Feb 15: Planned down time to launch Briar Press v5.5

I’m happy to report that we’re preparing to release a new version of Briar Press on Friday, February 15. Unfortunately, I’ll have to take the site completely offline for most of the day in order to make the change. If all goes well, it should be back online by evening.

This will be the last of our big upgrades for a while, and that’s good news. Rather than waiting for a year or more to introduce changes, I plan to make smaller and more regular updates. If something is missing from v5.5 that you hoped to see, you won’t have to wait too long for v5.6.

This site, version 5.0, is still crashing regularly (see the January update for more details). We’re hoping that v5.5 shows better performance, but if it doesn’t, we’ll figure out how to finance a server upgrade. That might mean placing a few carefully selected advertisements on the site. In the meantime, thanks everyone for your patience as the site flickers on and off.

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What hardware are you running these days? A virtual server through a large colocator? Your own box? I’m just curious.

Thanks for keeping the site going, it is a marvelous resource.

Google’s adsense ads are fairly unobtrusive…if you end up going that route.

I second ad-sense. You control where they go. The only ads you get are those closely related to the content of the site. You may also be able to talk to them and get a deal for being not for profit.

Great job to date BTW, Keep it up!

Hey both, a good suggestion. I’ll consider AdSense, but I think advertisers drawn from the Printer's Yellow Pages might be even more useful to our readers. A few businesses listed there have expressed some interest in the past.

Thanks for the support!

(LRF, it’s the former. We live on a virtual dedicated server maintained by MediaTemple. We’re on their basic monthly plan.)

He eric, i’d like to cast a vote against google adsense. If there are to be any ads—i’ve enjoyed their absence—it would be nice if they could be organized in such a way that nurtured the letterpress community. Perhaps a direct communication between the site managers and various groups themselves, like you say.

My fingers are crossed for RSS.

Hi…I’m new. Just saw this and I know if you’re non profit with the tax verification forms you can get free hosting from some of the more reliable companies.

Baltimore

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