Srijan's Diary

I am finally at peace with myself I think. I may not be at the place I imagined myself in 2011 when I started working on WriterBabu first, but I know I am good. I feel humbled by time.

I want to revamp WriterBabu, but it takes huge courage to touch this codebase which is now about 13yrs old. Only way is to create anew replica and migrate the database to new one. Still hopeful that I'll do it someday soon. Never say never!

keep writing ... writing is fun :)

Hello WriterBabus,

I am around, usually I make a diary entry(personal one) every now and then. Please drop me a message in case you have any query related to your account or in general. You can also reach out at srijan@writerbabu.com which I use actively daily.

New signups has been disabled since long time so it's just us, the same old folks.
... keep writing ... writing is fun :)

Actually not 4 days ... just from last night. or maybe afternoon yesterday. Phewww ....

Sorry guys ... WriterBabu website was down for 4 days .. I forgot to renew the domain.

Moved WB to a new server. The last one was pretty old and could have stopped working any time. This one is in India( AWS Mumbai datacenter) so theoretically should load faster for Indian users.

I was writing about the issue of unemployment of Rhea but it got too long, so did not post ... :D ... maybe will post a part of it.

Some of you must have faced issues while accessing WriterBabu last night post mid night. I too after long wanted to write in my personal diary and noticed that it's not loading. It turned out that the script to calculate user score was stuck. I thought maybe it will get alright by itself in an hour and went to sleep. In the morning I tried again and the problem was still there. Had to restart the database server as a quick fix and now things are working fine. Some of your score must be showing incorrectly though.

Keep writing ... writing is fun :)

Made some minor UI changes on the diary page. The design which was there before today was there since mid of 2012. That is an interesting fact. It was never changed since the diary section was implemented first. Diary writing page indeed had some UI changes somewhere around 2013 0r 2014 I think.

It was fun working on it. It's such an old codebase which still works fine after almost 7 years.

There are many features of WriterBabu which no longer work and are hidden but they still exist. Like thought gallery. When I conceived that idea it was a really ambition thing to achieve. I opened the thought gallery page by mistake( here is the url https://www.writerbabu.com/thought_gallery.php ). And then I was there reading WriterBabus' interpretations of various thought provoking images .... it took me back to the time when I was thinking by heart, everything I did back then was just so pure so deep ... I was stupid in many ways but still the thought process I was carrying back then leave me speechless ... I realise I may never be the same again as I have learned a lot with time which I can't unlearn. The expression was so free and maybe that was the reason why the thoughts were so unadulterated and pure. WriterBabu was and still is all about freedom of expression. And I will keep it alive whatever it takes.

I will be working on adding images in diary entry next. Although I can't say when it will be done because am not working on WB full time as of now.

Updated fonts for heading and paragraphs. Looks better I think. Last time I had changed the font I didn't get any change to analyse if it's looking good or bad. My MacBook Pro shows any font in good way so will need to check it on a windows system or linux one too.

Cleared the database table user score archive which was touching 5 crore records and it was about 2GB alone. The scores were not getting updated. Now whenever you visit anyone's profile, their score will get updated. The site should now run faster since now the CPU usage for the DB server has gone down from over 100% to little over 2% like what it used to be 5 years ago. Well, can't believe WB has been going on since 6 and a half years. The reason why it's still alive is because I never started it to earn money at the first place. Although at that time it happened that I was not earning anything, when I started it. I tried a lot to make it a commercial success but I failed at that because I was never able to compromise with soul of WB which was writing for the joy of writing and not anything else. It still gives me so much satisfaction when I write here anonymously or in my personal diary. And when I see people who have been here since 5 long years and even from the first year itself I really gives me good feeling for what WB has been. It is a platform with no strings attached. I don't care about the traffic, shares likes or any other KPI which can measure the success of this platform. I just love writing and that's the end of it. There is nothing more than this. Basically writing for me is like getting in touch with myself again when am lost in the world of chaos to keep things together in the real life. It's like meditation. It calms me down when am overwhelmed by some trouble. And when I get lost in the flow it's so much fun. Just pure fun.

Keep writing ... writing is fun ... :)

Removed all ads from all pages. I had to do this since long but was in impression that it will require a code change and hence was procrastinating but I had totally forgotten that I made it configurable from DB. So it was just a 30 seconds change and all ads gone.

