Blogs

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.

I’m moving aggregation feeds on the right sidebar of the homepage to the bottom. Feeds affected are Google News, Yahoo! Buzz, and Digg.

Digg was never the same since the redesign. Although I’ve seen improvement in the quality of articles since they started moderating homepage news, it’s still not what it used to be. The community is pretty dead. The norm for number of comments for each article is around 3. It used to be 100-1000 times that.

Yahoo! Buzz will be shut down soon. I’ve also started noticing spammers making it to the homepage - not good.

I installed Android on my HD2 a couple weeks ago. Initially, I thought I would continue to use Windows Mobile 6.5 as my main OS, but just hop into Android once in a while for games and apps not available in WM.

I'm finally taking the Android plunge. Ever since I bought the HD2, I had been keeping track of the development of the Android port for it. Why didn’t I just get an Android phone? Well, at the time, the HD2 was the first smartphone with a 1GHz processor and a 4.3” screen. I also liked the HTC Sense UI and had been using Windows Mobile since I started using smartphones. I was looking more for an alternative mobile OS for additional apps and games.

With all the talk focused on Android, iPhone, and lately Windows Phone 7, I’m glad the guys at Opera haven’t forgetten about the group of us who are still using Windows Mobile 6.5 (or earlier versions). Opera released a native version of Opera Mini 5 Beta for Windows Mobile earlier this year, and being a beta release, it was buggy. Sometime in September, they finally got a chance fix those bugs and improve the page rendering.

That’s how it is sometimes. I wonder if Fall and Winter are the two best seasons for online advertising revenue. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has always been Summer because that’s when the biggest films are released. Outside of movie sites, I’m not sure.

Look to the right of the homepage and you’ll see a new module called “Most Fed Articles.” They’re AP articles ranked by the number of times they’re being used in the top newspapers in the US within the last six hours. It’s a quick and easy way to see which AP news stories are most popular across the U.S. It’s one of the methods that I’ve been using to gauge which articles to feature as the top story, and now I’m making it available to you.

I’m working on a new site using Drupal on a LAMP environment. One of the things I want to install is APC - Alternative PHP Cache - for opcode caching. When I did it with Wopular, I’ve noticed the effects immediately. Because the site crashed so often before using APC, I had to have a script to automatically reboot the server, fixed db errors, and reload the site whenever server resources are used up. It works, but sometimes I would end up with a corrupt database and had to spend hours to days fixing it or restoring it from a backup.

I've integrated Facebook's Like Button and Like Box to Wopular's homepage and subpages. I don't think they're effective traffic drivers, but did it just to cover my bases; I think, in general, that's true for most small to medium sized sites. They're pretty easy to integrate.

I’ve finally replaced the MySpace button with Google Buzz across the site. In order to do that I would have to first create a profile for Wopular on Google. The funny thing was I had actually created a Google profile for Wopular a while back, but had forgotten about it. I only found out when the profile name was taken when I tried to create a new one. Unfortunately, I’ve also forgotten my login/pw for that original profile, but after a while, I figured it out.