Site Updates | featured news

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 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’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 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.

I just started noticing this recently. It’s a nice touch. Before, you would have to go into a specific comment moderation page to keep track of comments. Now, it’s all tied into your profile page, just like when someone likes or comments on your status updates.

Months ago, I converted my commenting system to Facebook’s. I had my reservations before. Most of it is that because it’s javascript based, the comments will not be crawled by Google. All Google sees is the javascript code, not the actual comments.

I just noticed this morning that the MGID link exchange widget wasn't loading up on Wopular's subpages, so I temporarily disabled it. The widget was keeping those pages from fully rendering.

I'm finding that StumbleUpon has been the most effective social button on the site. I've been consistently sharing my blog entires on StumbleUpon and other content sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin, +1, Facebook, and maybe a couple other ones. It's mostly a waste of time except for StumbleUpon.

Because Google’s Panda Update 2.5 has taken away a chunk of Wopular’s traffic, I’ve decided to try out web 2.0 link exchange programs. I read that they’re significantly more sophisticated than their previous incarnations. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never tried them with Rotten Tomatoes.

I spent the whole day dealing with servers. The facility where Wopular and MoviesWithButter are hosted were having some network issues. I was able to get MWB up and running within an hour or so. Wopular was a whole different story. The Database is about 21GB. It's a huge db, so whenever there's a network issue, I can always count on at least one corrupt table. And it always happens to be the largest table, which takes several hours to diagnose and repair.

Long time no blog. Even I wasn’t expecting this long of a hiatus, but maintaining two sites does take a lot of time. I’ve made some minor tweaks to Wopular, but most of my work lately has been focused on MoviesWithButter.com. Here’s what Binh and I have done to promote the site since launching it a couple months ago.