The BlogShares Blog

I've spent the last two weeks in California, visiting with Jay and checking out the area - it's fantastic, I hope to move here very soon. During the visit, I had the opportunity to visit the hosting facility for Blogshares, and snap a photo of the old database box, shown here. In case you didn't know, it's a Quad PIII 550Mhz with 4Gb RAM and 10K SCSI disks with RAID-5. It's served us well, handling up to 900 queries per second when the spiders were running flat out alongside the website, but it's slowly failing. Not to worry, due to your contributions, soon this old box will go on easy street.

No, we haven't purchased the new one yet - this is taking some careful planning and execution, going for a balance of future security while not compromising on components. We're gonna shell out for a 3 year 4-hour response warranty out of our own pocket, on top of the community donations, to make sure that in the unlikely event of a hardware problem, we can get it sorted quickly. The hope is we'll have a box on order within the next two weeks, we'll keep you informed of any news.

Cheers!

Addendum: While doing some Java today, I'm reminded of a site that has helped me immensely in the maintenance and growth of the spiders, as well as our other projects, yet I've never given it props. It's Roedy Green's Java & Internet Glossary, a useful resource. Thanks to him for the help it's brought me.

Posted by Suburban Wolf at 11:15 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)

We are continually overwhelmed by the generousity and kindness we see every day by the BlogShares community, and as you may have noticed, that generousity has paid off big time for the BlogShares site. Yesterday, after numerous donations from a wide range of players and anonymous donors, our fund drive for a new database box was completed.

You did it.

You, the players, have come through stronger than we could ever have imagined. This wasn't paid sponsors or advertisers or corporate investment, this was a diverse, wide-spread group of players who have given and given strongly. Thanks to your donations, BlogShares will soon have a more powerful box for the database, which means more features, faster pages, and greater flexibility in the game.

This is no small feat. You have given over $6000 in less than one year's time. To say we are blown away would be an understatement. We are incredibly thankful for your donations, and we look forward to selecting a box and getting it online for you as soon as possible. How can we possibly say enough 'Thank You Thank You Thank You'. We'll keep you up to date as we go through the process of selecting and installing the new box, and it will be our pleasure to do so. Best wishes and our eternal gratitude to everyone who contributed in any way to this fund drive, and we at BlogShares look forward to spending time each day in this community that you all have built as a unique, welcoming, generous, and positive Home on the web. Cheers and thank you, all. We can't wait to see what you will do next!

Posted by Island Dave at 09:51 AM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (6)