I guess it was about time: I already did remove Google ads a couple of months ago and now I also did remove the 'Google Analytics' code from all pages. Google Analytics is a service by Google which offers in depth visitors statistics for websites and so is tracking all kind of data about your surfing behavior on Revleft and on other sites.

Instead, I'm now collecting visitor statistics with the free, open source GA alternative Piwik.

So, bye bye Google!

After about a month of time out, I'm now back here on Revleft. I was busy with all kind of stuff like work, moving house, private issues. And yes, football:

Fortuna Düsseldorf, back in the 2nd Bundesliga!



A photo of the celebrations right after the match last week. After 10 years of misery, we are back in German, professional football. I did travel all around Germany to see...

As you might have noticed, I have made some technical additions and changes within the last couple of days to the RevLeft board software within the last couple of days. That include:

- upgrade of vbulletin to the latest version with many new features and improvemnts, especially in social group and PM functions

- "Thank you" add-on installed. This addon makes it possible that everyone know can express their support for a post simply by hitting a button below...

I guess many have noticed the server outtage yesterday. The old web server did totaly fail, still for unknown reasons. Probably hardware issues.

Luckily I have backups, and now everything is running on the server, which was supposed to be a database server only.

Surprisingly enough the performace of the board is now much better than before. Hardly any page needs more than a second to generate.

That means that I will of course stick with the new setup,...

For now just as an experiment, Revleft is now running on two seperated servers.

I have rented a new server (P4 3.0ghz, 2GB RAM) with the purpose to act as a dedicated mysql database server.

this is a common setup for vbulletin boards of the size of RevLeft.

The remaining services (web, email, IRC etc.) will remain on the old server.

This should increase performance of the board drastically.

As I said, for now this is just...