emulinks.de

I hate e-mail, it always causes problems. Anyway, registration e-mails are now going out again. Sorry for any inconvenience.

The MediaWiki database has died after a MySQL update, and I did not bother to restore it because I want to move the entire site to Wordpress anyway. Could take a while, though. In the meantime, the front page redirects to the blog.

Just look at the main page: all new stuff, fancy logo, Semantic MediaWiki and all. There is not that much new content yet, but I think it’s already a vast improvement over the rapidly decomposing MyThreads site. The “dossiers” should be pretty cool once I manage to write up enough of them to cover a broad range of topics.

The search engine was broken due to a malformed annotations XML file. Should not happen again.

I have finally implemented a way to integrate the numerous relevant Wikipedia pages into the directory without adding hundreds of identically-looking entries. There are now over 800 keywords followed by a small question mark that when clicked on pop up the corresponding Wikipedia article. This effectively adds more than 600 Wikipedia pages to the directory.

In case anybody wondered why the site was down today: Some time last Friday (possibly before), my provider Host Europe silently and slowly took away hard disk space from my virtual server at a rate of a few kB/sec. After some days (probably last night) the MySQL server stopped working because the disk was full. After I had opened a support ticket, they fixed it, and I am back to the 30 GB I pay for, but the ticket is still open, and they have not commented the issue yet. My guess: When they are short on disk space, they just take it from existing servers and hope the operators won’t notice. Un-fucking-glaublich.

I just removed the AdSense ads for emulinks.de. There are hardly any commercial offerings for vintage gaming enthusiasts, resulting in both CTR and CPC near zero. There is no point in annoying everybody (including myself) with it.

I have just added the 2000th entry to the directory: triggerzone.de. Congratulations.
Update: I had to delete a couple of broken entries, falling back to 1997, so I quickly added a few new ones, meaning we now have a second 2000th entry, CellarDoor. And, of course, there has always been Heimcomputer, the 2000th link if you do not take deleted entries into account…

After switching to Debian, the thumbnail quality deteriorated. The problem seems to have been the X server (Xvfb), and switching to a VNC X server (and setting the display depth to 24 bits, for that matter) increased the rendering quality a lot. It also allows me to monitor thumbnail generation, making it much easier to find problems and broken entries. I have also fixed the not-so-clever khtml2png resizing method (makes sure that thumbnails are of the given size in spite of any scrollbars that may appear when rendering), speeding up thumbnail generation considerably. I also did the documented but unimplemented –time parameter. If anybody still uses khtml2png 2.0.5, you can find the patch here.

No, I am not Doctor Nick Riviera, even though I have been watching a lot of Simpsons episodes lately. The CVS server is back, and thanks to some plastic surgery it has become an SVN server. You may call her Francine.