An idea for maintenance annoucements

[mc se7en]

I'd like to see each server get an RSS feed assigned to it for maintenance announcements. Here's why….

I read in the free hosting section that 4 servers were down for about 3-4 hours a few days ago. One of them is my server (Chopin). I didn't know about it until after the fact (my site was down and I didn't know ). Obviously, I could read the announcements here, but what about this instead:

If there was an RSS feed for these announcements (and ONLY these announcements, or other important server news) I could feed that into my blog. Then, whenever a new announcement about maintenance or downtime was made, it would automatically be imported to my blog, along with any updates on extensions of the downtime, etc. It would be a lot easier than me having to check and see when the site is back up or if there was going to be an extension of the downtime to tell my users.

Obviously it would be self-defeating to host these feeds on the server they are about, because then when the server went down, the RSS feed would as well.

Anyway, I just had that idea and thought I'd share.

 

[Corey]

Thanks, we were actually planning on doing some type of blog setup but it has been pushed back at least for now. As always there are a lot of changes going on but we are definitely interested in anything that helps with communication as it seems a lot of people do miss the messages.

Regarding the RSS feeds I'm unsure if we could do a separate one for each server via the forums here, maybe I'm wrong though. Does anyone have suggestions on how to best accomplish this? Is this possible in wordpress if we did move announcements to a blog?

 

[mc se7en]

Thanks, we were actually planning on doing some type of blog setup but it has been pushed back at least for now. As always there are a lot of changes going on but we are definitely interested in anything that helps with communication as it seems a lot of people do miss the messages.

Regarding the RSS feeds I'm unsure if we could do a separate one for each server via the forums here, maybe I'm wrong though. Does anyone have suggestions on how to best accomplish this? Is this possible in wordpress if we did move announcements to a blog?

That would work very nicely actually. If you just set up a wordpress blog for each server (not sure how many you guys have, but I'm assuming it's not too many) then you could publish the service updates on there and it would indeed generate a suitable RSS feed.

Currently there are no RSS feeds on the board (not sure why, must be the software. SMF and PHPBB provide RSS feeds, but only for the entire board, so it would be impossible to isolate a single thread or board for the feed. We'd end up getting support requests, general chat, etc in there as well.)

Another additional suggestion would also be to set up a twitter for each server and use the TwitterTools WordPress plugin to publish announcements to twitter automatically.

 

[adamparkzer]

Another additional suggestion would also be to set up a twitter for each server and use the TwitterTools WordPress plugin to publish announcements to twitter automatically.

We already have a Twitter page that covers everything that happens on x10Hosting.

http://twitter.com/x10hosting

You should follow us.

 

[mc se7en]

We already have a Twitter page that covers everything that happens on x10Hosting.

http://twitter.com/x10hosting

You should follow us.

Oh, I do. That's what gave me the idea to have one for each server…

 

[adamparkzer]

Oh, I do. That's what gave me the idea to have one for each server…

We currently have four free servers, four paid servers, three VPS hosts, one staff server, and one back-up server.

I don't think we need thirteen Twitter accounts. Even if we did, I don't think I would be able to remember thirteen usernames and passwords to be able to update them all.

 

[mc se7en]

We currently have four free servers, four paid servers, three VPS hosts, one staff server, and one back-up server.

I don't think we need thirteen Twitter accounts. Even if we did, I don't think I would be able to remember thirteen usernames and passwords to be able to update them all.

That's true. I didn't know there were so many!

 

[adamparkzer]

That's true. I didn't know there were so many!

We have an unofficial server status page where you can see all of our servers.

http://x10staff.co.cc/status

 

[mc se7en]

We have an unofficial server status page where you can see all of our servers.

http://x10staff.co.cc/status

Interesting… thanks.. I haven't seen that before. Very handy.

 

[Livewire]

I've got a possible idea in my head but I dunno if Wordpress can do it by default; the idea is simple. Categories with RSS feeds for each Category.

I already know 1 article can be posted in multiple Categories, so 1 update for 4 servers would be 1 article but could show up in 4 rss feeds if it turns out you can do an RSS feed for -each- category


Doing some digging now, seeing what I turn up and I'll post back if I find something that'll work.




