iSpot & EML project blog

There’s been the usual few maintenance points this week including, a new webservice for S159 to allow validity checking of the exported data, the clear my unread link getting fixed and some changes to the expert badges. As well as these I’ve extended the idea of the likely ID idea to now give an ‘initial ID’ on an observation that doesn’t yet have a likely ID, this means that most observations will now have some kind of ID for the summary view.

Aside from the above, the two big features that we’ve started work on this week are:

• A next & back feature that will allow users to navigate between observations without having to keep going to the parent page.
• An overhaul of the location side of the site.

Both of these features have some complexities to them that need considering in developing them but should provide powerful additions to the site.

This week has seen us able to again focus work on developing the site further, here’s what we’ve been doing this week:

• the addition of a knowledgeable user role for each of the top level groups. Allows users to have their reputation seeded without having to be classed as an expert.
• likely ID feature added. This rates each identification in an observation based on the sum total of the reputation of each user that has agreed with the reputation of the ID author, if the highest scoring ID is above a certain threshold the ID gets a ‘likely ID’ badge and is shown on the summary view of the observation.
• A bug with the oucu login has been fixed. This bug was preventing some users from seeing certain content.
• S159 students will now get a different badge upon completion of the course. This had previously been talked about but not implemented until now.
• A new login feature that allows users to login using an existing account from one of the following providers: google, yahoo, wordpress, facebook, twitter and windows live. At present this will only allow users to create a new profile on iSpot by logging in using this method but the module is being actively developed so linking to an existing profile may soon be possible.

Due to a warning light showing on our main database and file server we’ve moved the hosting of both iSpot and EML on to our backup server. This gave us a chance to test this process and well as allowing time to look at the database/file server.

After spending a significant amount of time documenting the process to transfer the sites to the backup system as well as the process of setting up the actual backup architecture, the move to the backup server was reasonably straight forward, the main issues were as follows:

1. Swapping the domain names to the backup server can take up to 24 hours to propagate through all domain name servers. This means, potentially, that people can not access the site for that amount of time.
2. The process of rebuilding all of the images used in the EML caused the backup web server to become unresponsive and so both sites became inaccessible until the server was restarted.

The latter issue should now have been solved with the upgrading of the backup web server and the sites now seem stable. The former issue relating to the swapping of domains between servers will pose the same problems when we come to move back to the main server. There’s not much that can be done about this this time and in practice people should be able to see the changed location much sooner than 24 hours but we are going to look at revising the process of moving to our backup server in case of future need, to minimise the site’s potential down time.

Now all the backup architecture has been successfully set up and tested work can begin again on the development of site features. Top of the list is allowing users to be seeded with a knowledgeable status to recognise users that aren’t experts but do have knowledge, this has is now under way.