I began migrating w8track to a new server last night. The application was previously on shared hosting, and it wasn’t working out the way I’d hoped. I moved it to a virtual private server, which should be more reliable. It also gave me the opportunity to customize the configuration, streamlining the services for this specific application.

Before the migration began, I put both servers in read-only mode and copied all the data from the old server to the new server. Then I took the new server out of read-only mode, leaving the old server online as read-only. It only took a few minutes, and most users probably never saw the read-only message from either server. However, because of the way DNS propagation works, there may still be a few of you who’ll see the old server for another day or two. Please be patient, and eventually you’ll be redirected to the new server.

After the migration, you’ll notice a number of changes in the site. The front page is now in a blog format, allowing me to get announcements out more quickly. You’ll also notice the Google advertising is back on the front page and the other content pages, but not on the application pages where you enter your weight and view your progress. This is because the other pages don’t generate enough content to produce good advertising results. In the future, I may use that space for something else, but for now it’ll remain blank.

Thanks to the new blog format, you’ll now be able to post comments. The blog software accepts OpenID for user authentication, just like the w8track application. You’re welcome to use the same OpenID for the blog and for the application, but you’ll have to log into both systems separately. On the other hand, if you use a different OpenID for each system, you may maintain some degree of anonymity between the comments you leave and weights you enter. It’s up to you.

The w8track community is small but steadily growing. In the coming days, I’ll be adding some of the first user-requested features. I’ll be looking forward to your feedback.