As most of you know… we had severe down time last week that presented a challenge unlike anything we’ve experienced to date. I want to go into that in a bit, but first, let me address the communication failure.

As the site administrator and owner, it’s my responsibility to communicate with each of you when something as significant as this happens. While I wasn’t personally aware of the “source” of the problem for several days, I understand it is my duty to let you know what is happening and I failed to do that properly.

Where the communication went wrong

Unfortunately, we haven’t kept a list of emails for blogivists. I’m not really sure why we never went through the database and did a proper address export, but the fact is… we never did. So, because of this, I didn’t have your email addresses when we were hit two weeks ago. I had an old list, but constant contact gave me problems because there were a LOT of bouncebacks and spam reports on the last blogivists message we sent out. That list was scrapped.

In short, I had no way to make an announcement. Like you, I couldn’t get into the site, and I couldn’t get email addresses from it either.

By the time the problems hit critical mass, we were getting pummeled by emails about blogivists and just couldn’t keep up.

But the reason is not really relevant at this point. The result is. And the result is that we didn’t properly communicate with you, our bloggers, and this caused a lot of problems within the community.

For that, I personally want to apologize. You have my word… it won’t happen again.

The problem explained

Running a website as large as blogivists is no easy task. And, unlike organizations that are well funded and overstaffed, we’re an all volunteer team with zero funding. We pay for the servers that host blogivists out of pocket, and when a huge problem comes along, we have to pay developers to fix it. I’m not suggesting that we’re not capable of getting problems solved, but I will admit that solutions to problems as large as the one we recently experienced will take longer to find for us.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’ll always eventually be able to find the solution.

Anyway… so over the past few months we’ve seen a tremendous rise in spam blogs. At the same time this was happening, our volunteer staff was dealing with several large scale campaigns such as TaxDayTeaParty.com and a few other time consuming efforts. A few weeks ago, when we were at our weakest with regards to time dedication to blogivists, the site got hit with thousands of spam blogs.

The spam blogs were being created so quickly that it eventually overwhelmed the server, shutting down the entire system. Allen Fuller had to immediately freeze the site to get the database interaction and memory use under control before the server would/could be damaged.

This is why everything went dark. And this is why we couldn’t access anything.

The solution

First, we had to get a bigger server with more RAM. The blogivists database is so large that the site will require an entire server just for itself. So we had to pay for a brand new server, and buy extra RAM, before we could bring the site back online.

Allen Fuller and his team, with the help of Lennie Jarratt, carefully moved all of the data over to the new server, and we believe the site is finally starting to stabilize. There are still some slow moments and there may be a few glitches here and there, but we’re working on them and we hope to be running smoothly soon.

The future

We now have a brand new server that is fitted just for blogivists. We’re currently having a custom design built for the new homepage, and we’re going through to delete all spam blogs and implement new spam fighting features.

Also, we’re hoping to be able to hire an intern who can work with the community and help us know what needs to be changed/fixed/implemented.

It was unrealistic for us, as volunteers, to assume we would be able to manage a large community like blogivists as a 100% volunteer effort. We understand this is a problem, and we’re trying to work out a few ways to address the situation and make sure we’re better positioned for system problems moving forward.

I hope you’ll continue blogging with us here at Blogivists.com. Please know that even though there have been some challenging times in the past, we’re working hard to make things better and strengthen the community.

-Eric Odom
Blogivists.com

Enough is enough, Sheridan. I asked you on your wall to knock it off and you still haven’t. I do not like McCain, I will not support McCain, and I certainly will not be joining any of your spammy Facebook groups.

Just sayin…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY E.M.!!!

Who is E.M. Zanotti?

