Technology, Site Updates | featured news

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.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

I knew Yahoo Buzz was one of the “sunset” sites - properties that would be shutdown by Yahoo. I still kept it on the site, but moved it to the bottom of the homepage. The quality of the articles being voted up have been on the low-end months before its eventual demise was announced; sometimes, you even get spam. The site had also been redesigned to its bare essentials.

Last Thursday, Google launched a new tweak to their search algorithm. It was targeted at content farms, which many consider to be spammy sites whose content are created solely to attract search engine traffic for specific keywords.

I do notice more and more of these sites on Google’s search results. For me, the main offender is ezinearticles.com. Most of the articles I get from there are completely useless. They’re just keywords being repeated over and over again with a bunch of fillers. I can see why Google wants to push those sites further down their search rankings.