Richard Cave's blog

Performance of the websites hosted on Topaz has increased over the last two weeks with a variety of patches ported to the production servers. We still have an outstanding memory problem that requires a restart of the Topaz applications three times a day (these restarts usually occur around midnight, 8am and 4pm with a duration of less than 10 minutes). I feel that we're close to diagnosing the memory problem which is the last performance hurdle.

We’re continuing to experience slowness and intermittent downtime for the websites hosted on Topaz. At this time, the priorities for the IT and Topaz teams are to improve stability of the Topaz applications and increase the performance of the web sites.

Looks like I’ve been a bit remiss about posting release candidates on this blog as we’re on the third release candidate since RC 0.8. We’ve obviously been busy as the release candidate now has an extra numerical identifier. New features include:

• minor and formal corrections on articles
• advanced search
• dynamic table of contents
• dynamic journal archives

As with all release candidates, you may need to refresh your browser once or twice to get the new CSS changes.

Many users have seen the "undergoing routine site maintenance" page splashed across their browsers a bit too often recently when browsing to the PLoS ONE, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases or PLoS Hub Clinical Trials journals. We've taken some steps to resolve the problems and the TOPAZ developers are digging deep into code. We won't have a full fix in place until TOPAZ RC 0.8.2.1 is released at the end of February, but bandaids are in place that should make the site outages much less frequent. If you're interested in the gorey details, read on....

The Zotero developers announced that Zotero is now compatible with all PLoS journals. The new Zotero translator allows users to capture metadata and full-text PDFs of PLoS articles. I've tried Zotero with PLoS ONE and PLoS NTD articles and it automatically gathers metadata information including the authors of an article, abstract, volume/issue and DOI. You'll need to download the latest Zotero 1.0.1 release to get the new PLoS translator.