Tim's dashboard

Folks, here's the scoop (vanilla, goes nice with those cupcakes)

Ok, wiki stats are up and running again, but may take a while to load the first time you bring up the page, and may actually time-out the first time. Sorry, it's lame but I'm working on improving that.

Details: The stats system runs on separate hardware from our main servers. This is done to prevent the huge volume of disk, memory, and cpu load from interfering with general usage on the remainder of the PBwiki service. We installed some otherwise routine security upgrades on several non-core machines including the stats server and ran into some compatibility problems during the process. I've addressed those issues and things are back online. We're sorry for the confusion and brokenness, thanks for you patience!

Brian, many thanks -- I uninstalled Web Developer add-on from Firefox, and it now works just fine, whether using classic editor or point & click; both editors load and work, and display of the pbwiki is fine in either case.

Many, many thanks indeed -- your assistance here has been greatly appreciated! Well done!

Cheers

Tim

Hi Tim! Sorry for the trouble.

Do you have Yahoo! toolbar installed? (or other Firefox plugins?) You may want to try disabling them temporarily, restarting Firefox, then trying our editor again.

I have been viewing traffic statistics successfully every couple of days. It has shown hits that don't appear in my ClustrMap, and I really like the feature. Suddenly today I'm getting the fatal error! I'm presenting staff development on pbwiki Feb. 6, so it at all possible, it would be nice to have the feature back before then.

still no luck, and getting the same error message when trying to view my pbwiki stats page. Is anyone working on resolving this?

Thanks for your reply, Chris.

No problem on my home machine (running on Vista). Office machine is Windows XP Pro, ver 5.1. Classic editor in pbwiki loads ok, but display is broken and crazy. Point & Click editor does not load (progress bar almost gets to end, with message "Transferring data from darwintern.pbwiki.com...) and browser (FireFox) then hangs; error report it sends to Microsoft is:

szAppName: FireFox.exe
szAppVer: 1.8.20071.12718
szModName: hungapp
szModVer: 0.0.0.0
offset: 00000000

All Greek to me.

My work around here: I've installed Opera (not a browser I otherwise care for), which at least doesn't initialise pbwiki in point & click editor mode, so lets me edit in classic mode and display is fine. So at least its not the showstopper it was yesterday, but the behaviour is eccentric here so something ain't quite right under the hood.

While I'm about it here, let me also thank you guys at pbwiki; this incident notwithstanding, I'm an enthusiast for your product, it has brought a long-simmering project to life (have been running my wiki here for a year now), a genealogical site which has helped other researchers find my work and contribute to it. We've accomplished more on this project in the past 12 months than we had in the previous 5 years, and its thanks to pbwiki.

A major upgrade of the point-and-click editor is on its way with PBwiki 2.0. It should represent a significant improvement over the current editor, and may solve some of these issues.

However, even having the current editor not load is unacceptable. Can you tell us a little more about your computer setup so I can make sure Engineering gets the bug report?

Maverick, thanks for reply.

I'm still stuck with this one -- of the two different computers I use, one is fine (editor in classic mode, so I can edit) and display is fine. On the other, display is crap unless set to 'point & click' editor mode -- but point & click editor won't load (the progress bar almost makes it to the end - 'downloading data from pbwiki) but then blows up, and browser hangs. Same problem whether using Firefox or IE6 (IE6 looks even worse).

Very, very frustrating :-(

Switching between the two editors can cause all sorts of editing and display problems. I know that's not very helpful, but believe me, you are not the only one who has had this problem.

As far as I can tell this is a longstanding bug within PBwiki and only very vague time frames have been put out there for fixing it ("it's on our radar!" "We'll be fixing this soon!" etc.)

Best way to avoid is to do your best to never switch between P&C and Classic editing.

I'm using my wiki for a similar purpose -- compiling a massive forest of family trees.

Here's a page showing one approach -- not optimal, but quite functional.

http://darwintern.pbwiki.com/20-DAR-00

Another useful way to use tables, to link individuals to specific categories of original documents (in this case, individuals to copies of census returns):

http://darwintern.pbwiki.com/31-PS-CE...

But I'm always on the lookout for good ideas -- hope you share them here! (I don't have a clue on how to make hot-spot clickable .jpegs -- any clues?)