So far I have been reluctant to officially launch it through big blogs like the Terrible Trio, or through widely read metablogs with an Australian focus like Blogpond or Problogger; or even indeed to bite the bullet and start pumping out press releases. “Soon”, I’ve said to myself. “Once I have the technicals licked”.

And therein lies the rub. Anybody who follows my ramblings at Club Troppo knows that my hatred for Wordpress has grown more nuanced and detailed in the passage of the years I’ve had to spoonfeed it. These days it has gone beyond mere contempt into loathing and detestation. Very uncharitable and impolite, but my distaste for Wordpress has grown beyond civilised boundaries.

Anyway. Ozblogistan runs, in part, on a variant of Wordpress called Wordpress Mu. This latter program adds a few extra layers of code to allow multiple blogs to run within the same top-level domain and share user logins and so forth. It’s the code that powers Wordpress.com, who currently host millions of active blogs.

But, as it turns out, they use a loophole in the GPLv2 to keep a few juicy bits to themselves. Such as the nice bit that makes CNAME redirection work properly. Hmmm. It’s also easy to overlook that Automattic (the company behind Wordpress.com) have tens of millions of venture capitalist dollars and about a dozen employees; I have a part-time casual job and the few hours per week I can spare to try and headbutt Ozblogistan into shape.

Consequently I have decided that I will turn off automatic registrations for Ozblogistan for a while, to limit my exposure to stressful difficulties. Acting as administrator for even one busy site is actually a very taxing job, as I have learnt at Club Troppo. Today I also oversee Skepticlawyer’s new site and the handful of sites who have attached themselves to Ozblogistan so far.

I will continue to honour these obligations, but I won’t be allowing new registrations that I don’t add myself — that is, I will only add blogs by invitation or on application by email. I plan to write a replacement blog engine — a bit of a geek rite of passage these days — that will do my bidding in the way I want. More on that another time.

Update: The previous outage seems to be a combination of MySQL being incorrectly configured by yours truly, and an hourly backup script that creates 300 new processes. I’ve pushed it back to run daily instead.

This is very exciting — both of these ladies are excellent writers on a wide variety of topics with a legal focus. I expect that the new site will blossom into something of a must-read in the very near future.

The culprit is PHP. This service is set up with a division of labour between the web server, which handles the front end of things, and copies of the PHP engine which Wordpress Mu relies on. What is supposed to happen is that every X requests, a given copy PHP engine will shut itself down and restart. This is meant to ensure that everything is clean and stable in the long run.

Except that it isn’t working that way at all. PHP unfailingly manages to start up the new copy of itself, but thoughtlessly manages to overlook the killing-of-original-copy part. So after a few days of this the server looked less like an orderly room of cleanliness and more like a petri dish full of angry bacteria on crack.

Right now I have a temporary fix in place whereby each copy of PHP is made to hang around for a great many requests before trying half successfully to die-and-be-reborn. We’ll see if I can solve this little conundrum before things really take off.

WPMU is a modified version of Wordpress designed for hosting many blogs on a single server. It’s the software which drives the Wordpress.com service.

That’s the blurb, anyhow. As it turns out, Wordpress.com have a bunch of custom code which they haven’t quite shared completely. Such as the nifty code for domain mapping. But that’s neither here nor there.