5000th post

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, March 26th, 2010 - 25 comments
Categories: admin, The Standard - Tags:

Sysop

We’ve now done 5000 posts. Number 4000 was at the end of October, so it took a bit less than 5 months (even with the dropoff during the summer break). The comments are sitting just less than 155k which is less than our long-term average. It is probably more a reflection of the kiwi’s disappearing into holiday mode off the grid in our extensive conservation areas (the Brownlee wants to mine).

I just had a look at how long the site has been running. It turns out that today is our 954th day of operation. Which means that we have averaging 5.24 posts per day during that period. With about 6.85 posts per day average over the last 1000 posts.

At 4000 posts, I commented …

But we’re going to have to do something about the layout. I’m pretty sure that I’m missing some of the posts because they’re scrolling off the page too damn fast.

Well that has happened. How are people finding the new layout?

For myself, I find that it is a lot easier to keep track of what is going through the site, because I can see a lot more posts in a single scroll. The authors are generally using the excerpts that display on the front page to good effect. The thumbnails keep the front page looking active. I’m amazed at the number of images that the authors find to tag their posts with (I’m still using my boring dolphin over the world for these admin posts).

The only thing I find substantially wrong with the new layout is the extra server loads. There are a lot more page views which makes the server work harder, so I’ve doubled the amount of memory at the server. As the primary server is on a virtual server, where the physical server is shared with other customers, the new loading is making the site more sensitive to their calls on the CPU – which caused us problems last week when something was chewing up all of the processing grunt. However the hosting company appears to have largely dealt with that. Eventually I can see us needing to shift to a dedicated server sooner rather than later.

I’m looking forward to the release of WordPress 3.0 at the end of April. Amongst other features it has the long awaited merge of the multi-site support into the main branch. This means that we can start to run more sites using the same base domain. I’m already thinking about running a techie site to deal with my other interests outside of politics – tech.thestandard.org.nz? Anyone got any other ideas?

Lynn

25 comments on “5000th post ”

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  1. prism 1
    26 March 2010 at 9:51 am

    Nothing boring about your posts, and your dolphin lprent. The site is so attractive with pictures which are amazingly good and sometimes drop-dead funny and now I have set up speakers I can use the video clips options. The Home page with thumbnails is good overall I think it is great.
    Not getting the 500 breaks any more at my end.

    captcha – sincerely!

  2. marty mars 2
    26 March 2010 at 9:57 am

    I have to congratulate you on the site. It looks great, it is easy to navigate and I’m a fan. Plus the posts have been especially good.

    Thanks

  3. Lanthanide 3
    26 March 2010 at 10:07 am

    I got a couple of 500/database timeout errors yesterday, once after I submitted a comment, so it disappeared into the nether and I couldn’t be bothered typing it out again.

    [lprent: Yeah I’m getting them on the odd occasion at present as well. They’re because the timeout on the site is still set down after I had those nasty server side CPU issues last week. I dropped the timeout because it allowed effectively dead processes to terminate earlier and not blow the RAM limits through accretion. I’ll turn them back up tonight. ]

  4. Andrew 4
    26 March 2010 at 10:21 am

    i mostly use the iPhone to browse the posts when i’m not at work. why would it be that some posts use the mobile layout and some use the standard (excuse the pun) website layout.

    captcha: “compilers” … he he, my msbuild script is running at the moment.

    [lprent: Depends on the caching and how I have it set. Login to the site and that goes away. Basically reading the site without logging in is considered by me to be the mark of the robot 😈

    I frequently shift a flag in supercache to on to serve anonymous users a cached version of the page if the new one is being created. This allows me to serve cached pages to the robots reducing the server CPU loading and allowing actual logged in people to get served the fresher pages faster.

    The only time I ever see the ‘normal’ page on my iphone is when I’m not logged in. ]

  5. r0b 5
    26 March 2010 at 11:04 am

    tech.thestandard.org.nz? Anyone got any other ideas?

    Make that “scitech”?

    How about “arts” for books, music, film….

    • lprent 5.1
      26 March 2010 at 11:34 am

      Sounds like an idea.. There are quite a few posts that I’d like to write but which don’t really fit inside of the political standard. More for tech geeks than political. On the other hand I really don’t want to admin multiple sites, especially with regard to themes and plugins.

