I’m good friends with EiKON Games and The Return Fire Podcast founder Mike.
So, last night I sat listening on the live recording of the show, and I was hanging out in their IRC channel, all while drinking some a lot of beer and some Dooley’s.

Mike and co. go about their usual business, chatting about recent events and releases in the gaming world, when they decide to have the listeners call in.
So, I did. While being not sober on some a lot of beer and Dooley’s.

Here’s The Return Fire Podcast, episode 39 - Wasps Knees

The increase in Feed The Gamer’s readers and subscribers hasn’t come to a halt yet. It’s almost becoming a problem now, albeit a luxury problem.

The servers are being absolutely hammered at times, and all the resources are being maxed out on the server resulting in crashes and errors, so I’ll probably need to combine another upgrade with the acquiring of a Code-Ninja to come on board and help out with some deeper optimization within the core.

I’ve taken every optimization step I can think of to reduce the stress: caching, minifying, hardcoding and asynchronous loading, which have all helped very much considering how snappy the website now functions, and how much reduction there’s been to the entry processes. But still there’s a great deal more that can be done when someone with some ninja coding skills takes a look at other areas that are out of my knowledge and experience. Help is wanted!

If you’re reading this, and you’re a fan of Feed The Gamer, and you’ve got the ninja skills I’m looking for, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a chat. I’m easy to find.

Feed The Gamer’s user numbers have exploded in the last 4 days.
We’ve seen a doubling in traffic, and way more social media interaction.

However, as awesome as that may be, more concerns emerge in my head as I’ve also noticed the the load on the server’s memory and database connections are maxing out what the site can take. What’s more worrying, I don’t know what’s causing it, I don’t know the source, nor do I know where to begin to look for the source of what I think is a bottleneck somewhere. Not yet, anyway.

I’ve begun the process of hardcoding a lot of stuff that I know is making a lot of unnecessary calls to the database just to output the same I’m now hardcoding in. As far as I can tell so far, it’s helped take the load of the server a little. Now I just need to optimize some of the scripts, and start stripping out code that’s been kept for future use, but hasn’t been used yet. And I’m not even sure most of it would ever be used.

The site is cached and compressed. Almost a full 80% compression by gzip, so that’s most likely not an issue I need to worry much about.

I probably shouldn’t worry so much, though.
If there’s anything I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I always find a way.

I’ll find the culprit(s) eventually. 

Next up for Feed The Gamer is to totally revise the Facebook page.
So far we’ve gone through the extremely tiresome and tedious process of deleting every single aggregated feed ever published on the page.

The plan is to develop a better page, and point the main focus to our original stories, rather than the aggregated feed. On a social media outlet, the aggregated feed will be so overwhelming it will just be considered spam. We’ll of course include the feeds and headlines somehow, but just not spammed on the wall. Besides, we have the main Twitter account taking care of the aggregated feed.

Now comes the designing (as much as Facebook allows you to, that is), testing and approving of some new designs, where one will hopefully make the cut.

As you may or may not know,
I created, own and run the gaming news site Feed The Gamer.

I’ve got some names on board as writers, which gives the site some serious leverage.

Grant McMaster, author of Metro 2033: Britannia, and Luke Dicken, a Games AI researcher and contributor to #AltDevBlogADay.

Feed The Gamer started out as a tiny blog, built by myself, for myself.
It was just an idea that came to mind, as I couldn’t find what I was looking for around the interwebs. So I simply decided to create what I couldn’t find.

A few weeks passed after I made the site live, and I started noticing more and more traffic. I thought to myself that as long as you do something right, there’s always going to be someone around to take notice and visit the site from time to time. Little did I know however, that the traffic would increase so much that I had to start working on the site close to every available hour, just to keep up with what I started seeing as demand.

More and more traffic, and more and more emails. Emails stating, demanding even, that Feed The Gamer needed something more. So I started writing the odd original article for the site myself. But, I found myself again needing to spend every hour keeping up with maintaining, structuring and even writing to keep the wheels turning. I went to Twitter, and asked for help. Which brings me to my mentioning of the two writers above. 

Luke came along and brought his own style and thoughts to the table. He gave Feed The Gamer the lift it needed, and he gave the readers what they demanded. After his joining as writer, it’s safe to say that he helped Feed The Gamer establish a household name. Without going deeper into details, I’ll leave it at saying that Luke proved to be more than I could ever hope for.

Grant came along a few months later, a close personal friend for many years since before Feed The Gamer was even an idea. After finishing his novel Metro 2033: Britannia, he shared an interest in writing for Feed The Gamer and I immediately grabbed the opportunity welcoming him on board. That decision was golden as Grant’s article and reviews are still to date among the most read collection of words on Feed The Gamer.

So, why share this?
Well, that’s easy: I have a lot to thank these two for.

If it wasn’t for their involvement then I don’t believe my little project would have reached the level it has today, or should I say: so far?

Thank guys. I owe you.