Note From The Editor, Site Updates | featured news

For the past three years (especially 2015), I’ve been neglecting my two websites: Wopular.com and MoviesWithButter.com. During that peroid, I worked in spurts: there were months when I was very active and others when I just disappeared. I’ll get into the why in the future. But for now, I plan to work on my babies more consistently. That’s my plan for 2016. Hopefully, it’ll last.

I’m been fixing a bunch of broken feeds since the new year. It started with CNN, which launched a redesign at the beginning of the year. At the time, all of their RSS feeds were broken as a result of that (more about this later). Since they’re the second largest news site on the web, behind Yahoo! News, I still wanted to show them on the site.

Around April, my VPS provider Linode announced that they’ve just finished a major $45M upgrade to their hardware and network, which means free upgrades for their existing users. The new hardware uses SSD RAID drives and faster CPUs. I hadn’t bothered because Wopular and Movies With Butter have been relatively stable.

A while back, My ISP told me my backups took half a day to complete, which is too long. If anything goes wrong during that period, the process would have to start all over again, which happened quite often.

The customer rep told me that my server had too many files, and even though they didn’t take up much disk space when added up, the process of copying each one of them takes a lot of time.

After updating the site for seven days a week since the site was started years ago, I will be hands off during the weekends from now on. Because I don’t want the site to look too static, I’ve decided to redesign the “Most Fed Articles” block from the top right area of the site and moving it the top left just for the weekends and calling it “Weekend Edition.”

If you came to the site this past weekend, you may have noticed the change and relocation.

That’s just a start. I’ll try to pre-program other content for the weekends during the weekdays and keeping my weekends free.

A couple days ago, I was checking out film blogger and columnist Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere and learned that his site was blocked by Google Chrome and Firefox because those browsers suspected his site contained malware. By that time, he had already gotten the problem fixed, but only after fretting over it for several hours during Christmas Eve.

Over the years, whenever the site was slow to load up, I always went through the same routine. I checked traffic logs to see if it was due to a sudden increase in traffic. If not, I would look at the mysql slow query log to see if there were slow queries bogging up the database. If that wasn’t the culprit, then I would take a look at the access logs to see if there were any irregular activities from search engine bots.

Lately, we’ve been adding more local news feeds to the site. Eventually, I want to have most of the major cities across the U.S. covered. What I had noticed since starting this local news project was that the more feeds we've added to the site, the slower the feeds on the homepage updated.

I finally had to do it. I stuck with Digg for as long as I could. It’s the first social news site. Even after the infamous version 4, I stuck with them.

A decent number of Digg's hardcore users had already jumped ship since v4. I was too lazy to do the switch - mainly because the headlines I saw on their homepage didn't quite fit those on Wopular's. Digg was still providing me with relevant and interesting 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.