Neowin Six Years Old Today

Hi all, Just wanted to make time to let everyone know that Neowin has just entered its 7th year online.

As many will know we spent the better part of the last two days offline while our coder guys ran maintenance on our servers. The changes have been significant, the site is responding a lot quicker and work is still being carried out in the background so that we can iron out the bugs of the new config to ensure better service in our 7th year.

The changes are as follows:

• Re-enabled 2 Apache servers for load balancing. Neowin can be accessed through 2 web servers
• Instead of using Network file share (NFS) we now use rsync to sync those 2 web servers
• Our primary database is now innodb and the slave db (for searches) is Myisam with realtime sync between those 2 servers.

So basically what this all means is, we have 2 servers doing our SQL database and 2 servers doing the web access. A lot better than 1 for web and 1 for the SQL eh? The technical side of the above changes can be answered by our coder guys should you have any questions. I also took the opportunity to make a few changes to the boards, adding a link to Back Page News from the news link, added a RSS feed for that forum, tidied up the top row of buttons, added a "Go to the top of the page" link under the skin selector and enabled the forum index link on the blog breadcrumb bar. Guests can now view images emoticons and avatars on our boards, it was previously disabled. Full list of changes here.

Design Update: Shift

This past year also saw the launch of Shift (or version 4.0), we have been working hard to make it fully standards compliant and port it to our forums. With the imminent release of Invision Power Board 2.2 we have decided to wait until that is released before we implement the new style on the forums. We are already working on a port for Swift (version 3.9) which has been completely rewritten from the ground up by Timan for IPB 2.2 and that is about 70% done. Shift was also started on the 2.2 Beta of IPB and is looking quite nice, not quite ready for a preview yet but I will post a image of our progress sometime this month.

Bugs

We appreciate any feedback on the current version of Shift for the main site. It is very important that it works properly on all browsers and especially so before we launch the forum version. We have a major update coming in about 2 weeks, should the new configuration work ok then we will be able to update the site which will add Articles and Galleries to the main site as 2 new major features. You can post bugs here for the main site and forums.

Thanks

So I would again like to extend my gratitude on behalf of the whole Neowin team for your support over these past 6 years, without you Neowin is nothing and we realize this on a daily basis. I hope that all these changes (Design updates and server improvements) are welcome and really do improve your Neowin experience.

We usually do a give-away on our birthday, but due to the extensive amount of work we"ve been doing on Shift and the servers there just hasn"t been time enough to pull it all together. We will be doing a giveaway but at a later date, my immediate guess is sometime in November.

For those of you who lurk (there are many frequent regular guests) why not take the time to register today, it costs nothing and you will be participating in a grand community on this date our 7th year in business.