In our previous post Professional Level Platform we detailed our server setup. Since first setting up our production environment we’ve struggled to get the perfect setup.
Since moving away from the resource hog that is Apache2 things started to get better immediately. Load times were a bit faster but, more importantly, we could serve a LOT more requests. Despite this PHP, the language we use to make all our sites, would eat up all the memory on the system causing a situation where the server would be constantly trying to read and write memory to the swap partition.
This problem seems to be fixed at long last. We’ve been tweaking our server settings for a while to varying degrees of success but now we seem to have hit the nail right on the head. The server is still serving a good number of requests but isn’t dying when Google, Yahoo and the few other search engines all come to visit at the same time.
Stability, at long last, has been achieved 
For the past week or so I’ve been working on the Kink ID profiles. The concept behind them is to have one, global, kinky profile per persona.
So, to help this idea, we’re producing a profile system that works a bit like the iGoogle page. We have a series of widgets made for various things like Twitter, RSS feeds, bios etc. that you can add to your profile page and place it however you want. We also have ideas for adding widgets for any books you author, websites you own, lots of stuff that relates directly to your identity that you would like to have on the page.
There’s also a series of settings to handle how your profile is displayed to registered kinksters or random strangers. The big bonus to this is that if you want your ID to stay out of search engines we can make it happen.
We are also trying to engineer a platform that lets any techy kinksters make widgets for profile pages. If you want something up that doesn’t exist yet we really want to encourage you to make them!
Finally, we’re authoring an API that allows sites that use the Kink ID login API to push updates to a profile widget. For example, say you’re on a kinky forum and you post a new thread, new reply, something of that nature, if you want that information to be in your profile then the website can tell Kink ID about those new posts and display them anywhere you want on your profile.
The development and testing for these profiles is still in a very early stage but we’re very excited,
I can’t believe it’s been a month since I last blogged about this project. I really wanted to make sure I blogged often here so that anybody who happens to find their way here will be able to read all about what we’re doing.
Anyway! We’ve been slaving away on the blogging platform, advertising platform and the ID platform. All 3 are really starting to take shape now which is really exciting. Kink ID and Kink Ads are sharing the same API module, meaning they share the same standards, which now supports authentication of clients. We’ve implemented authentication with client x.509 certificates for XML-RPC and SOAP but the REST interface handles authentication slightly differently. To keep things simple for the REST users out there we’ve gone with a private key+timestamp+hash system that is easy to implement on any platform you choose and is also easy to understand.
No matter how far we come in the project the tasks that are remaining are as daunting as the day we started. Even the 3 focus projects (blogging, ads and id) that have work constantly done on them appear to be having more work added than is ever getting done. I won’t be demoralized though! Must keep working hard!
On the up-side of things Kink Ads now categorizes ads and is able to track impressions and clicks. Kink ID has evolved nicely, the pages for the login system are much much nicer now if still somewhat lacking. Kinky Blogging has had MANY problems fixed and now supports multi-domain logins. In other words, when you login to this blog (or any other) you are logged into all of them, plus the main home page. We implemented this to avoid having a potential user login many times over just to get to the wordpress admin pages or write comments while authenticated. There are now admin pages for us to use with out custom plugins too!
Yes, things really are coming along nicely I think. I’m happy with it so far
So with all the ads up on the blog at the moment you may have guessed we’re developing the ads plugin. To serve the ads we are using our newly developed API module.
The ads plugin we are developing has a number of places where a user can choose to place ads. Blogs will be required to display ads on their site or pay an optional small fee to have them removed. We also plan to create a donate link for those who block our ads. We don’t feel it’s unreasonable to replace ads with a quick and easy donate link if you choose not to view the ads.
Our API module is still under some heavy development and hasn’t quite been standardized yet. The current version in out SVN is supporting SOAP and RESTful interfaces and is due to support XML-RPC very shortly. Unfortunately our lighty build is 2 revisions behind the current release candidate it is missing support for the Expects HTTP header and so using the built in .NET support for the service requires a small amount of configuration (will post at some point, promise!).
In short things are coming along great! The blogging platform is really starting to come together and I’ve never been happier about my personal projects
One of the commitments we have at Kink Network is to provide a professional grade level of service. What does this mean?
- Fast, responsive web servers
- High levels of up time
- Presenting ourselves professionally
- No random maintenance periods
To help with the first two we are spending a lot of time ensuring our servers are setup just right so that the websites and services we host for you never just vanish or go down. For the geeks out there our webserver is lighttpd with php running via fastcgi. This helps with our server loads because it’s a lot less resource intensive than the other mainstream solution: apache. Infact during development we have been using apache (as it’s the easiest to use out of the box) and have had performance troubles with our hosted sites and apache hogging too much memory.
To help conduct ourselves professionally and make sure there are no random downtimes we are adhering to the industry standard: development, staging, production. These 3 stages of development/deployment help ensure that no code reaches the web before it’s ready.
- Development - each developer has access to our development server. Here we can try out new bits of code, new ideas and produce our core code.
- Staging - developers don’t have access to this area directly. Instead we move code to the staging server via Capistrano straight from our SVN trunk. All code here is put through QA tests to make sure it is ready for production.
- Production - the sites that everybody on the www sees. Code is moved from staging to production, again, using Capistrano. During this time a maintenance page goes up so we don’t just vanish from the web and our API services respond with the service unavailable HTTP response code (503).
Because our deployment strategy is using Capistrano we automatically get rollback points. This means that if a deployment goes wrong we can go back to how it was before we did anything. We also manually (via Capistrano scripting) take a database dump before any deployment begins so no data is ever lost (which is a Good Thing ™).
Currently each site shares the same maintenance window (the first sunday night of the month). No deployments will take place except in these windows or unless there is a critical problem.
All this testing and procedure is going to help Kink Network provide a very professional level of service.
Since cancelling my Eve-Online subscription progress on Kink Network has been steady. This is good.
For the past year or so the site that set it all off, Kinky Groups, has been slow to develop. The initial start was strong, getting a core built and the calendar module 95% complete, but quickly time seemed to slip away and I had no time to continue development and work at the same time.
So, a project tracker is up, site designs are being made, our wordpress mu install is coming along nicely. All in all I feel good that our development is going so well.
So then, about this Kink Network stuff.
Kink Network is our attempt to provide professional grade web-services to the kinky community. We are kinky ourselves (yay!) and are very dedicated to providing services to the community at large.
We run all our services from our own servers so there’s no chance of being shut down!
The services we plan to provide are:
- Kink ID – Identity/login service, free for users and sites to use
- Kinky Blogging – A blogging platform welcoming all the kinky folks
- Kink Database – A database of articles and essays collected from the web and submitted by users; free-to-use API to integrate the database with other kinky websites
- Kink Ads – An advertisement service to serve ads on adult/kinky websites!
- Kinky Groups – A website provider for real-life kink groups with a rich set of modules to make your site complete
For the kink community we hope these services fill a gap.
For those techies among you we provide a rich set of APIs to go with Kink ID and Kink Database (and possibly others soon). The APIs we produce all support XMLRPC, SOAP and REST (json and xml encoding) interfaces.
