This is my third blog entry since I started this whole process out, and instead of listening to some music like I usually do when writing these things, I’m sitting in Teamspeak listening to Dfg rambling on about freelance projects and porn. Occasionally, I find myself zoning out when he’s talking although I’m not totally sure why. I think it might have something to do with his strange voice, or the fact that I’m trying to write things for Totse at the same time as listening to his camel-talk. Whatever the reason, I’ve just set myself a few minutes aside so that I can write this week’s blog entry. Last week, I recall setting myself a template to work with when writing these things, so let me refer to that for just a second…
*Flicks open previous entry* Ah yes, now I remember!
CMS – Recent Articles, Updates and Issues
This week has been a fairly slow week for the CMS in terms of fresh content. Thewanderer has resigned from his Editor position and I’ve had a lot on my plate just lately, thanks to education and sorting out the rest of my life. However, there has been a few articles written which will be posted up to the CMS as soon as I have another spare few minutes (probably today, after writing this out). It’s a shame TheWanderer has left our editorial team as he was a great asset to us and worked very hard on keeping this place up to date with fresh content. Shame to see you go, brother. Thankfully, he’s sticking around on the forum and I think he’s still keen on helping us out in other areas.
On the other hand, I’ve been testing out some of the new SEO tools which we have in place on our article submission page. As an Editor, I am able to adjust all kinds of search-engine friendly settings, such as page descriptions, meta tags and titles. It’s pretty fun stuff, although very time/effort consuming! Oh well, I guess that’s what you need to be cut out for when you sign up for this job.
Finally, you may have noticed that Totse actually had some downtime a few days ago! This is because we exceeded our monthly bandwidth allocations by a long shot, caused by a spike in activity. I’m not actually sure why it happened, but looking at this graph, you can clearly see that our traffic levels are steadily increasing;
There were talks of it being a DDoS attack, but aside from the fact that our traffic is steadily increasing (not randomly), logs have also been inspected to check for strange activity. It’s nice to know we weren’t under attack 🙂
Forum – Recent Threads, discussions etc.
Just lately, there have been a few promising new members signing up to the site. I made a thread about this the other day, but I might as well mention them again as I’ve got my eye on them. My IRL buddy ThirdRockFromTheSun has also started posting more frequently, and recently told me that he feels “accepted” at Totse and that he “wants to help the site out” in some way. It’s really good to have this kind of dedication from new members, and I think that these guys will really help out if we steer them in the correct direction. I don’t have much else to say about the forum right now, except that it’s fun and is my main source of entertainment on the internet.
Anything Else?
Yup, I have a section for anything else which I feel like writing about. I might as well mention the fact that we’re working on the index page right now, in real time. Dfg and I, are actually sharing a Dropbox folder together so that we can work on code together. I’m not doing any coding right now as I’m obviously writing this blog entry, but I’ve got his work open on my screen and I can refresh it whenever he updates it. Very handy! So, expect a new index page very shortly. It’s one thing which we really needed around here, simply because as it currently stands, there is no consistency throughout the site. The index page is still using the old style, but that’s getting changed right now so that the whole thing looks nicer and works faster.
I also heard that we’re ditching the old Totse text-files, but we’re not going to let them go completely. I think a few members are backing them up, and are willing to host them on private websites or torrent files. I have no idea what we’re doing, but I’ll let you know in next week’s blog entry if anything comes up.
