An exciting week for ResearchPages
Well well,
This week I was supposed to be writing my talk on marine ammonium biogeochemistry for the Challenger SIG meeting in Galway next week which, incidentally, I’m NOT flying to! £84 return all in on the train and ferry from http://sailrail.co.uk.
ResearchPages has been somewhat on the move – with lots of interest from various places, including ENV at UEA and the Tyndall Researchers Network. The problem is, there’s always something that’s a bit broken, or an annoying bit that lets the rest down. It’s a difficult task to manage single-handed and have a full-time job to do as well. I’m a bit worried about how it’s going to be when I’m away from it next week. Maybe the server will go down, or some hitherto undiscovered bug will appear and make the whole thing tear itsself to pieces. I need to get myself a clever phone with an ssh client and fast connection so I can fix ResearchPages on the go!!
Nem just lost all her friends on the site through some completely unreproducible error and having just trawled through that bit of the code I can’t see anything wrong. It hasn’t happened again so for now I’ll put it down to operator error and fix whatever-it-was when I get back. This morning I spent hours trying to figure out why the mysql database on which ResearchPages sits wouldn’t accept non-ascii unicode charaters in form submissions. A trivial problem it turns out, and not something that you’d necessarily think was a problem when selecting which social networking site for researchers you’d like to use, but it meant that adding any greek or other symbols to CMS pages was impossible. NOT a tenable situation.
What this all boils down to is that I need some help! If anyone knows any django or python developers out there, please please send them my way. I suppose they’ll probably want paying though – time to figure out some kind of a business plan!
Right, I’m off to buy a new laptop so I can write my talk on the train to Ireland! Have a good week everyone.
Martin
31/08/07 17:19
Comments
- Colin Goldblatt says
- Well, its got to 3pm on Thursday, and there has only been one email from a user for whom the site won't work properly (the bug is, of course, not reproducable by me...). So Martin's worries about his baby getting unhappy when he was away seem unfounded....
- 06/09/07 15:03
- Martin Johnson says
- Oh, I hate those nasty bugs. They're so difficult to squash. Talk to you about it on Monday Colin!
- 08/09/07 1:24