StopPress and comments

Written By: - Date published: 5:13 pm, February 25th, 2014 - 12 comments
Categories: admin, humour, notices, The Standard - Tags:

Dolphin Over World 2010I did a email interview with Damien Venuto of  StopPress (an online advertising industry mag) a few weeks back. It has now been put up online if anyone outside of that industry is interested.

I’m in my usual pleasant, widely expansive and egotistical best with my beautific face beaming out at you*.

Previous articles in this series were interesting to read.

Umm I can’t have done too badly.  Our contact at Scoop emailed me without screaming how I’d made our site unsaleable. I must be losing my touch… I usually try to ensure that people always come away wanting to avoid any further contact. It helps with balancing time between home, work, family, and the blog. 😈

Incidentally, we’re coming up on 700 thousand comments (just over 696k at present). I think it will happen during the weekend. I’ll have to plan to spend some time getting some stats together for a 700k comments post. I rather think we’ve been accelerating since the 600k mark. Seven months?

I’ve also started to escalate the moderation bans heading into elections. So if anyone wants to troll on the site with mindless trash or to abuse authors, then don’t be surprised if you find your comments wind up in auto-spam until after the elections. Keep your contributions interesting so we don’t have to notice you when moderating.

For the techheads and geeks, the new server configuration (finished in January) now has a permanent database server and file server with their required backups. It then throws between one small cloud web server and fifty small cloud web servers paid by the hour at the task of servicing your reads and writes.

So far the peak has been seven web servers. So we have a lot of headroom for those poxy peaks of usage when stories break and the site gets flooded.  I do still get small clusters of error 500’s as servers go online rapidly. Mainly due to the database getting choked as it loads up pages for the first time and before it caches the queries. The fix for that comes next month.

This configuration is both cheaper and more flexible that going for the one or more larger capacity servers with the inevitable steps required in capacity.

*  Yeah right! You did read the categories I chose eh?  As far as I’m aware there are no public photos of me on the net. And as for my usual mood on the site, “pleasant, widely expansive and egotisical best”. If you really believed that I was trying to emulate some other bloggers then all I have to say is “suckers”….

12 comments on “StopPress and comments ”

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  1. Tracey 1
    25 February 2014 at 5:38 pm

    interesting stuff. especially those who dont know the standard as a baby.

  2. fender 2
    25 February 2014 at 6:06 pm

    That was interesting, but without a single swear word I’m not sure it was the real lprent 😈

    “On average they spend about seven minutes per visit, more than half will visit the site at least once per day, and a third will visit it more than 5 times per day.”

    And some have days when they hardly visit any other site whatsoever 😳

    • lprent 2.1
      25 February 2014 at 6:29 pm

      I thought that was only me trying to fit unmoderate moderation around coding and debugging. I put in the RSS feed on the right so I least got to see what the rest of the left/greens sites were doing.

    • David H 2.2
      25 February 2014 at 7:14 pm

      Well since I found it I find that the Standard is loaded before any MSM crap on my system. And it’s some sanity between Curious George, Donald Duck and Pooh that my 2.5 year old just loves

  3. swordfish 3
    25 February 2014 at 11:48 pm

    “I usually try to ensure that people always come away wanting to avoid any further contact.”

    Yeah, you’ve said in the past, 1prent, that having to be polite exhausts you.

    So, I’d suggest this is the song for you……..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18GBiJhI4Jw The Residents: ‘Act of being Polite’ (1980).

    The story of the song is essentially………A man falls asleep as his wife or girlfriend is talking to him at night. He wakes up, goes down stairs to find her angrily secreting something (probably a sharp weapon to take her revenge) about her person. He apologises and explains that he didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, it’s just that he was exhausted from having to be polite to her all the time.

    Which seems, you know, fair enough to me.

  4. Murray Olsen 4
    26 February 2014 at 3:12 am

    The Standard is the second to last site I open on weekdays and the last on weekends. I leave it until I’ve done my other stuff because I often get caught up in it and never know how much of my time it will demand on a given day. If I opened it first, I’d never get anything else done.

  5. Rich 5
    26 February 2014 at 4:45 pm

    It’s great that you guys are happy to run the site at break-even on a bit of advertising.

    I notice a certain centrist blogger has frequent fundraising drives couched in his characteristic super-entitled tone – and only posts two or three times a week for that (and usually a massive whine about how terrible it is that somebody was nasty to an acquaintance).

    Then again, the hard right don’t have to worry about fund raising: taxpayer cash for ‘market research’, bungs to post defamatory and stolen information and probably a few bags of cash under the table from the secret squirrels to boot.

  6. Frankie and Benjy Mouse 6
    26 February 2014 at 10:36 pm

    To quote “Lemmings” “careless clicking costs lives”. I almost lost the will to live reading a ….a….I think it was a blog that I got to from a comment on the Stop Press article. When I retraced my surfing and saw who had posted the comment the penny dropped. It was Pete George. It explained why the attacks on …everything were so deluded.

    • lprent 6.1
      27 February 2014 at 12:49 am

      It is an experience in the understanding of the mind of the deluded….

      Hi pete – I only write these so you can carry on your strange obsession…