Edit: Holy crapola that was fast. Wordpress is doing it by default, for example:

http://livewire90210.com/wordpress/category/blog/announce/feed/ My site's Announcements
http://livewire90210.com/wordpress/category/blog/programmingbank/feed/ My site's "programming bank," which hasn't been posted in for a while (I'll fix that sooner or later )

Seems to follow the tier like this: wordpress/category/CATAGORYNAME/feed. Mine do blog/catagoryname cause those two categories are subcats of blog. So I guess you could do wordpress/category/free/stoli/feed, wordpress/category/paid/artic/feed, and wordpress/category/vps/rain/feed or something similar

 

[mc se7en]

I've got a possible idea in my head but I dunno if Wordpress can do it by default; the idea is simple. Categories with RSS feeds for each Category.

I already know 1 article can be posted in multiple Categories, so 1 update for 4 servers would be 1 article but could show up in 4 rss feeds if it turns out you can do an RSS feed for -each- category


Doing some digging now, seeing what I turn up and I'll post back if I find something that'll work.

Very nice!

*Runs off to his own wordpress blog to also test*

 

[Livewire]

Very nice!

*Runs off to his own wordpress blog to also test*

Read up 1 post; you replied so fast you didn't see the edit where it worked

Also: http://www.facebook.com/x10Hosting if you use facebook

 

[mc se7en]

Awesome. I hadn't looked hard enough (had to actually create categories because I don't use them!) so I was actually thinking it wouldn't work. Glad it did! That makes things much easier! Hope we can implemented soon! It would def be a good way to keep our users updated automatically.

 

[Livewire]

Awesome. I hadn't looked hard enough (had to actually create categories because I don't use them!) so I was actually thinking it wouldn't work. Glad it did! That makes things much easier! Hope we can implemented soon! It would def be a good way to keep our users updated automatically.

I've also got one more thing I'd -like- to test, but I don't have a legit copy of vBulletin so I can't test it particularly well unfortunately.

I want to see if there's a way to auto-post with keywords from a vBulletin post TO Wordpress in particular categories. For instance, if it picks up the words Stoli, Lotus, and Artic in the topic of a post in a particular forum (Service Alerts), can it copy the FIRST post's contents into a new article, and post that article into the categories Stoli, Lotus, and Artic. If there is, then the -real- purpose to the wordpress blog is just finding a cheap way to use RSS feeds without much of a hassle - the updates could stay in both areas.

The alternative is doing it the other way - have vBulletin pull from the Wordpress blog and post in Service Alerts when stuff gets added to the blog. I honestly will be VERY surprised if there isn't some form of a plugin to do this for one of the two apps -somewhere-.

 

[mc se7en]

If there's not a plugin for it, it may not be hard to make one (provided it was someone who knew how to do that… I don't so I wouldn't be able to.. )

 

[Livewire]

If there's not a plugin for it, it may not be hard to make one (provided it was someone who knew how to do that… I don't so I wouldn't be able to.. )

Oh Im sure someone who codes for wordpress has already attempted it; the question really becomes is it up to date for both vbulletin and wordpress, cause if it's outdated it might not work properly

 

[Danielx386]

Well, for phpbb (in the RC version) it was possible to have a rss for each subforum, and even a rss for each thread

 

[Livewire]

Well, for phpbb (in the RC version) it was possible to have a rss for each subforum, and even a rss for each thread

It might still be, the only debate is whether or not it's worth undoing all the addons x10's got like Free Hosting topic escalation and everything else that has gotten done to make x10 better.

I'm not sure it is, as far as the forum goes. I'd be surprised if there's not an addon somewhere though, the Wordpress idea was just another thing that wouldn't stand a chance of breaking vBulletin, especially if you just manually post updates on the blog

 

[Danielx386]

well, it "MAY" be possible to set one up so that it only look at the News and Announcements and Service Alerts forums. Then you won't need to worry about breaking anything.

 

[Livewire]

well, it "MAY" be possible to set one up so that it only look at the News and Announcements and Service Alerts forums. Then you won't need to worry about breaking anything.

Very true, just dun wanna recommend breaking vB without testing the living daylights out of it