E. M. Zanotti, the American Princess, is, as she is so oddly described, a 25-year-old overeducated, overopinionated, politically conservative relapsed Catholic, technogeek, “crunchy con” and member of the legal profession. She has served as the editor and lead writer of American Princess since its inception in 2004, and alternately as a freelance political journalist, columnist and talk radio personality (go figure). Her work has been featured and/or maligned on National Review Online, the Washington Post, Salon.com, Slate.com, BBC World Online, AOL News, Netscape News, The Huffington Post, Say Anything Blog, Lew Rockwell, Right Wing News (where she also serves as a perpetual guest blogger), Hot Air, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang Politics, Ms. JD, TechRepublican, TechPresident, GotDetroit.com, RightMichigan, and Wonkette (among numerous, less hip others). She can, occasionally, be found on television as the “token conservative” on various CNN programs and on Michigan public television.

She is a Detroit (yes, that Detroit) native, but currently an Ann Arbor resident, and has all of the necessarily pretension and apathy that that address requires (as well as the requisite love for film, art, ethnic food and indie music), only she has to hide it because she consistently votes Republican. In her spare time, she shops for shoes, reads non-fiction (particularly on philosophy, economics, religion and political science), plans cheesy vacations involving large fiberglass objects and obscure museums, and researches Disney history. No joke.

That being said… keep an eye on ConservaBlogs.com for CPAC updates.

Thanks to the paperwork coming through, I’ll finally be able to make some of the changes around here that I’ve been wanting to make. I’m pulling all of my blogs into one single place, which is the main domain here at FreshVisionMedia.com, and I’ll be moving my consulting business to this site.

Lot’s of changes coming…

So before we get it all underway, I want to plug my social networks and give everyone a chance to connect in. I’ll also be listing the bloggers who I read daily via RSS.

Networks

-Stumble (sorry, I had to open a new account today because my old one was a complete mess)
-Digg (I don’t really use Digg much anymore, but I still have an active account and will Digg stories from time to time)
-LinkedIn (ericjodom@gmail.com)
-Facebook (I’m VERY active on Facebook)
-MyBlogLog

Daily Reads via RSS

-impNerd
-Blog About Your Blog
-Blogging Notes
-Hack Wordpress
-Me and My Drum
-ShoeMoney
-Inside Facebook
-All Facebook
-The Make Money Online dot net
-Lorelle
-Mandarin Musing
-WP Candy
-Road 2 Blogging
-Blog Perfume
-Linkfog
-Jeffro2pt0
-Self Made Minds
-SEO Noobs
-Wordpress Publisher Blog
-Blue Verse
-Guide to Blogging
-The Blog Entrepreneur
-Ari Shohat (BIG fan of Ari’s DigitallyImported.com)
-Caroline Middlebrook
-ThinkBlogger
-Internet Babel

Yes, it’s true that I don’t have many “A-List” feeds. To be honest, I’m tired of reading most of the A-listers. They spout the same stuff over and over again and I find it much more refreshing to read through the “smaller guys”.

Also, this is only a small percentage of my feed collection. I chose to publish this list because the above bloggers actually blog daily and maintain that pace with regularity.

So, a big thanks is in order for all of the blogs mentioned here. You guys/gals have provided me with tons of good information and I very much appreciate the efforts.

Keep it up, and have a great 2008!

-Eric Odom

Last night we reported a tip that Yahoo has created a list of 1,500-2,500 jobs that may be cut within two weeks and that Jerry Yang will make the decision to go ahead with the layoffs–or not–this week. We have now received additional details from the same source, who has been reliable in the past.

The decisions appears to be based on poor stock performance.

The decision to go ahead with lay-off is said to be largely dependent on stock price: Yahoo’s stock trading in the low $20s has gotten Jerry’s and president Sue Decker’s attention. Jerry will feel vulnerable if the stock goes into the teens and will try whatever he can to prop it up. He’s not ready to give up the CEO job, sell-out, or shop the company around at this point.

Ouch.

The original logic was sound, I believe, but proved to be far more time consuming for myself as well as my readers.

