Jacques Marneweck's Blog

One thing which was brought up from when Twitter moved data centres is that the maintenance page should have a 503 HTTP status header as defined in RFC2616:

10.5.4 503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. If known, the length of the delay MAY be indicated in a Retry-After header. If no Retry-After is given, the client SHOULD handle the response as it would for a 500 response.

Note: The existence of the 503 status code does not imply that a server must use it when becoming overloaded. Some servers may wish to simply refuse the connection.

Google recommends using a 503 status so they know not to crawl the maintenance page.

If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the "down for maintenance" page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Zoopy, a South African social networking site which clones functionality from sites like Flickr, Youtube, LiveJournal and Odeo, and forms a proudly South African mashup, have broken all offsite videos used by members of their site. Jason, Jerry and Pat please fix this as it looks silly having videos on Zoopy that don't play offsite anymore. :( Url gets redirected to is http://www.zoopy.com/member/list.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Twitter, a web 2.0 communications service where they ask a the question "What are you doing?" is currently undergoing a data centre migration, from Verio. Not many places mention that they are doing a datacentre migration. I suppose that Twitter is different in that respect.

Even their UI oke used a whale on their maintenance page which is different to the usual maintenance pages and is pretty cool.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon are launching their SimpleDB product to a limited group of people in the next couple of weeks which exposes a webservice for running queries on structured data in real time. Apparently this service works with both their existing S3 and EC2 services.

Interesting idea to offload database queries to a third party, but the question is how reliable is it to offload data processing to a third party when you ideally want your SQL to run in less than 10 ms?

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just got back from the Geek Dinner at Primi in the Waterfront. Joseph Jaffe was the 'guest speaker' this evening. (Note to self link to Glen's video clip on Zoopy of the 5 minute speech once it's been uploaded).

One of the most sought-after consultants, speakers and thought leaders on new marketing,Joseph Jaffe is President and Chief Interruptor of crayon, a new marketing company.

Stormhoek as per usual sponsored the wine. Eskom struck twice so we went without power for quite some time. These rolling blackouts aren't fun.

Anyway we headed to the Alba Lounge for drinks and to continue the conversation. I can't wait for the next Geek Dinner on the 27th to continue with the conversation. In a way I'm excited about various networking opportunities the Geek Dinners provide.

Geeks are doing some interesting things at the moment. Things I'm sure I'm not going to mention but rather will get them to speak about what they are busy doing at the next couple of Geek Dinners.

UPDATE:
Already receiving some feedback. This is for one of the 'original' Geek Dinners arranged by Max and Dave. Not the Cerebra rebranded 27Dinners or the Joe/Clug ones.

• Dinner at the edge of the ocean
• Join The Conversation
• Joe Jaffe meet-and-greet (Video clip by Glen from The ZA Show)

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 2:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been asking Kristie to prod Dave into releasing a new episode of ps pipe grep. Turns out they have now launched a new podcast (same old style as ps pipe grep) but called quad-core.

Posted by Jacques Marneweck at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)