upgrade – Behind the Scenes

Tripawds 3.0 Coming Soon!

For quite some time now—a few years, in fact—we’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes here at Tripawds on the third major overhaul to the News Blog and discussion forums since Jerry first inspired us to start this site. If all goes as planned, things will soon look a lot different, be more stable, and work much better on all devices.

Nothing is required on your part, other than your patience during this long awaited transition. We have a select team of Tripawds members helping to ensure the new site is ready for prime time. Consider this ~~fair warning~~ a heads up that one day in the coming weeks the site may be unavailable for a while. We will do our absolute best to keep downtime to a minimum.

NOTE: All Featured Blogs and Member Blogs will remain accessible during the makeover! Only the main site and forums will be affected.

The Shape Of Things to Come

For the first time ever, Tripawds is being re-branded. We are retiring the original logo inspired by Jerry, and replacing it with a badge of honor that represents the power of three paws—for both dogs, and cats!

tripawds three paw logo

A Sneak Preview

Clarity, performance, and functionality on all devices are the primary purposes for this overhaul. The new design is faster, cleaner and mobile friendly.

new tripawds discussion forums

We will still feature random Tripawd Angels on certain pages. The home page is being trimmed down to quickly and more easily direct new members to the most helpful resources. And site menus are being restructured to help users easily navigate the vast resources available.

Most content will remain the same, but we do have a few surprises in store. The major difference will be how information is presented, but we promise the change will not be too drastic. Familiar forum layout and functionality shall remain—just look and work better!

Any Questions?

Please post in this Tech Support topic with any questions or concerns. Thank you for your patience and support!

If you appreciate all the efforts that go into the incredible undertaking that this overhaul entails, please consider making a charitable contribution to the Tripawds Foundation 501c3 public charity, created to ensure this community remains online and free to use.

Please stand by…

Welcome to Aspen.

Monotone Rocky Mountain Colorado Aspen Grove by Rene That’s the name of our new server here at Tripawds. The name is really more appropriate for Jerry’s three legged dog blog community, along with our snowbird blog and other sites. And from the first feedback, performance kicks ass over Elm. That was the name of our first server we upgraded to a couple years ago.

“Holy cow…. it’s so fast I’m getting dizzy.”
— krun15

“SUPER FAST!!!!”
— cometdog

Remember? We had that 2010 fundraising campaign to help cover the expense of hosting our own web server to meet the demands of our growing membership. With more than 3379 members, 848 blogs, and 73280 forum posts, and counting, the Tripawds community continues to grow daily.

With increased traffic and use of a popular WordPress multisite network like Tripawds, comes the need to address server load capacity and bandwidth limitations. With that comes added expense. But first, the specs.

WordPress Multisite Server hardware requirements

WordPress network administrators and anyone considering building a niche blog network ~~might want~~ need to know what to expect regarding hardware if any sort of growth is expected. Our new box, in a nutshell:

Xeon 3450 with Hyper Threading
Server runs with 8 cores
4 GB of RAM
2 TB Bandwidth2 250 GB Hard Drives
Cent OS 5 x 64 Bit
cPanel Unlimited Domains
On Call Server Management

We bit the bullet to outfit this system, but we want only the best for our members. And we don’t want to do this again anytime soon. We chose this system over a Core 2 Duo 8400 with 8 GB of RAM since CPU speed/power is generally more important in processor heavy sites and RAM can be increased if needed. Elm was a Pentium 4 with 2 single core processors and 2 GB RAM. It served us well over the past couple years, but recent sporadic spiraling server loads necessitated this upgrade.

Having a server manager is highly recommended for this type of job. That, or some serious command line confidence. While DNS propagation took a bit longer than expected, the actual migration went pretty smooth thanks to the hard work of our guys at Morse Media. And thank you to those Tripawds members who helped us iron out a few kinks.

What does this mean for Tripawds?

If you’ve ever had a comment not save when posting in the forums, or visited the site only to find it wouldn’t load, this upgrade is for you. Say goodbye to database connection errors, and feel free to join us in the chat with all of your friends. This upgrade means you are part of the largest online community for three legged dogs, and it will always be here for you.

Tripawds is a user-supported community.
Please do what you can to help keep it online.

