Find more songs with “implied” redirects.

I’m proud to announce a long-overdue feature: implied redirects.

Implied redirects make it so that the site can often understand what you’re looking for even if it is misspelled or we don’t have a redirect page for the specific song.  For example, we have a redirect from the band name “Of A Revolution” to their preferred form “O.A.R.“.  However, if someone comes to the site, we do not have a redirect from “Of A Revolution:Crazy Game Of Poker” to the correct page: “O.A.R.:Crazy Game Of Poker“.  With the new implied-redirects extension, the site will automatically figure out what you meant and display the correct page.  To see it in action, go to “Of A Revolution:Crazy Game Of Poker“.

Implied redirects have been active in the API for quite some time, but didn’t work on the site until tonight.

LyricWiki and Wikipedia :)

LyricWiki is now in Wikipedia’s inter-wiki map.

To decrypt that for most users: now if you want to create a link from a wikipedia page to a LyricWiki page, all you have to do is enter [[lyricwiki:Page Name]] on the page and it will make the link for you.

Here is an example of what you could put in the wikipedia page for the band Tool which would link to the lyrics on LyricWiki:
[[lyricwiki:Tool|Tool lyrics]]

Pretty easy, huh?  The “Tool lyrics” part is just the text that you want to have show up as the link.  When you think a wikipedia article would benefit from linking to a LyricWiki page, feel free to throw one of those inter-wiki links in there.

API is back! :D

Everything is all patched up finally.  The site and the API are both up, running, and seem to be handling traffic as well as ever.  Thanks to everyone who helped as we worked through the problems.

On top of that, thank you to everyone for being patient while the API was down (it ended up being more than 3 straight days).  This problem gave me a lot of time to think about how to avoid a similar problem in the future, so hopefully we won’t be going down this path again any time soon!

Taking another crack at it… site will be down.

Once more into the breach!

I’m going to hurl myself at the database-replication problem again.  The current plan I have unfortunately involves some downtime for the site.  But it’s already after 1am so I’m hoping the impact on users is relatively low.

I’ll keep you updated.

Update on the API

Everything I’ve tried so far has failed (lame).  The only thing I can still think of requires that I take the master database down for a bit of time and copy it over table-by-table to the slave.  I’m going to do this when it’s really late at night here… hopefully you’ll be able to wake up to the API tomorrow.

Site back up, API still down

The read-only slave database isn’t up yet, so I’m keeping the API down for the moment.  The rest of the site is back up though.

Reloading database…

This may take well into the morning…

Sorry for the inconvenience.  Re-loading the database is taking forever.

Still workin on it…

We’ll let you know when it’s back.

3/12/08 9:30pm EST: Upgrading LyricWiki – expect outages.

We’re going to be upgrading LyricWiki to the newest version of MediaWiki.  This is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the newest versions always have the lowest number of known security vulnerabilities.

There are also some new features that our extensions can’t work without.

Teknomunk was kind enough to jump right in and test/re-write a bunch of the extensions (I think all of them actually) to make sure they work in the new version.  He also made some upgrades which only work in the new version (which was what ultimately caused the decision to upgrade… so give him mad props ).

Anyway… this is going to cause a lot of outages tonight.  I’m going to shut down the API (the SOAP), back up the database, then do the upgrades, fix what’s broken, then turn the API back on.   I’ll keep this blog updated as things progress.