still recovering from the big digg

Callum Hanlon (producer/7159)

Hey everyone,

Thanks to all our new producers who have been joining! We have already raised over $500 today, and have over 100 new producers since we launched. This is totally amazing, especially considering the site crashing, etc.

Something else that is happening is that a lot of our 'founding producers' have been adding to their previous amounts and moving up our credit list. This wasn't easy to do before, so it's cool that many of our producers are chipping in again. We will be working on some way of displaying all the activity going on in our site during our next rounds of web development. But just having the automated system up and running is amazing.

I talked to our programmer today (Jason Salter), and we have still not completed the new adjustments to our site to optomize it for the increased traffic. pair Networks generously donated another server, and we received really excellent consoltation from some Drupal masters, so we have a pretty good idea what to do. for the geek producers it involves optomizing the Apache server by removing the extra Drupal modules that are being called to unnecesarily for each user. This is causing the system to have to work much harder than it needs to, as there are a lot of Drupal modules we aren't using. Once that is done we can calculate exactly how much of the server each user needs, and then set a limit so that our servers will be dedicated to an equivalent amount of users- if we get hit by another traffic spike, new users will not get service temporarily, but existing users will continue to be able to use the site wihout it crashing. Basically, our existing producers will get priority. It's amazing how complicated technology is. who thought of all this stuff? it's fun to pretend to understand it and to figure out ways to use it creatively.

So the current PLAN is to stabalize the site before we pursue another big press push. Meanwhile, some press is picking up our project on their own. Check out this nice little write up about T1SF online: http://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=15163 .

I also got a call from an LA tv show, and we will be taping an interview on Tuesday. Once the site is really stable, we will start hustling.Until then, it's great to see the site starting to come to life and to check out all the new producers, profiles, perfect moments, etc.

If you are having any problems with the site, please let us know. Post a comment in our forum or contact us.

best to all,

n