Note From The Editor, Wopular | featured news

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.

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 did some house cleaning over the last couple days with some feeds on the site.

I removed Bloglines from Search because the site's closing down in November. Ask.com, which owns it, thinks that RSS readers are going the way of the dinosaurs. That's not good news for me, but I'm just gonna chug along.

Digg v4 reshuffled some of its categories, so some feeds no longer work and had to be removed - Digg Travel, for instance. Same deal with Yahoo Buzz.

I did an Interview for IndyBizShow.com, a new business site focused on independent entrepreneurs. It’s created by Sean Saulsbury, the co-founder of BoxOfficeMojo.com. I talked about - what else - Rotten Tomatoes and briefly about Wopular.com.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

Like I mentioned in the Ebert article, I've been testing out ad networks on subpages of Wopular for the past couple months. I don't want to put any ads on the main channel pages until I've settled into something; also, I want to reserve those pages for premium sponsorships.

On most websites nowadays, you'll see somewhere on the page, usually at the top right corner, links to the site's RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook fanpage. I've always wondered why MySpace, being the second largest social networking site by far, isn't on that list.

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.