User pruning
Hey, short note – I went through the users and did some nuking of dead/inappropriate/impersonators/multiple account holders/and so on. Hopefully no actual, active accounts got caught, but as always with this stuff… if that’s you, apologies in advance.
Bonus: anyone who can offer me a reasonable explanation of why the most-duped account was “Chet Masters” wins a month’s free subscription to USSM.
New Readers, Comments, and Moderation
As you’ve probably noticed, USSM continues to grow, and especially lately, we’ve seen an influx of new readers and commenters through widespread references to the site. To those of you who have recently found the blog, welcome. We’re glad you’re here and hope you stick around.
However, when we experience significant growth in a short timespan, inevitably, we attract some folks who aren’t aware of the groundrules for being part of the discussion here at USSM. So, this post will serve as a primer for the new guys and a refresher for those of you who have been around awhile.
The beer thing
If you’re curious – when I had the beer thing running for a couple days (and again very briefly this week) we got 45 beers out of it. Thanks much to the <1% that hit us (and by us, so far I mean “me”) with three dollars to enjoy a refreshing beverage — USSM pledges that your support will be funded directly into the purchase and consumption of suitable beverages for the authors.
The beer button
About that beer thing: I was playing around with plugins on Friday and threw that up for a minute to play with, Russ Hausman immediately hit it, and I cracked up laughing. Since then, ten others joined him, and I bought decent beer last night for the first time in ages (beer turned out to be more expensive than $3, but whatever, right).
Now, I don’t know if asking for random small amounts randomly for a specific purpose is more effective, or really how we might get any amount of money out of USSM, much less make a delicious living at it, but in terms of random experimentation, that worked out kind of nicely and made me grin last night while enjoying an Anchor Steam.
Third Place Books next Wednesday
Hey everyone – next Wednesday, the 30th, is the rescheduled date for my appearance at Third Place Books. 7pm. Their event calendar is here. Please do come out, it’s always nice to hang around with USSMers and hopefully the team will be on a terrific tear and we’ll all be in good moods.
Wacky fun fact: the next day features two local science fiction/fantasy authors, Kay Kenyon and Louise Marley. Marley wrote the short story “Diamond Girls” aaand a nice review of the Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, over at Amazon. I thought that was kind of cool.
Kaboooom
That was fun.
I have to admit I don’t know exactly happened: between tweaking the database settings and the web server settings, something went horribly, horribly wrong, and I got to watch the box spin out of control over and over… and then I’d restart it, it would take ages to shutdown and then reboot, it’d look good, then go horribly horribly wrong… oh, it was great. I feel like I’ve wrestled a bear for a couple of hours.
Anyway. Apologies.
Patches. Patches welcome.
Known issues I’m working on are in that box on the upper-right. If you have a complaint, right know we’re offering two choices:
– Patches welcome
– Say nothing until the to-do list is complete
A patch is a fix. Anything that doesn’t include a fix is not, right now, welcome.
Here’s what that means: let’s say you hate, hate, hate the new template, and you send me an email that says “I hate the fact that the titles are blue, they should be military grey, or ocean grey, or some grey.” At some point, if I have a chance between reading the other 90 emails on this stuff, this will cause me to stop and grind my teeth a little. Or you comment in a thread that you don’t like thing x, which may well be on that to-do list. Equally annoying. We’re trying to get things fixed, and that is not at all helpful in any way.
Actual assistance, though, is quite valuable. We need patches, actual ways to fix things. We do not need suggestions at this point, no matter what your background or what degrees you have or self-assessed opinion value may be, and if that sounds like I’m a little snippy because I’ve gotten a lot of these, it’s because this gets really old really fast. If you send an email that says “Hey, to get the banner right, set attribute whatever to value whatever” it’ll get fixed, and probably pretty fast. If you want it changed to ocean grey or military grey or back to ocean grey, and someone else sends me an actual fix that turns it orange, they win.
Also, see the previous post on this.
But really: patches are welcome. If you’re not coming to us with a problem and a solution, you’re contributing to the problem and actively keeping us from solutions. Stop.
Template upgrade tonight
Hey all, it’s going to be a weeee bit wonky as I get this thing up and chugging along. Please be patient, we’re working hard at USSM Labs to get this righted as soon as possible.
If you’d like to see a better color scheme, layout, or whatever, patches are welcome. Please don’t just complain – I need help a lot more than I need to hear that we suck or whatever.
Also, and I can’t stress this enough: this is not my strong point. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to. So help, or leave me and the people who are helping alone.
11pm update: well, that’s a night’s work. The to-do list is on the upper right-hand corner.
USSM scalability and general geekery
During the first inning, I got to see load go from 1 to 15 to about 60, and then stay there for four innings. At one point, I actually blocked new connections for a while until the load dropped, then let people back in — and it jumped back to 60 again.
As Dave says, there’s got to be a solution for this. But I haven’t found it yet. So if you’re interested in another one of these technical wonkery threads, read on.
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USSM slowness and geekery
I spent about two hour during today’s game when things were really bad working on making some more performance enhancements, but I’m still worried about tomorrow. I’ll keep at it – getting this right is really tough, frustrating work. Also, please buy the book k thanks bye Read more