Smutish was always kinda the black cheap of the family, kinda weird design, no real purpose, it was a experiment left abandoned to itself, still people seem to like it and wanted more, so after a bit of tweaking its finally something pretty cool, its still the same posting cute naked people, but now its simple, clear and way faster and with HUGE picture sizes hehehe, enjoy!
Huhumm, new site, its called Luz Portugal, and of course its about Praia da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, its kinda a portal of sorts, i know there are a couple of sites kinda like this, but i wanted to make one that is nice to look at and nice to use, mixing helpful information and funny and interesting things about Praia da Luz, hehehe cool humm.
Awwww, its a site about kittens, and yeah i know kity.org isn’t quite the correct spelling, but i don’t care, and yes its supposed to look like a sickly sweet eye candy orgasm! haahah its wonderful, guaranteed to lift anyones spirit hahahaha (or at least mine hehehe) ^_^
Oh this is funny, remember when there were like all this influx of buttons to save/post/share/like and then came the aggregation buttons, like addthis and addtoany or sharethis, all of this was a freaking drag on webpages and i was never a big fan, cause they weren’t really very useful, sure 1 or 2 people might use it, but the vast majority doesn’t, and why make your pages load like shit just to make life better for a couple of visitors?
Most people that use delicious have and use other ways to bookmarks, users of stumbleupon probably have the bar installed, so there wasn’t any point, that is until facebook started with the like buttons, those seemed to be way more practical and a stronger promotional tool, same goes later on to the tweet buttons and now the google plus button, so we are back to the same problem, although the buttons are more useful and practical its still at least 3 or 4 hits to different places dragging your own pages down (ohh and the tweet button is kinda the worst of the bunch).
That is were addthis comes along and just adds these buttons to their standard setup, so now instead of all those hits you are just hitting the addthis site, add to that asynchronous loading and you are pretty much having the best of both worlds, adding to this the fact that i dont need to hardcore parts of the template or some referral on the buttons to make them work properly, makes addthis even more practical, so expect some more buttons popping out of s2r sites hehehe.
Well it goes a little like this, i wanted to create a gallery for buriko, cause even though i love updating buriko with cutie japanese girls, it was kinda a drag for user to search on it and find the girls they wanted, so i decided to create a gallery for buriko, however that proved to be a bit tricky and weird, when i wanted something easy and simple ^_^
Sooo like a lot of my sites, this one is a spinoff of a shortlived buriko remake, its a simple and easy to use japanese idol gallery, its called gomenasai (means “im sorry” in japanese), anyone can register and upload their favorite girls and well browse away ^^ its simple, easy and cute, i hope everyone likes it hehehhe.
As a sidenote buriko will focus now on single posts and high quality images (its going to be a mix of automated crawling and random posts) ^_^ enjoy
Yeah more wordpress plugin talk, but since 1/3 of all S2R sites are powered one way or another by wordpress, its kinda something i deal with, so why am i moving away from the caching wonder kid W3 Total Cache to the old school WP Super Cache, well mostly after a few weeks of testing, i found that although both do a excellent job there are some basic strong points and weak points on both of them:
Soooo, what does this mean, first it means both are really good, but also that even after a lot of tweaking and reading a lot about its settings, its still a difficult process to push W3 Total Cache to use its potential, i have several different servers with different software running (Apache and Nginx, with different plugins and caching addons), and W3 Total Cache kinda feels a bit hit and miss, sometimes its wonderful sometimes it isn’t, while the “Keep it Simple Stupid” approach of WP Super Cache always brings good performance.
Also the fact that i tend to make tweaks and improve the code and performance both of the sites and server, WP Super Cache kinda gives me the best combination of rock solid performance and ease of use, while with W3 Total Cache i have to worry about a lot of different things to have it work properly, so therefore im moving away from W3 Total Cache to WP Super Cache ^_^’
S2R > Humm got a new donations page, better contacts and slightly better txt.
Hostcult > Hey hey its this site heheeh, just added some like facebook, twitter and such buttons, for easier promotion and likability, also cleaned up and added a bit to the contacts / about page.
Fiendish > Cleaned the layout, added random quotes, for moar awesomeness ^^.
Neechan > Merged the requests board into the main board, plus some tweaks with performance, should run super smooth now ^-^.
We all know backups are important, if shit can happen, shit will happen, they are important both online and offline, but if you are hosting a site or several sites, its important to have a backup strategy, that’s why S2R created the 3 Tier Backup System (sounds way more exciting than what it is):
1) Hosting Provider Backup System
2) Offsite Backup System
3) Local Backup System
With a three tier backup system, it might look a little paranoid, and you might take some time and money to build it, but now that its done, its easy to add new sites and the peace of mind it gives is priceless, and now i can eat right in front of the computer hahahah ^_^
Ahhh nothing like autumn to get you inspired, well not really, muhahaha, still lots of new shinny things to come from the nice folk at S2R:
Expansion of the S2R Network, yep new sites, a bunch of them are coming, while most are well in Portuguese, and some are revamps (like panchira), there will be some niceties all round, both in new sites and oldies ^^
Much Improved Hosting, performance is always something we aim for, S2R’s hosting is now spread through the world, well mostly around the US of A, in places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando and Kansas City, but in the UK and Netherlands as well, so i hope most, if not all sites will have better performance, we will also be rolling out support for CDN, for extra performance.
On the home-front, some upgrades on some of the computers (so expect faster website building muhahaha), but mostly my custom multiple TB backup system, so all my sites will have 3 layers of backups, from my hosting provider, from an off-site backup and finally to my new backup system, AWESOMEEEE ^_^
Yep yep, kudasai had a major improvement, that’s how i like to do it hehehe try stuff out and keep improving, partly because of some complaints, partly cause it had some not so user-friendly “features”, so here are some of the improvements:
Well i ordered a new box and found out that it was running Apache 2.0.63, a very stable version of Apache (still used by lots of webhosts), but since like a year ago, i’ve moved to the 2.2 branch, so to decide what was the best choice i decided to do some testing between both version to choose, humm performance wise?, and yes i know 2.2 is much better regarding speed, but performance is not just about speed, so i just installed one and then the other, did some tests and let it run for a full 24hours midweek (cause weekends the traffic drops a bit)
So what are the results, interestingly enough… im gonna make some charts ^_^
Average 24h CPU Load (Restricted to 1CPU)
Average 24h Memory (Restricted to a total of 1GB)
Average Requests of File Types
Ok charts are cute but were are the numbers? well there isnt a point or need really, since the site hosted (and test files) on the box are not a perfect benchmark of Apache’s abilities, this should be considered above all a real world test, than a well measured test, but we can take a conclusion out of this, just looking at the charts, Apache 2.2 branch does seem to perform faster than the Apache 2.0 branch, although that performance increase is traded by a slightly higher cpu and memory consumption (about 0.3% memory increase and about a 6% CPU load increase ), hummm i can live with that, 2.2.15 WIN! hehehe, besides newer software has a tendency to bring better performance and security, and in the long run thats always smart thinking.