Note From The Editor | featured news

You had probably noticed that the site was down for a couple hours on Monday and hadn’t been updated until this morning. I was on my way to the airport for Cannes and, of course, the site had to go down. It’s not my fault though. There server crapped out because of hardware issues, and my site had to be moved to another one. That took about three hours. Well, actually, it only took about half an hour, but I didn’t know the site was down and out until two and half hours later.

Yesterday, I had database issues. Today, I have computer issues. I started my morning off early today, and was ready to catch up with stuff that I placed on the backburner yesterday while trying to repair a corrupted MySQL table.

That didn’t go according to plan. I was about to start work, notice ASUS and Windows decided to do updates. I let them, and before I know it my mouse stopped working. Shortly afterwards, my touchpad stopped working too.

The site crashed yesterday morning at around 9am, although it’s hardly noticable until a couple hours later. I didn’t notice it until I started picking stories to feature on the homepage. Whenever i tried to feature an article, it would stop the site from loading up.

From that, I knew that the MySQL database must be checking for corrupt tables. And if it’s doing that, a crash must have occurred. Checking out stats at my ISP confirmed that the server was restarted at 9am.

I’ve installed the All-in-One Sidebar add-on for Firefox for a while now. When I’m updating news in the mornings for Wopular, I open up over twenty tabs and Firefox has been corporative. A couple days ago, I’ve noticed that after opening a handful of tabs, the browser became unresponsive.

When Google first launched Google Chrome, I installed it and give it a test drive. I was fairly impressed. It had a super clean interface and was really fast. Pages rendered noticeably faster than Firefox.

Back then, even though I wanted to take the Chrome plunge, I couldn’t. It didn’t have all, or even half, of the apps I needed for web development and maintaining the content on Wopular.

I just noticed in the last couple of days that the sharing platform AddThis has removed “via @addthis” at the end of tweets using their widget. I use AddThis throughout the site. It’s a handy little widget that allows users to share articles through any social bookmarking/sharing site, like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest.

As a website owner, I use it to tweet articles to my Twitter account. I used to manually get rid of the “via @addthis” suffix each time to give me more available characters and to make the tweet cleaner.

I spotted Google Play on Google’s header menu last week. My first reaction was what the heck is it? I clicked on it and saw a menu for Movies, Music, Books, and Apps. I took a peek at the Movies channel, noticed and liked the clean design, and left.

The design for Google Play is comparatively more gaugy than the bare-bones design of the other items on the header menu, but still simple and elegant.

I’ve switched over to Facebook’s comment system a while back. I did it for two reasons. First, offloading comments to a third party takes the load off my server. Second, I’m hoping to get some Facebook traffic juice.

The first part worked out. I disabled Drupal’s commenting system, which resulted in less cron jobs and queries to the database.

The second part hasn’t quite worked out. My Facebook referrals have mostly stayed the same. I’m also noticing less comments, which is a surprise. I figured since most people are on Facebook already, I would get more.

I’ve been using the ASUS Zenbook for months now. It’s running on an i7 1.8GHz Processor and 4GB of RAM. I can’t say I’m completely satisfied with it. It’s the keyboard that I just can’t get used to. After almost four months, I’m still missing keys when I type. It gets pretty annoying, especially if you have to type often.

I finally found some time to replace the now deprecated Google Buzz with Google Plus. And it's probably a waste of time, but I'm just doing it out of completeness.

My personal Google Plus account has turned into a ghost town, just as soon as Buzz. It's sad. That's why I don't understand how there are still reports saying that it's growing. I bet it's just users from various Google products who are signing up and then taking a peek. And then never coming back again.