Ok, so this week has been like a ghost town here on Geeky Habitat and also on Secluded Habitat. I thought I should explain why. This is the extended and geeky version of the post which I have just put up on Secluded Habitat.
So the first thing that has been taking up my time will be one that is interesting for all of my readers that use Entrecard. For those of you who do not know what Entrecard is, it is a form of social networking cross advertising for blog authors. You will see to the right hand side of this post a little box with a yellow ‘E’ underneath it. This is the Entrecard advertisement widget that I have on my blog. When people visit they can ‘drop’ their Entrecard here to let me know that they have visited, and if they would like to, visit the current advertising blog that is above the ‘E’.
So now that I have told you what Entrecard is, there is a website that has been created with the top 300 fastest loading Entrecard blogs that have the Entrecard above the fold (i.e. you do not need to scroll to see it). The site is called PowerDropping.com. Recently the author of PowerDropping put out a request for assistance as he has found the site becoming too large to handle the maintenance.
So I set out on a mission to help out as I have loved the site thus far. I wrote a whole back end management system so that the submission, approval, and addition of new blogs to PowerDropping is now a lot more automated. The system I designed, while not all that graphically pleasing is quite functional and written in PHP with a MYSQL back end. This was my first ever attempt at working with PHP, and I have had a lot of experience with SQL through my development work I have done previously.
I wrote a system which takes the submission of a new site, and submits it to a quarantined table for approval, once approved the site is moved into the main ’site list’ table. From there sites can be disabled if they no longer meet the conditions for inclusion on the site anymore. All in all I have been finding it relatively easy to manage at this time.
I have also agreed to volunteer my time to assist in managing those submissions etc. So this week has been quite hectic with a lot of my spare time going to getting the site back up to date as it had not been updated in nearly a month.
Finally I have just moved my site over onto a new webserver which is more than twice as powerful as my old server. The old server was a single CPU Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2GB ram, the new one is a dual CPU Intel Xeon 3.0GHz with 2GB of ram. For you all this means you should notice better loading times of the site, and daily scheduled maintenance should no longer cause my sites to run slowly.
If any of you are interested further in the code I did for PowerDropping please let me know and I may do a post about it here.
Stuart 
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Stuart
