Sunday, March 27, 2011

Site Update Status

Transition to the new server has been completed. A DNS change request was submitted to the ISP @ 2:30 PM US West Coast time, March 27th.
Anglachel

Thursday, March 24, 2011

HASA Server Downtime Schedule

Ang asked me to post this:

HASA is moving into its new home this coming weekend!

Starting about noon on Saturday, March 26th, HASA will be taken offline for maintenance. If all goes more or less as planned, the site will be back up on the new server about mid-day on Sunday, March 27th. Due to lags in DNS population, it may be a bit longer before users can see the new site.

So, what is being done? Many things have already been done this week. The server was patched and its security configured, a mail server was installed, the web site and application servers were started, tested and patched, preliminary tests were done on the mail server, sample databases were moved from the old server to the new one, and test sites are now running. Starting tomorrow, the following will be done:

• Thursday - Code transfer
• Friday - email account creation
• Saturday - Database backup and transfer
• Sunday -- ColdFusion application mapping, site configuration, testing and DNS switch

So, it's going to be a busy few days for me this week. Some features, like the Research Library text search, will not be operational until later next week and there will no doubt be some bugs to shake out.

Please, if you are planning story updates, forum posts or reviews, do your best to complete that before noon on Saturday.

Anglachel

Looking for subscriptions!

Just a quick note:

Since HASA is about to move to a newer, more stable server, I'm hoping we can celebrate with some new subscriptions.

Julie

Friday, March 11, 2011

HASA news - Birthdays, stories

March birthdays and links to the stories written or updated in February.

March Birthday Challenge
Is your birthday in March, and would you like a drabble about your favourite character or topic? You can request it here.
Not sure what the birthday cards are about? Have a look at stories written for previous requests.

February Stories
All of us writers love feedback. It is the lembas and miruvor that sustains us as we write our story, and leaving a few words about a story you read is always a nice thing to do, whether the story is new or old.

Every fifteen minutes HASA highlights a story chosen at random from the Reviewed and General stories in the archive. Read the currently featured story on our front page.

Many talented writers are publishing every day. In February:
--- 15 Reviewed Stories were published or updated.
--- 27 General Stories were published or updated.
--- 1 Beta Story was updated.
(Please note, you need to be logged in to view beta stories.)

Thank you for reading at HASA. Enjoy!

~Nath ~

Friday, March 4, 2011

Please read, we're still behind

We're at -$161 which means January and February hosting fees aren't fully paid for and the March bill will soon come due. HASA depends on member & reader donations to pay hosting fees. The hosting fee pays for the dedicated server we need to host our content -- all the features and fun visitors love - stories, comments, forums, alerts, challenges and more.

We should not be running this far negative for this long. Thanks to recent donations we're less behind than we would have been, but on average we've tended toward more negative rather than less. It would be best if we were positive. Please support HASA so our great stories can remain online and accessible.

One way we can do that is subscriptions. Currently we have two monthly and two annual subscriptions. It would be great if we could have more! I would be pestering you less. The monthly hosting fee for HASA is $150. There are now three ways to donate to our PayPal account.
• One time donations - this is what we've always had
• Monthly donations - set up a monthly recurring donation in amounts from $5 to $25 dollars.
• Annual donations - set up a recurring annual donation in amounts from $15 to $50 dollars.
Donation buttons are on the home page (one-time donation only), all story list pages and on the Donations page. If you haven't donated yet to help support HASA, please consider doing so; any support will be timely and greatly appreciated. HASA gets a lot of traffic and offers many great stories and features.

If you're a little short on spare change at the moment, donations of time are always appreciated. There's an archive full of stories just waiting for comments, authors who would dearly love an email complimenting them on their work, challenges that need entries, playlists that need to be created, and forums begging for discussions. If you are a reviewer, check out a story today. If you aren't a reviewer, no better time than now to sign up. If you are an author, please consider donating a new story.

Thanks for enjoying HASA!

Julie