Create Auction Galleries

Premium

5 GB Disk Space
15 GB/month Bandwidth
No Branding On Images
No Branding On Pages
Create Image Portfolios
Flash Photo Portfolios
Create 360 Spins
Create Slide Shows
Flash Slide Shows
Create Auction Galleries

Pricing for the two enhanced plans has not yet been determined.  I’ll make a front page announcement when the service is up and ready for use.

We have certainly been busy over the past month and a half since my last post.  We have rolled out several software products as well as our new web hosting service.  Now it is once again time to turn our attention back to phpBB.

It has been a while since we did our last full refresh of the phpBB backend.  Unlike probably every other free forum host on the internet we use our own customized version of phpBB; we did not just purchase a "multiforum" script and open our doors.  Instead we have chosen to create our own enterprise-class phpBB virtualization solution based around phpBB 3 using Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition as a backend.  That makes us even more unique as a quick web search did not turn up a single free forum host that uses MS SQL Server.

For some time we have been quietly working on a "version 2" if you will of our backend forum hosting engine.  While it’s not quite ready for use, it will be soon.  To prepare for its debut, we’ll be conducting a code audit/refresh on phpBB to ensure that all updates have been applied as well as to roll in some additional functionality too.  For starters, we are looking to add a shoutbox, and SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs to our codebase, as well as to update language support as well.

I do not have a timetable as of yet for the launch, but it will be sometime in November, preferably before Thanksgiving.  Your opinions matter; please feel free to share your comments and suggestions on what you would like to see in our new platform.

Things have been very busy lately to say the least.  With the economy being what it is, many including myself have to work more than one job to make ends meet.  In my case, I work at a local TV station in the engineering department.  For the first time in many years we have a strong presence at the Great New York State Fair, and this has required a huge time commitment on my part.

New York State Fair - Day 1

I still have many great things planned for Boardoo in the very near future.  Probably the biggest change will be the total integration of all of our hosted phpBB forums into our social networking backend.  This means one person can join multiple forums while using the same username, password, and even user profile, but maintain seperate signatures and other forum-specific details on each forum.  There will be a unified private messaging system across all forums along with integrated chat.

You will still have total control on your forum, banning users, restricting user signups, even custom profile fields will still be available.  I know that it might sound a bit complicated, but it isn’t.  As we get closer to making this change, I’ll be posting more information on how things will work.   This exciting change will be the last major modification to Boardoo before we launch a large advertising campaign!  This fall is going to be big; stay tuned!

We’re back, a day ahead of schedule due to the awful weather that we’ve been having this summer.  We woke up to wet ground, managed to run out for a quick breakfast, check out, and do a bit of shopping before the sky opened up.  The rain never stopped; it pretty much rained the entire 3 hour drive back to camp, almost never letting up.  Upon returning to camp, we decided to pack it up and head home rather than sit through another rainy camp evening, but not before a stop at the Turning Stone on the way home.

My girlfriend fared much better at the casino this evening, pocketing $50, compared to my loss of $10, lest I still have my 5 souvenier bottles of wine from vacation to look forward to over the coming weeks.  It’s nice to be home though, even if a day early, but it won’t go to waste.  The grass is so long it would be easy for one to lose their car should they venture off the pavement.  If the weather isn’t condusive to yard work, then I suppose I shall start work on the social networking project I have in mind for Boardoo.  More on that later.

Finally, I apologize for not posting as often as I wanted; for some reason moBlog decided to stop working altogether, and for no apparent reason.  I have a couple other neat photos to share, but not before a good night of catch-up sleep.  Cheers!

Today we wound up being more active than originally planned afte a morning shower curtailed plans to rent a boat for the afternoon.  Unfortunately when the rain hit, we found ourselves nearly a block away from the hotel, sans umbrellas.  The irony of it was painfully obvious since not even a half hour had passed since we paid for another night at the Townhouse motel.  At least I could take comfort in knowing that the decision to stay came from a unanimous verdict from our entire party.  So, to our backup plans we went; the first activity being a stop at the Olympic Ski Jumps.

Now, I’m no stranger to visiting the jumps with this being my 3rd time, but this time a chair lift ride was included.  The views were spectacular, although the cloud cover varied throughout the entire time we were there.  Tomorrow marks the end of our short escursion with a few activities in mind before our return back to camp. 

It was tonight while posting these pictures that I decided that the 50MB of storage that we were including with the starter plan was not all that great, so I’m going to change it effective immediately pending another review.  Free blogs will now get double the space; 100MB and that change includes all existing blogs as well!  Just another reason why I hope that you choose to start your blog here.