We’re so happy to be back in our own house that we forgot to mention that, yes, we’re back in our own house.
We remain incredibly grateful to our friends at NBC for giving us temporary lodging while we cleaned up yesterday’s mess.
Part of the problem is WordPress, which apparently wasn’t designed to service high-traffic sites. So we hope to be converting to a new system ASAFP.
Thanks for your patience. We’re fairly confident (i.e., we’ve got no f–king idea so we’re opting for blind optimism) that the site will run well through the weekend.
By The Way, We're Back
Posted by Mike Florio on April 22, 2009, 8:28 AM EST
28 Responses to “By The Way, We're Back”
Now that you’re back “home”, who won that copy of that book nobody wants?
Florio… WordPress services a lot of High-Traffic sites …
Your development team should be looking into different plugin solutions for items like stat collection and banner ad services as those are the likely culprits to choking your setup!
Regards …
A Geek who is NFL O.C.D.
Is Terry Bradshaw your web guy?
Florio,
My organization specializes on system integration technologies that could be valuable to you guys. Have a member of your team shoot me an email if they are interested in having a conversation, I know I would be interested in learning more about your problems and seeing if I can help.
I hate it when the site is down because I might miss a wonderful write up on White or Ivy so I will do anything in my power to fix the problems. Lets go….. Mountaineers!!!!
Regards,
B.
PFT got debacled by WordPress!!!
Dude – pay your friggin’ bills!!
I am a fellow wordpress man myself. I can definately tell your site gets much more traffic then mine, but realize that blogs.nfl.com is also a wordpress site. I have to assume they get about the same as this site here. WordPress can handle it, the problem probabaly lies in your server company. Sometimes they put restrictions on crazy things that you dont know about. You might (A) just need more server space. (B) need to increase the ram that wordpress defaults you to be able to use on your dashboard. (C) increase the amount of gigabites that you can upload onto your website.
Just a few things I am thinking of.
maybe your hamsters need to make the positive list.
Welcome back, Mike. When’s Suzy Kolber going to crash on your couch?
@Michael LaRocca says:April 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 am
<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
Cool … Joe Namath can use the internet & he’s smart enough to go by an alias …
…sorry Michael, couldn’t resist!
FLORIO … ZUKNY is close on his suggestion …
You need more bandwidth and more RAM & processor power.
Overall though the problem is NOT WordPress … it’s the extra items & yes a little bit with the server setup.
WordPress should be fine. But Jesus you guys need a new graphic designer.
This is what happens when hamsters skip the involuntary workout program.
good..the NBC site was a bit too professional looking
I agree with PKep85, when are you gonna announce that my witty comments won me a year supply of toilet paper?
Like others said, WordPress runs tons of high traffic sites. You should fire whoever told you it didn’t. They’re likely just trying to squirrel out of fixing the actual problem and will instead try to sell you new stuff that they claim is better for a really high price.
Could not agree more eatyourguitar… I am a Creative Director with over 25 years of design experience and your site has been dreadfully BAD for years. Florio you would not know design if it smacked you in the face. You probably like the new Pepsi logo. No design sensibilities. Design is money. Invest in design and it will have a greater return than Morgan Stanley (who, BTW, is not a free agent out of Penn State). Please, upgrade your servers, pay your freakin’ bills and hire a Great Designer FULL TIME. Then you just might get some respect from Madison Avenue.
It’s not wordpress dude. It’s the plugins. The app itself has pretty good scalability. The guys who wrote memcached, which is like scaling pixie dust, did it originally for wordpress. You’ve got too much crappola and doodads. Also, if you were to roll your own cms-style blog you will still have to figure out how to get the same functionality your current plugins do. And that means custom code. Done by guys who don’t understand scaling already.
My suggestion? Go static for the draft. And selectively enable comments on a per article basis. And drop as many of the plugins as you can, even at the expense of losing advertising, until you’re satisfied you’ve got the bare minimum required to address the needs of the draft. And while you’re doing all this, get a test environment up and pound the shit out of it to resolve the issues with the plugins that are crapping out.
