My Opera News

We're ready to announce one of the biggest changes to our community since its launch in 2001. We are really committed to our work, and there's nothing greater to see new members joining or existing ones logging in!

But... There's a catch to it all. As most of you know, developing Web sites today is time-consuming, and in order to maintain My Opera we're forced to think of all different kinds of contexts when we create something new (or fix something old). So, Nicolas, Edoardo, Esteban, and I (together with front-end guys Fred and the new kid in town, Tristan) have decided that it only makes sense to continue development exclusively for Microsoft IE6 (according to our stats, the majority of our users are IE-followers).

Yeah, yeah, we know... We are the Opera community, but, boo-hoo-on-you!

There's simply too much work to support all those browsers along with their interpretation of "standards".

We can safely announce that starting today, a new era will arise.

If you think this is good, then help us digg it!

Finally, we're able to show the world what we have been tinkering with the last few months. Since before Christmas, actually.

We didn't really plan for it to be so long between updates, however since Fredrik went totally overboard with a complete site redesign, we figured we might as well do some heavy-lifting under the hood as well.

Besides a new look, this release brings with it some new features, and some forward-thinking database backend optimisations which we hope will relieve some stress further down the road. A proper changelog will follow as soon as we've had time to fix the most obivous bugs still left

Thanks for waiting while we updated. Hope you like at least some of the new stuff


Back, left to right: Fredrik (design/frontend code), Espen (community management), Michael (design/frontend code), Sverre (backend code/javascript), Ole Kasper (backend code/backend project management), Vetle (manager -- dunno what he's doing here? ), William (backend code).
Front, left to right: Kjetil (backend code), Esteban (quality assurance)



OK, back to work. We need to start on the NextBigThing.

Today was the official opening of the brand spanking new server room on the Opera Software ASA premises. The system administrators were out in full force along with major parts of the Opera Software managment. Obviously, having nothing better to do than eat cake and drink alcohol free champagne, most of the Opera Community team tagged along as well. Claudia from sysadmin had even made a server room cake. Mmmm. Stein claims it is a world's first in server room cakes. I'll take his word for it.

Anyway, the most interesting thing in the server room, is of course the Opera Community rack, as seen to the left. From the top, we have user file storage (the content of files.myopera.com), "bigma" (the master MySQL database server which we so proudly have shown you nudie pics of before with its five 15K RPM striped disks in front loading bays), and two IBM blade centers containing multi-purpose machines (Apache front ends, Apache back ends, slave MySQL database servers, load balancers, file servers, cache servers, sync masters and what have you).

Considering how stuff typically goes down every time I try to brag about our new hardware's perfomance, I won't this time. Actually, on the contrary, I must say that files.myopera.com is performing rather poorly at times of heavy load. We'll need to make someone invest in a proper caching front for that one...

Anyway. With the Opera Community as the only in-production system running in the new server room, it was with a bit of trepidation that we watched Jon flip the switch on the fuses to cut the power to the entire server room. Apparently, this is sysadmin's sick joke of an inauguration ritual. Anyway, the UPSes and the 10 tonnes of battery backup somehow worked fine, the diesel generator kicked in, and the Opera Community survived. Even though the 500A relays were making some rather disturbing noises.

Lastly, here's a couple of more pictures of random server room porn; left is my.opera.com's naked behind and the right are containers of argon gas (for extinguishing fires without messing up electronics).

Edited to add, Nov 6: note: As of Tuesday Oct 31, the beta site is using the same database as my.opera.com, contrary to what is being said below. There are currently no ongoing beta tests.

We are now establishing a new beta version site of the Opera Community, for limited public testing future of updates and such. We are going to commit to use this extensively upon future updates of the Opera Community codebase, which also includes widgets.opera.com and [censored-for-now].opera.com. By doing this, and with the kind help of some of you folks, we hope to reduce the amount of bugs we release into the wild.

In other words, this will be our testing grounds for new software updates of the Opera Community.

This time around, however, is not a software update beta, and as such there will be no fun new features to try out. There will, however, be a behemoth of a database server (well, compared to our current ones at least) in the backend, hopefully serving your needs that much quicker than before.

The new database server and the Opera Community Beta cluster is however not situated at the same location as the current my.opera.com cluster. This means:

• Changes made or content contributed on the beta site will not propagate to my.opera.com, and vice versa.
• Files uploaded to the beta site will not be made availalbe on the current files.myopera.com server which serves all user files

There are also some other minor things; no email notifications, no MMS blogging, and possibly other stuff I haven't thought of yet.

The second bullet point above, means that if you upload images to an image gallery, you'll see a lot of blank frames, even though the images were uploaded properly. We hope that even though it might be difficult to enjoy the full experience that you try to upload some images, and even try to edit some of your old photo albums. Simply do stuff, and don't be afraid of breaking anything---changes will as mentioned not propagate to the "real" Opera Community. Search for stuff, post blog posts and photo albums, etc.

We hope that you take the time to look around a bit around perhaps put some minor strain on our new database server.

OK. Hopefully you took the time to read the above. If you want to refer other people to the beta site, please refer them to this post, so that they know the limitations of the current site. We don't want to get truckloads of invalid bug reports to wade through. Currently, the Opera Community Beta can be found at >>> http://beta-my.opera.com <<<. The URL is subject to change once we have moved our servers. After the server move, the beta site will be directly tied in with the live database server and user file storage, meaning that we'll get much much more realistic test environments.

We would very much like to hear your feedback on this in this forum topic: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=164350 . We are especially interested in hearing about stuff which takes a very long time to execute (searches, posting stuff, etc) and stuff which simply doesn't work even though it works on the live Opera Community.