Almost back to normal now guys.  Unfortunately the day job prevented me from fixing this earlier.  It looks like we had a runaway email process hogging the box and causing everything to run very slow.  For the moment, I've left email switched off so you won't get email's via PM.  I'm not convined everything is fixed yet so I may reboot the server later tonight.  I'll give you some notice and it should only be down for 5minutes or so.  Apologies again - shame there wasn't any world cup to watch while blonde was away!

Sparks

We've just made a few changes to the main website after some feedback.

The home page and the where to play menu is now focussing more on the blonde poker room than the affiliates and we'll start adding more news about the blonde poker room on the home page.  All affiliate info is now under the menu option "where to play - internet cardrooms".

The blonde profiles section is now ordered alphabetically and you can now do a wildcard search to find the profiles you are interested in.

The blogs page was a little messy, so this has been tidied up, and there were a few other issues I've fixed on listing tournaments on the home page.  There was a problem when using the previous button when scrolling through a gallery that's also now been fixed.

Enjoy,
Sparks

ifm said it for me. The whole site is indexed now so you can search for anything within the site (excluding the forum which has it's own search).  Search is available from the Home menu.

Just had confirmation from our hoster that a networking switch that our server was attached to failed and was replaced.  It was just coincidence that this happened 30 minutes after we upgraded the site but did get us a little worried that we'd screwed something up.

We had a bit of an unexpected outage there.  It looks like there was a networking problem at our hoster - it doesn't look like it was a problem with our server or the upgrade.  I'm waiting for an explanation from the hoster.

We'll wait for a bit more feedback on the forum colours before changing anything.  We've tried to give the forum and web site a similar look and feel, using the grey/yellow/black colours.

Ok folks, we're back.

It looks like it's all working ok - hope you like the new look and the new forum theme.  As tikay has mentioned we have disabled the ability for you to change your own theme, primarily to ensure the banners etc look ok.  We may re-introduce other themes in the future.

There is lots of new stuff on the web site.  Snoopy and Aaron have done a great job with migrating/adding content and will be adding new content every day.  We will be adding new features to the site over time - this is just the start.

If you notice any problems, have any comments (good or bad) - please let us know.

I'm about to start!  The upgrade will take up to an hour and will mean locking the forum while the upgrade takes place.  As we are moving lots of things around, you may get errors if you try and access the site in the next hour.  As you know the forum will also be getting a new theme to keep it in line with the look and feel of the new site.

Hope you like it,
Sparks

There was a problem with the ads not appearing on the home page which we fixed, however all of a sudden the ad from the home page started appearing at the top of the forum - I know not why.  Anyway, I've reversed the change I did to fix the home page which has stopped the ad appearing in the forum.

The ability to display ads is available in the forum software, but we have it disabled.  Somehow it got re-enabled.  We'll have a closer look tonight.

Apologies

I'll try not be too technical about this!  As we are moving servers it takes a while for the internet to realise that blondepoker.com has moved to a new server.  If you hit the old server (using blondepoker.com) you will get a page that will redirect you to the new server.  This will only last a few days and then we can take the old server offline.

We have created a new domain (blondepoker.net) which will take you directly to the new server without having to go through the redirection page - bookmark it once you are re-directed there.

It will all make sense when you see it tomorrow!

Sparks

The guys at UKFast have upgraded our bandwidth so we now have 8 times the previous bandwidth.  However, the server will still struggle under big loads so that is something for us still to fully resolve. The server is a little busy at the moment as I think everyone is catching up with their threads.

We will be doing some additional performance tweaks over the next week or so but we need a major server hardware upgrade to cope with the major peaks we get during live updates.  We will get this underway as soon as we can.  In the mean time, bear with us, there is lots of good stuff coming , and try not to hit F5 too often.

Sparks

PS anyone got any anadin?

We use FileZilla on Blonde

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

All done

Morning All,

I'm about to take the forum down for a few minutes for a backup.  Shouldn't take long

Sparks

Thanks Mikky T.  The cardplayer and hendonmob calculators are primarily Javascript/DHTML based for the interface to allow cards to be dragged around etc.  They may still do the calculation serverside.  The Pokulator one used by Bluff is entirely Flash based and I think looks pretty good.  Getting the code to actually do the calculation is easy, the complicated thing is providing a pretty, functional and reliable interface. As you say, this would take more than 2 weeks.

Obviously we could write this code but to me it makes much more sense to try and use/buy one that is already available. The ones I've seen that look good graphically are the Bluff one, cardplayer and hendonmob.  There may be others we're not aware of.  We know we can get hold of the Bluff one and use it.  We should be able to get hold of the cardplayer or hendonmob ones but we're not sure where from yet.  We need a view from you poker players to tell us which one you like the best. If you've got time to do the research and find the source code/supplier (eg on sourceforge or similar) then even better.  We can then organise the techy side to get it implemented as long as it is not too expensive.

On a slightly more serious note, it looks like there was a connectivity issue with UKFast who host the Blonde server) as all their sites were unreachable. The blonde server didn't go down, it was just hiding.  I'm awaiting confirmation of the what the issue was from UKFast.

Sparks