A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

Orrery appears to have attracted link spammers, who use open access blogs and wikis to increase the Google PageRank of their sleazy marketing pages. The first one I noticed is bublik2010, who is pretty blatant - s/he seems to post the same set of viagra/cialis/herbal remedy links to every single discussion thread. The rest of this site seems legit prima facie -- generating this post was the easiest way to draw it to your attention.

Due to events beyond our control, the server from which Orrery.us is served is having its IP address changed on February 1. Due to various details of the Domain Name System (DNS), it may take a while for the connection between the Orrery.us name and the new IP address to get propagated. So it might appear that Orrery.us will be unreachable tomorrow and Friday. Don't worry, we'll be back.

We are working on getting a server in a proper co-location facility, but haven't gotten it in place yet.

As we have alluded to before, the server that provides Orrery.us with its connectivity isn't really in a full-blown co-location facility. At any rate, the local power company has found that they need to do some heavy hardware replacement of transformers and lines that feed power to the building. So Orrery.us will be out of comission during Saturday, August 19, 2006 for some indeterminant amount of time, while they address these problems. We hope to be up and running again by the end of the day.

We have added a subscriptions feature to the site, so that users can be notified via e-mail when new posts are added to nodes or categories that they are subscribed to.

One of the drawbacks of getting our hosting donated is that when a tornado tears through the midwest and there is no power at the small business that is providing the hosting for almost two days, we kinda disappear from the internet.

Unfortunately, there is a history of bad power at this location (the errant squirrel has been known to bring down power for several hours at a time). So if we disappear suddenly in the future, that might be why.

Today, the 19th of February 2006, we have officially launched this website.

The concept of the site had been around for a while in our heads (mine and Jason's), but during the summer of 2005, the first actual alpha test sites were tested. This was followed by a beta-test period starting in September 2005, culminating in this launch. We'd like to thank all of our beta-testers for the help, and we look forward to more stories and comments.