Note From The Editor, Site Updates | featured news

Last December, Alexa launched a new feature on their site - demographics. It measures the relative age, education, and gender of a site's users. It also measures where those users are browsing a site from (home, school, or work), and whether or not those users have children which is an odd statistic.

FireFox 3.6 is officially released today. After 3.5's browser freezing problems which caused me to downgrade to 3.0, I was kinda reluctant to upgrade. I did it anyway, and to my surprise, it was as advertised.

My family and I just came back from a one-week cruise to Mexico. We were on the Mariner of the Seas and stopped at three places - Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta.

Look, it's a big muck shot of your editor. That's a caricature of me drawn by an artist from CPU magazine for an interview I did in 2005 regarding IGN's acquisition of Rotten Tomatoes. It's an interesting read, in light of today's announcement, because it talks about the struggles during the internet crash, the IGN acquisition, and the future plans for Rotten Tomatoes (and myself). Rotten Tomatoes has user ratings now, but still no critics matching, and film school for me is still being pushed back.

You may have noticed that Wopular was down for most of Friday. The database crashed and one of the tables was corrupted. It just so happened that it was the most important one. It stored all of the headlines and teasers. Yeah, why did it had to be that table. I tried repairing it, which usually was't too bad, except this time, it was.

I'm just starting to submit stories from my blog to Digg, hoping against hope that they'll get some Digg love and drive some traffic back here. So far, no luck. The only Digg love my blog entries get is from me - and ONLY me. But I noticed a nice side effect - articles submitted to Digg almost instantly appear in Google's search results. Nice! Sure, the link goes to Digg, but from there, potential users can get here. It's a good trade-off.

I was testing a couple of caching software to stablize the site. Wopular used to crash 3-8 times a day. I had thought the main culprit was mysql because whenever resources become low, there is a logjam of queries waiting to be processed. They eventually pile up and consume all available resources and crash the site. Since I was able to set the server to reboot whenever it's near the melting point I didn't mind it too much because it only takes about 2-5 minutes.

You may have noticed a search bar at the top the page. It's brand spanking new. It searches the top newspaper sites (CNN, NY Times), aggregation sites (Google News, Digg), blog search sites (Twitter, Technorati), and video sites (YouTube, Hulu) for any news topic and lays them out like a newspaper rack. Now, you can instantly get the latest news and buzz on any news topic. Here are some examples:

Barack Obama
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/barack+obama

Air France
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/air+france

The Tonight Show
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/tonight+show

Looks like I got all (or most) of the kinks worked out. The site's been pretty stable for the last couple of days. Yeah, I know, it's ONLY a couple days. Compared to crashing every couple hours (or completely out), I'll take that as very good news.

You may have noticed that the site has been pretty unstable lately. That's because I moved my site to another internet service provider.