I need to replan the notifications architecture of WriterBabu. It has been down since long and the reason am not doing a simple restart is that it will send out loads of emails to all users.

I need to rethink the system of score calculations and notifications which till sometime back was a realtime thing. It was no doubt very efficient as it used least resources and was able to keep off the backlog. The only bad thing about it was that it used too many different technologies. It is a mamoth system with dependency on Neo4j graph databsed, Redis, Mongo, Beanstalk, PHP, Apache, Mysql and to keep everything working SupervisorD. That too many things.

So how it works is that whenever an action happens like a poll is taken it calls the events API to raise an event which then creates a log in Mongo and at the same time adds a job in Beanstalk. Then the PHP worker scripts which listen to this beanstalk tube finds out the subsequent chain actions from the relations-graph that is stored in Neo4j. All the actions are then added independently into another beanstalk tube from where the execution worker scripts pic their respective jobs and execute them. An example of such job is sending an email to user or score calculation.

This system was built at the time when WriterBabu users were increasing and there was a lot of activity on the site. It was designed to handle a few million monthly active users. It never happened but the system is still there.

Now I want to redo the system because the server it was running on is so outdated that no update is possible. And migrating this system to a new server means that I will have to configure each and everything again. Which am not going to do. I need a solution which reuires least setup and is easy to migrate and move around. I think I will go with nodejs this time as it has the best dependency management and is just one thing to install and maintain. And biggest thing is that it's async by default.

First of all I need to maintain a map of relation between triggers and subsequent actions. Like a poll will have its subsequent actions as following:
1. score calculation for user giving the poll
2. score calculation for user who is the author of that post
3. sending out a notification to the author about the poll if author is not online
4. Calculate and see if the user is elegible for any new badges
5. calculate and see if the author is elegible for any new badges

Earlier I had built a dashboard where one can map activities and actions but I think it's not necessary in the new system as it can be stored in json format in a simple file. That can can be used to build a dashboard if needed. At max it will be few json files nothing more than that.

Once that is done the system can be itself simplified to handle just events and raising subsequent events and execution will be decoupled by making the execution through API calls. I mean in place of executor scripts embeded in the system itself the executors can just call apis which execute it. So no code and logic in this new system.

Infact I did something very similar for one of my open source projects that is called Amoeba. I wrote it in a single day and it's been used in Times Internet for sending push notifications. It sends out about 10000 push notifications in less than 10 seconds. So this new system will be even better than that. I should start work on that now.

Happy New Year WriterBabus :D

I visit WB almost everyday but mostly for my personal diary. This is a new special entry in my public diary.

A lot has changed since my last diary entry. I left my job at Times Internet Limited and moved to my home town to do something for people here. Now am a free soul with some randomness in my mind trying to find some focus in life. Let's see where life take me from here.

Keep writing ... writing is fun ... :)

Finally after so many small tweaks the spam posts have stopped (almost). It was really frustrating. Although I did not gave too much time improving WriterBabu over the last year but whatever I did was for spam prevention.

I had been working on lakshmirecipes.com with Mom and Saumya since last few months. I recently learned react js and have built a small website for sharing my travel photos. Will make it live soon.

A lot of old pages has been updated to be in sync with rest of the site and be responsive. The book section has been updated too except for the book reading part which will be updated soon.

The big news is :Book publishing has been made free.

Keep writing ... writing is fun ... :)

So after a long time and a big change. The cover images has a new shape and they are bigger in size. Although it looks like the old images are bigger as of now., but they are not, they are just stretched.

Now it's easier to insert images in between the post and easier to do some basic text styling like bold italic and bullet points etc. Also you can quote a text, it will appear as highlighted. Please read my post "An Evening In Paris" for more.

keep writing ... writing is fun ... :)

Have enabled ads on diary page and the post page. Need some source of income to support WriterBabu. The thing is that impressions don't make money. Only clicks will. Lets see.

Lots of changes are being made on day to day basis since last few weeks in WriterBabu. Small small changes to improve the site speed were made last to last week. Tonight I updated the diary card in feed. Earlier the card only had the diary cover image and name of the diary, but now it will show a line or two of the last diary entry.

Also the personal diaries will not appear in feed going forward.