Last week I saw all this talk about RPadholics Big Blak and N8R throwing down in Mortal Kombat. From what I understand, this has yet to happen. What’s going on here?!? Is BB suffering from injuries (like the rest of his Boston Red Sox)? Is he ducking N8R like Floyd Mayweather, Jr. is ducking Manny Pacquiao? Or is it merely a scheduling conflict? Kindly take today’s poll and voice your opinion on the matter!
[poll id=”132″]
– After a horrific August with AnHosting, site performance seems to be solid again. If you notice any issues, please let me know. Traffic is up again and hopefully the next few months will help improve the site’s ranking. It took a major hit in August because of the constant outages. It’ll take some time, but I’m confident that the ranking will rise again. I’d love to get the Alexa numbers back under 100,000.
– You’ll notice a pretty significant change to individual posts. I removed the social buttons that are native to this WordPress theme and replaced them with a small toolbar at the end of each post. The change improves the load time of individual stories and improves functionality. The new toolbar is simple and implements several popular services. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon buttons are present. The new toolbar makes it super easy for you to share any RPad.tv stories that you like. Play it with it and let me know what you think (please)!
– I did have a question about the toolbar placement. One of the options is to leave it floating on the left-hand side of each individual story. It’s much more noticeable, but in my opinion it crosses the line to the obnoxious side. Leaving it at the end of each story is subtler, but also easier to skip. What do you guys and gals think? Do you like the toolbar where it is? Would it bother you to see it floating on the left-hand side?
The site has been on a new server since 6PM PDT on Friday. Most of you know that I’ve been having terrible problems with my crap web host. This is the second server move in two weeks. I’ve lost count of how many service outages the site has had in the last month. The good news is that things were mostly stable over the weekend, but I’m curious to see if I can go a full week without problems from my crap web host.
If you notice any site slowdown or are getting errors (I’ve seen 502, 504, and 520 errors in the past), please let me know. Either leave a comment here or send me a message through the social network of your choice. Hopefully the ridiculous problems are in the past!
AnHosting has managed to botch the site’s server migration for the fourth time. This is beyond ridiculous. The numerous service outages of the last two weeks and the multiple failed migrations have been stressing me out. I have a bunch of other problems, but I’m paying AnHosting for the pleasure of this one.
Let’s rewind a bit. For the site’s first 15 months, AnHosting has been mostly excellent. Service was solid and consistent, no matter what kind of traffic the site was getting. 2011 has been spotty, especially since April. The last two weeks have been pathetic. The company is in the process of migrating all of its accounts to a new server facility. Due to my numerous service outages, I was promised early migration twice. That never happened. My scheduled migration never happened. The late migration I was assured of never happened.
Here’s the latest entry on my (really long) support ticket (opened on 7/26/11):
Okay, my account has not been migrated to the new server. This is partly hilarious and partly frustrating. To review:
8/3/11: James Griffiths offered to migrate my account early due to performance issues. This did not happen.
8/5/11: Josh Howard offered to migrate my account early, but this got messed up and the account remained on the old server.
8/8/11: This was when my migration was scheduled to happen, as per your migration date tool. The account remained on the old server.
8/9/11: After reviewing how ridiculous the sitation had become, Adam Croshaw wrote in ticket #25511570 , “I have talked with our technical team lead and he is making sure you are taken care of.” The account is still on the old server.So two early migrations were mishandled. The scheduled migration didn’t happen. The late migration didn’t happen. How is this acceptable?
I commend you for finding new ways to irritate me on a daily basis — (multiple) botched migrations, (multiple) service outages, bizarre account suspensions, etc.
Now will somebody please live up to their word and do what they say they’re going to do?!?
Please excuse me while I wait for my daily service outage….
On the plus side, everyone that I’ve dealt with has been polite and courteous. I was also given two months of free service for my troubles. Still, I am so frustrated by what has been happening with the site for the last two weeks and AnHosting’s inability to rectify the situation. I’m pretty sure AnHosting is the primary reason why I’ve had headaches, stressed shoulders, and new gray hairs in the last week.
Thanks for reading this self-therapy blog-post!
– After struggling with my web host on a wide variety of issues, RPad.tv has supposedly been moved to a new data server. Allegedly, performance should be much better. Things appear that way at the moment, but I’ve had so many problems with this web host in 2011 that I fully expect an outage next week.
– Having said that, I need your help beating up the new server. The site will take a few seconds to load the first few times you use it, but after caching is back in order it should be zippy. If you are experiencing any sort of slowness, please leave a comment with the issue, your operating system, and your browser.
– This might be tempting fate, but I’m going to attempt to use a new beta service that should make the site load faster, improve my page ranking, and improve my search result placement. I hope to have everything set up and rolled out this weekend. Let’s see how it goes.
– I’ll be mailing out the Ghost Recon beta keys this weekend.
– I’ll also be randomly picking the winners of the Activision superhero windbreakers.
– Thanks for your patience with the numerous site issues and, as always, thanks for hanging out!
