Site Updates, Wopular | 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.

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.

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.

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 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.