Just my advice. And hey, I only singlehandedly wrote one of the most widely used loyalty card services frameworks used in Canada, what do I know.
“Could not agree more eatyourguitar… I am a Creative Director with over 25 years of design experience and your site has been dreadfully BAD for years. Florio you would not know design if it smacked you in the face. You probably like the new Pepsi logo. No design sensibilities. Design is money. Invest in design and it will have a greater return than Morgan Stanley (who, BTW, is not a free agent out of Penn State). Please, upgrade your servers, pay your freakin’ bills and hire a Great Designer FULL TIME. Then you just might get some respect from Madison Avenue. ”
Boom. Roasted.
Florio, there are several problems.
1. Obviously you’re still trying to do this on a shoestring, someone needs to step up the funding.
2. You need a real IT guy on staff or outsource it, but get some IT help because these problems are easily fixable
3. I wholeheartedly agree with “eatyourguitar” & “offsidespenalty” that the site design in dreadful. It reeks of the 1970′s before there was even web design. The redirect to the NBC blog site yesterday reinforced just how bad your site design is.
The site content and the writing, expecially your humor, and the poster comments are excellent. Perhaps those are reasons you were named one of TIME.com’s 50 best websites of 2008.
There comes a time in the growth of a start up that some changes need to be made to take it to the next level.
The good news is you got this far and you’re quite successful
The bad news is: Now what the hell do you do, to take it to the next level? It’s really not that difficult to figure out how to grow this thing. You can do it.
@Brewster
Can I hire you for WebDevelopment Sales!?! … Extremely well put!!!
The “Designer” comments from others are true, but a Designer is not a Developer and beyond that inlies the issues of interaction with Developers and IT …
No offense to the Designers … You guys are right, he needs help there, but he’s looking at getting a site operational that goes to a different area.
Maybe you should talk to the folks at WordPress about getting into their VIP program:
http://en.wordpress.com/vip-hosting/
Get some freaking steroids for your hamsters! Geez!
Everyone already stated the “IT’S NOT WORDPRESS” thing, so that’s covered. And the bit about Pepsi’s logo was amazing, glad to see Madison Ave agrees with the small time boutique studio owner on that one, I would have thought big time CDs would love getting millions for doing nothing and rationalizing it all with a 30 page brief, but I digress.
Really what I would suggest is that you contact the people at WordPress, or even Matt Mullenweg directly. They love their platform and will bend over backwards for a site that utilises their platform and gets high traffic. The NY Times runs 50 blogs on WordPress and always raves about how great the relationship is, you should even look at their VIP hosting program that they use for a ton of CNN blogs (and many of the others mentioned), if it’s good enough for the silver fox…
here’s the list of all the majors powered by WP: http://en.wordpress.com/notable-users/
I agree with the VIP program: if it works for LOLCATS, it can work for PFT.
However, I disagree with those who dislike the site design. Sure, it could be cleaned up a bit, but “rough around the edges” is part of the fun. This is a tabloid site (which I mean as a compliment), not a slick news site. The design reflects that. Form follows function, and branding is more than a logo. You’re doing fine there.
I agree with the VIP program: if it works for LOLCATS, it can work for PFT.
However, I disagree with those who dislike the site design. Sure, it could be cleaned up a bit, but “rough around the edges” is part of the fun. This is a tabloid site (which I mean as a compliment), not a slick news site. The design reflects that. Form follows function, and branding is more than a logo. You’re doing fine there.
Just to echo .. “it’s not WordPress” .. I personally think it’s all the JavaScript-based ad-whoring you throw on top of it .. but Zukny offers sound advice as well. The problem could be in your server’s capacity/configuration or bandwidth deal you have with your hosting company. Sounds like you need to upgrade – especially if you plan to continue all the aforementioned ad-whoring.
-b
Don’t lie Mike…You were taking a dump again just like last week when you missed the Big O and Dukes show.