It also means we did it without holding another fundraising campaign! With any luck, and a little support from members like you, we won’t need to raise funds this year either. Soon you will be hearing more about a certain Tripawds member who helped make this server migration possible. Others continue to give on a regular basis. Some of you quite generously. You know who you are, and we can’t thank you enough.

In the mean time, chat away and post in the forums to your hearts content. Publish blog posts, upload photos, search for answers, share your videos and do what you can to show your support for this site by shopping online and spreading the word about the Tripawds Featured Blogs. Together, we shall continue to show the world Tripawds Rule!

PS: We couldn’t do any of this without our WPMU Dev membership either, for the best WordPress multisite plugins, themes and support!

PPS: The quicker Rene and I can grow our team of home-based marketing executives, the sooner we will never have to ask for money to help keep Tripawds online, ever again. Please contact us directly for information about supplementing or replacing your income while working from anywhere.

New features in WPMU 2.9.1

In his post about how to add commentmeta tables to your WordPress MU database, Donncha said …

…nothing quite like the stress of upgrading and finding that something has broken.

So true. I’m just happy nothing broke during our recent upgrade to WPMU 2.9.1, because apparently the upgrade function can choke when creating all those tables. We have over 160 blogs and all went well, but Admins for large MU sites should take care to run the script Donncha provides before upgrading. Then they should also skip ahead to WordPress 2.9.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Supposedly this will be the last release before the big merge.

WordPress MU 2.9.1 New Feature Overview

What does all this mean for Tripawds community members? Just that we are successfully running on WPMU 2.9.1 now, which includes some great new features in addition to various bug fixes.

Video embedding made simple

WordPress 2.9 introduces native video embedding! Now all Tripawds Bloggers can easily insert a video from sharing sites like YouTube, simply by adding the video URL to their post …

See! It’s that simple. Just copy and paste the video page URL onto a new line in your post and the video will be automatically embedded. It is important that the video URL be on a line by itself and that the text is not wrapped in any tags, so don’t style it or link it to the video page itself. Native video embedding supports the following video sharing web sites: YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, blip.tv, Flickr (both videos and images), Viddler, Hulu, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Photobucket, PollDaddy, Google Video, WordPress.tv.

Viper’s Video Quicktags Enhance Embedded Videos

So what does this mean for Tripawds Supporters who have been using the Viper’s Video Tags plugin? Just that they now have advanced control over how their videos appears if they choose to continue using it. Viper wrote the new native object embed code, so his plugin is completely compatible. Supporter blogs can still embed movies and have additional video sharing sources to choose from. Supporters also have the ability to embed raw Flash video files, and have much more control over how their videos display …

Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin allows embedding from the following video sharing web sites: YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Flickr Video, IFILM/Spike, MySpaceTV, Flash Video (FLV).

Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin has been disabled. WordPress now supports auto-embedding of videos.

WordPress MU Blog Dashboard Trash Can

Tripawds Bloggers will also now notice a Trash link when managing posts and comments on their blog. This allows for the removal of items without immediately deleting them. The Trash can (and should) then be emptied periodically to permanently deleting the unwanted items. This protects bloggers from inadvertently deleting valid comments or valuable post drafts.

Issues with New WordPress Image Editor

One of the most anticipated feature enhancements has to be the new Image Editor built right into the WordPress Media Library. There have been a number of reports, however, regarding difficulties so we will report back with an update on that. For now, feel free to provide feedback in the forums.

WordPress MU Upgrade Complete

We have just completed the maintenance upgrade of all Tripawds Blogs to WordPress MU 2.8.5.2. Thank you for your patience!

This update addresses various administrative bugs and security fixes. If you experience any technical difficulties or unexpected anomalies, please report them in the Tripawds Technical Support discussion forum.

Sometimes it feels lie we are always tinkering behind the scenes and upgrading things around here. But after the ordeal we went through making a major version leap earlier this year, it’s the least we can do to keep things operating smoothly around here for all our members. Thank you all for your continued support.

Upgrading core files for the Tripawds Blogs community is always nerve-wracking. But I actually find it easier than upgrading our regular WordPress blog. Perhaps just because between this site and the RVblogz free travel blog community, I just have more practice. But the steps for upgrading WPMU are pretty simple. It’s just the need to follow them exactly, and the potential for data loss if you don’t that greys my hair. As if it isn’t grey enough already! 🙂