Web Log of Greg Mathews

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the yzoo script will become available soon.

Well we have decided to sell the script as a site rather than on it’s own for the time being. The first site being onlinebestfind.com which just went live yesterday.

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The time has come for us to make the scripts behind the Yzoo Search meta search engine available for sale.

We have had requests for this in the past and have always declined, but it appears now that it is the right time to do so. We have to clean the script up before we can offer it on our site at CGIScripts4U so it won’t be available for a week or two.

If you are interested in being one of the first to know when the scripts are available  then please leave a comment here and we will contact you as soon as the script and documentation is ready.

OK its been about 10 days since my last post so lets try and bring you up to date.

I found that the Yzoo database replication was getting out of sync. I had set up 4 databases all replicating with each other in rotation, ie dbase1 -> dbase2, dbase2->dbase3, dbase3->dbase4 and dbase4->dbase1 then all the scripts would use the database with the lowest server load. In theory it should work, in practice it worked poorly. It appeared the replication itself on such a large database with hundreds of updates every minute was in itself causing a high server load.

I decided to reorganise (again), now dbase1 and dbase2 replicated with each other, and also dbase2 replicated its data to dbase3. I then modified the scripts so all lookups where done on dbase3 only, and any updates where then done on either dbase1 or dbase2 whichever had the lowest load. dbase4 is now used for two other sites listed below.

This appears to have had a dramatic effect, BUT during the process I wiped out the database in my mistake.

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As a perl coder I like to think my  scripts work as described, I do not offer refunds for my scripts unless a bug is discovered at which point I will fix the bug and if requested by the buyer refund them.

A few weeks ago I decided to set up a new website and purchased a script from http://panexis.com/

Unfortunately the script was full of bugs which I listed in an email to the site owner, Anthony Huxtable-Jones, and I asked for a refund. I heard nothing from these people, no  acknowledgement, not a thing.

Eventually I filed a complaint at Paypal, I knew that the fact I purchased digital goods means paypal won’t get involved but I thought it might get a response from Mr  Huxtable-Jones. Well I was right, he did respond saying he had emailed me with installation instructions. Well thats just bull.

Unfortunately the paypal case closed  today and I still have not had a refund.

Now I have to decide what to do and fortunately as he lives in the UK as I do I have a few options:

1. I could forget it, heck $40 ain’t a great amount, but there is the principle.

2. I could take a drive and ask him face to face for my refund, as he obviously has no problem with lying on a Paypal resolution I dare say it would be a waste of time, and cost me more than it’s worth.

3. The third option is to take them to court via the small claims court here in the UK, the cost of this is affordable and if the case is won Mr Huxtable-Jones would be liable for all costs, including interest on the total amount, including the cost of my time, my expenses, the court costs etc so if I win it will end up costing him a lot more than the $40 he stole from me.

I have downloaded the court forms and will complete them this evening. I hate the thought of having to do this but it’s people like this that give other perl sites a bad name.

OK it’s been heck of a week.

It was the general concesus that using an iSCSi was not suitable for my needs so that has gone out the window and I have reverted to using NFS accross the network.

I moved  the scripts over to the new server after making a few minor changes to it and tested the scripts worked fine before I updated the DNS which all appeared to go great.

I had decided not to move all the html files thinking these would be recreated by the script. I was right, but as there were 700,000 html files  this took so much resources that the site became unaccessable, what a disaster.

I switched the dns back and spent the next few hours transferring the files accross. Read the rest of this entry »

I am pleased to confirm that eventually Scriptlance did respond to my withdrawel request over the weekend and actually processed the withdrawel this morning (GMT) as promised.

I would still stick to my original advice though about paying freelancers on Scriptlance as thanks to exchange rates and various fee’s etc this has cost me more than £20 GBP ($40 USD)  which is a big downer and not an amount I would want to lose on a regular basis.

After looking at the script running onmysitenow.com and making a few changes to the mysql commands used it looks like the script is running much better, it is suprising the difference one small change to the mysql can make.

I may even look at the yzoo code and see if the same changes can be made to that aswell.

Greg

After further testing of onmysitenow.com we have found that at certain times the server can not cope with the amount of traffic it is receiving already so I have disabled the counter until I have looked to see if it can be made more efficient and if not is a new dedicated server required.

The current state of the script is fine until there are in excess of 400 hits in any one minute at this point it starts to lag and if that level of traffic continues for a period then it slows to a halt.

I will announce as soon as the site is fullly functional again but in the mean time you can still add the code to your sites and register for better statistical information of your current visitors.

Greg

A few days ago I posted Do it yourself or get someone else to do it well today I was really disappointed when the programmer I selected showed me what he has done so far. He has taken two weeks so far to basically create a registration and log in routine. Once logged in nothing is working yet, the links are there for various functions but they are all inactive.

There is no design for the site, nothing. He has asked for a few more days to complete the project but based on what he has completed in two weeks I could imagine this taking at least another month.

I sure wish now I had done this myself in Perl, it would have been completed by now.

I do hope this is just a one off, and using Scriptlance really isn’t this bad normally. I am going to post another project on Scriptlance this week for a site design project with some integration to existing scripts, I will post here to let you know how it goes.

As many of you know I have been wanting to learn PHP but as of yet I have not managed to get myself motivated enough to do it.

Anyway two weeks ago  I thought I would post a project on Scriptlance to get someone to develop aPHP script for me. It was for a site clone and I thought if I get someone two write it in PHP it should be completed quicker and I could look at the code and learn from it.

Well the programmer I chose said it would take him 14 days, I thought OK, I could do it in perl quicker but I want to learn PHP so that is good for me. Read the rest of this entry »