Please join me in congratulating RPadholic bsukenyan on his recent wedding. That’s fantastic news! May you and your lovely wife have decades of happiness together. Please post some pics when you can!
Hey you guys! I’ve missed you a bunch while I was in Hawaii. It was a fantastic vacation — one of the best and most relaxing that I’ve had in years. I just had an incredible time attending…
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, Derek Jeter’s incredible day, CM Punk’s awesomeness, or KiMO Bean extra fancy Kona, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Hey you guys! I’ve missed you a bunch while I was in Hawaii. It was a fantastic vacation — one of the best and most relaxing that I’ve had in years. I just had an incredible time attending my brother’s wedding, catching up with family, and seeing all sorts of stuff on Oahu.
Obviously seeing my brother get married and spending time with my parents were the best parts of my trip, but my favorite “quiet” moment was hanging out at Lanikai Beach in Kailua. It was amazing — clear water, less than 20 people at the beach, smooth sand, and a brilliant view.
Before I get to today’s question, I wanted to give major thanks to RPadholic smartguy for sending me Twitter messages when the site was down and when it went back up. It was annoying to deal with during my vacation, but I super appreciated the heads up. I was able to clear things up relatively quickly thanks to smartguy’s alerts (though I still want to punch my web host in the face).
As I settle back into mainland USA, I want to hear about some of your favorite vacations. My head is going to be floating to Lanikai several times today, but perhaps hearing about some of your awesome vacations will bring me back to Los Angeles.
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I hope everyone is having an excellent Fourth of July weekend! I’m still scrambling from last week, trying to finish up a bunch of odds and ends before I take off to the airport in a little over four hours. I’m not sure what my schedule is going to be like in Hawaii, but I’ll try to post a few stories every day (barring any injuries caused by giant waves, erupting volcanoes, or Da Hui). Now onto the housekeeping items!
– The comment system appears to be working nicely. There are some little quirks every now and then, but I haven’t encountered anything too major. If you do, please let me know and I’ll ask support to look into it.
– Last week was actually a fantastic week to fight with different comment systems. Although comments and comment-related traffic were down while I experimented with Disqus and IntenseDebate, I got a lovely traffic spike from this Rosie Huntington-Whiteley article. Thank you Transformers 3!!!
– I’ve added a Google +1 button at the bottom of each article. If you like something you’ve read, please click on the button. It should help the site get a bit more search traffic and it’s much less effort than posting one of my articles on Facebook/Twitter (although I super appreciate those of you that do!). Actually, even if you have tepid feelings about one of my articles, you should click the Google +1 button. Ha!
Be good guys!!!
After seven attempts, the IntenseDebate comment system is finally implemented across all of RPad.tv! It appears to be working mostly well. The only two problems I see are 1) the mobile version can’t display comment counts and 2) the links in the “recent comments” tab on the right don’t go directly to the comment. Disqus also has the first problem, but doesn’t have the second issue. I can also use the “top commenters” function of Disqus too.
A few things to keep in mind:
So what do you think?!? Do you like IntenseDebate? Or do you prefer Disqus? Perhaps you want to go back to the standard WordPress comments? Please, please, please let me know. I will go with the system that you guys and gals want. After learning about Disqus and IntenseDebate, I’m confident that I can make them both (mostly) work for the site. If you want me to change system, should I do it this weekend while traffic is slow? Please keep in mind that I’m flying to Hawaii on the 4th. It should be a smooth transition, but there’s always a chance that it’ll break and I’ll have to fly off before I can fix it.
Please take the poll and give me some reasons for your choice. I’ll look at the poll results, but also pay very close attention to compelling arguments made in the comments section. Like Captain Planet always said, “The power is yours!”
[poll id=”123″]
It looks like the IntenseDebate comment system is mostly working. I’m still having a bitch of a time importing the old comments; I’m on attempt #6 and it has been stuck at 87% since 5:00AM. Hopefully that will get sorted today. Once that part is done, I’ll be able to fix the other settings so that the new comment system works on the mobile version too. I’m not positive about comment counts on the mobile site though. Now for a few tidbits:
– You’ll notice two new elements in the right sidebar. The first one is a new “recent comments” view. I think it’s pretty neat. Please let me know what you think.
– The other new element is the “top commenters” box. I’m hoping this will be a fun feature that will keep everyone engaged. The top spots are determined by the number of comments posted and the number of “thumbs up” ratings given. Please give each other props for comments that are entertaining, insightful, and fun. Please don’t give me any thumbs up ratings. I want this to be all about you guys.
– You’ll also notice that I’ve taken down the Amazon ads on the site. Unfortunately, California just passed a new Internet sales tax law and Amazon has decided to cut off all of its affiliates in California. This really sucks for me. I was finally getting to the point where Amazon was paying for my groceries. I wasn’t making enough money to live on, but it was helping. Now it’s gone. Hopefully I can find an adequate replacement. Perhaps Best Buy’s affiliate program will accept me…or one of you has discovered a rich uncle that wants to make a donation or purchase 1,000 RPad.tv t-shirts. Ha!
