smorg

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about starting a new site in the vein of TechPedia but dedicated to Mac articles only. I had the base idea of how I wanted it to operate, but I lacked a good name.

I struggled with it for a few hours when inspiration struck. Therefore I welcome you to visit my newest site: BabyGotMac.com.

Apart from being one of the more clever things I have come up with, it is also one of the most technically challenging sites I’ve done. Based on Wordpress, it’s quite flexible, but I’ve made some fairly intense changes to the base templates and plugins.

I liked some of the changes so much that I brought them over to this site and TechPedia. Not everything though, as some of the functions BGM needs are completely unnecessary on this site, in particular.

The idea is to eventually extend all of my info sites into a network of sorts. We’ll see how that goes…
:)

(Bonus points if you get the title reference)

Today one of my sites, Techpedia.org, got it’s digital ass kicked.

Digg.com is a very popular technology news site. Users submit stories of interest (not original content in most cases), and other Digg visitors vote them up/down based on the cool/usability/techy value of the site.

An article I posted on Techpedia a few days ago about Apples new OS, codenamed ‘Leopard’, contained some of the first publicly available screenshots of the new OS. Being at WWDC recently, i was one of the lucky 6000 people in the WORLD to get their hands on a preview release. I, of course, being a huuuuge geek immediately installed it and posted the screenshots and some commentary on my site.

Well, after a couple of days with a few hundred visitors, the Digg effect really kicked in, and yesterday and today we had over 50,000 visitors.

That’s not page views, my friends…that’s unique IP addresses. Yeah. More people than you, I and our familes combined know.
:)

So the server itself got its butt kicked. MySQL failed bigtime, as all of the screenshots were stored in the DB. Not the pics themselves, just the metadata for them and the filesystem references. But poor php, wordpress and mysql as a team were beaten down badly. OH, so badly.

At this point, I’ve created a simple html page with the images, and redirected all ‘real’ traffic to that page, to ease the load on the server and to alleviate the downtime for the other sites on this server. Sorry guys.

Anyway, it’s kind of a back handed compliment…I’m thrilled that my content is so popular, but at the same time, a little disappointed that only 2 of 5 visitors got to see it in context.

Ah well. That’s life on the internet, I guess.

Oh, if you want to see the content mentioned, check out: www.techpedia.org …if it’s up.
;)

Some choices from Saturdays WH Press dinner:

Mrs. Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Mr. President and first lady, my name is Stephen Colbert and it’s my privilege tonight to celebrate our president. He’s not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that’s not true. That’s [right?], but you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the “No Fact Zone.” Fox News, I own the copyright on that term.
…

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible — I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical. And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be it Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe [there are] infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.
…

Read the rest of this entry »

I did an overhaul on my side site, mcdev.com last night.

I think it looks great and am feeling pretty proud of it right now.

Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Hrrmmm..I think I finally found a decent, fast and easy image gallery to use.
Let’s see how this goes, eh?
:)

Take a look!