Why did I try it? Well, it’s worked wonders for my political site, ConservaBlogs.com. Over at CB we have more than 20 Wordpress installs running on the same domain and server. Google is LOVING having each independent site with a different political niche on its own install. Each blog also has its own sitemap, and the search engine traffic is constantly on the rise.

In fact, it’s fairly safe to say that we’ll be breaking 90,000 unique visits per month over at CB from here on out. Time and time again I’ve posted a page that went on to outrank BIG sites like RealClearPolitics and ABC News within a matter of minutes. Some of those keyphrases brought an instead 900+ unique visits.

So in theory, I was going to try and replicate that model. But the flaw is that here at FVM, I’m the only blogger. Meaning, I personally have to populate all of the blogs with fresh content, and those of you who like to read what I have to say are forced to track feeds for multiple blogs.

Not very user friendly.

So, after getting an e-mail from a long time friend this morning which basically rebuked me, rightfully so, for trying to run this site like CB, I decided to spend some time today restructuring the entire site.

It’s a bummer because I just finished getting a design in place that I liked and was ready to work with. But it is what it is. This will be much better moving forward.

While the timing was bad because I had just finished up installing and customizing a new look and feel, it was good because the guys over at Daily Blog Tips just cranked out a great “earth tones” theme that fits my needs.

I think I’m going to stick with this one. I just finished importing the posts for the other blogs, and I’m currently cleaning up the category mess it caused. Once I finish that, I’ll start shaping the template to fit my needs and get everything up to speed.

This is good news for all of us. For me, it means I now only have to post to one blog here at FVM. For you it means you only have to follow one feed to get the goods.

I hope this helps. And I’m sorry for all of the confusion. It’s being sorted out.

AOL could have learned a lesson from that move, but it looks like they decided to ignore it. As reported by Tech Crunch, AOL is Beta testing a new portal design for it’s site.

I guess someone over at AOL liked Yahoo’s portal design and figured they might as well copy it and use it as their own.

Yahoo’s design.

AOL’s new design.

Tech Crunch noted:

AOL says they are building best of breed products, not simply copying things from Google, Yahoo and others that are proven to work and porting them to its less cutting-edge audience. In the past year, though, we’ve seen them largely copy digg and then release a new mail product that would have been awesome two years ago but which stacks up poorly to the current versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Shameful. Is it THAT hard to do something different when you’re a huge corporation?

I use a LOT of icons so this will be a perfect tool for me. The problem, however, is that when I went to use it for the first time, all the results came up with a “site suspended” error message.

The owner of the site says that the front page Digg story knocked him back a bit, but he should be online in a few days.

If he can get this thing up and running and out of beta it should be a winner in the design realm.

I then followed it up with a couple more posts, including a post with the “official” response from the Sitemeter team.

Before we get to Shane’s post, let’s take a look at Sitemeters response.

The chatter in the blogosphere has gotten to the point that we feel we need to go outside of our company blog and set the record straight regarding the SiteMeter utilization of the specificclick.net cookie. We have not addressed any comments in the blogosphere directly until now as we have made an official post on our own blog regarding this matter and have responded to every single email inquiry made directly to us via email and updated our privacy policy.

The problem is, Sitemeter NEVER posted anything about it on their blog. Shane says on his blog that “If they weren’t concerned that people know what was really going on, they’d post it clearly on their blog for all to see.” So true. If you have nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?

And Sitemeter’s post gets worse.

In addition, many of the Internet’s biggest web publishers utilize Specific Media’s technology including Foxnews, CBS, NBC and Time.com.

Well first of all, two wrongs don’t make a right. But put that aside and you still have the Sitemeter team comparing apples to oranges. The sites mentioned that use Specific Media’s tracking cookie’s have them on THEIR OWN SITES. They do not install them on YOUR websites.

That’s what we’re on about.

Anyway, Ask Shane has, by far, the best post on this that I’ve seen so far. I highly recommend you pay him a visit and read the post.

Screw Up? Don’t Try to Hide

Enjoy!