      Looks like the MU when put into wordpress will get around that issue.

      Looks like I could also do it something like http://www.thestandard.org.nz/scitech calling a separate site.

  6. Julie 6
    26 March 2010 at 11:31 am

    That’s interesting about the iPhone – I have an iPod Touch and have been finding it frustrating to not be able to see the mobile version, but I’ll try logging in over the weekend and see if that fixes it.

    • lprent 6.1
      26 March 2010 at 11:37 am

      I turned the anonymous flag on a couple of weeks ago when I started getting hit by CPU outages.

      It is a bit annoying in that it looks at the anon flag before it looks at list of exclusions from caching – which are all of the smartphones that the system knows about.

  7. Rob 7
    26 March 2010 at 5:04 pm

    I do like the look of the new site but if I haven’t been on in a few days to open like 20 posts in new tabs can be a bit onerous.

    • lprent 7.1
      26 March 2010 at 5:15 pm

      I can’t see an easy way around it apart from reading it with a RSS feeder. It would have been a pain simply scrolling down that number of posts as well.

  8. Julie Fairey 8
    26 March 2010 at 6:45 pm

    Just logged in and can definitely use mobile now on the iPod hurrah!

  9. the pinkpostman 9
    27 March 2010 at 1:54 pm

    Its a great post and can only get better.I find it’s a change from the gobbledegookand Tory hornswoggle we are subjected to in most publications. Also a wonderful source of usable information in the fight against the Political Right and their allies. Long may it keep going.I wish you a long life .Mazel Tov,

  10. Tigger 10
    27 March 2010 at 2:57 pm

    I liked the new layout from day one. And the mobile site gets thumbs up (reading chronologically rather than by conversation makes it a whole new experience).

    • lprent 10.1
      31 March 2010 at 2:00 am

      It is pretty weird these days. Like reading something old like ummmm kiwiblog…

      The people that produce the plugin for the smartphones are heading slowly towards handling the threading. If they don’t get there, then apparently there is a mobile version for wordpress that will get folded into the main release sometime soon.

      Ummm time to go to bed. Fixed the display of superscript, subscript, and the alignment of centered images.

  11. gingercrush 11
    27 March 2010 at 3:15 pm

    A simple suggestion and while its not necessary it just seems to bug me when I want to read a whole post one of The Standard writers have written. Is that at the end of the short text have a “read more” button.

    • Marty G 11.1
      27 March 2010 at 3:36 pm

      yeah, we talked about that and our initial thought was the same. Francis says best practice is not to have it.

      Herald has it, stuff doesn’t, guardian doesn’t, nyt doesn’t

    • lprent 11.2
      27 March 2010 at 8:25 pm

      I’ll have a look at it (on 2G at present..). Does seem a bit redundant…

  12. Marty G 12
    27 March 2010 at 3:36 pm

    btw, you can click on the thumbnail image to go through to the full post too

  13. pollywog 13
    27 March 2010 at 5:44 pm

    Anyone got any other ideas?

    mediawatch.thestandard.org.nz

    …with sales of branded t-shirts, key-rings, mouse pads etc, to sponsor a ‘standard’ worst media awards – worst doco, worst paper, worst reporter, worst piece etc etc

    nominated by us and voted on by y’all 🙂

  14. lprent 14
    31 March 2010 at 2:08 am

    I was also thinking something on the lines of noticeboard.thestandard.org.nz

    As well as our authors, also getting a seperate wider set of organizing authors on that site to put up notices of meetings, events, etc directly. Probably get someone different to the standards moderators to moderate the posts before release (and I’m always around to be a BOFH). Restrict comments to logged in users possibly? And restrict those to activists who organize?

    Get it to hop into a new tab ‘Notices’ on the right next to ‘Comments’ and ‘Opinions’ on The Standard. We keep missing notifying about events that we should really cover. This would give a whole website available to the people who organize them (or get coerced into publishing the notices). For instance the anti-mining protest in Wellington yesterday..

    A lot of this gets done on facebook and other social media. But I suspect that it would be useful to have a place to link to more information from there. It’d also help by having a RSS feed out of it to go across a number of the activist blogs.

    I think that we have enough capacity for that type of addon now..

    Ummm, bears thinking about

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