My project Feed The Gamer is already live, it’s been live for a good while in its current state and it’s already a household name. It’s recognized and has been approached by Shacknews among others to feature their content.  It’s running smoothly now, and seeing a lot of traffic and returning traffic.

It’s time to launch Feed The Gamer to new heights. Now, how do I do that?
Like any other business, one of the goals are obviously monetizing the business. Sure, that can and is being done by publishing ads, but for that to generate the money needed, Feed The Gamer needs even more readers and visitors.

More readers and visitors; that’s the key to a successful website. And to keep a website interesting, it needs constant work and perhaps renewal and new features from time to time. More prolific original content is also very much a factor of success. 

So, it all boils down to a need for more writers/journalists to provide the original content, and programmers to do the necessary work under the hood. The ones with a firm belief in Feed The Gamer and its potential, combined with a willingness to work for it for nothing more than gratitude and recognition at first, they are the hardest ones to come by.

If you think you fit, contact me.

I love Drupal. I’ve worked with it several times, and I still run a Drupal site.
Earlier today when browsing around the web, I happened to come across a discussion about Drupal, so I thought I’d go check out the latest Drupal 7 version. I headed over to drupal.org and downloaded the latest stable version.

After installing and setting it all up, I was very tempted and began thinking about maybe porting Feed The Gamer, that currently runs on Wordpress, over to Drupal. This will be one hell of a job, and not something I’m about to venture into straight away, but I might some time in the future.

The thing is: Drupal has a lot of what I need for Feed The Gamer already built in, while I have to rely on certain plugins and hacks for Wordpress to do the same. And, as those of you familiar with it, the more plugins, the more unstable a Wordpress site can get.

We’ll see what Wordpress can come up with, they might still convince me to stay with them. My main concern is the load that Wordpress can have on a server.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I still love Wordpress equally, but let’s put it like this:
I love Feed The Gamer more. 

I’m very much tempted, but I have to give this a long and hard think.
Planning will be key, and it won’t be easy.

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.