Blogs

Look to the right of the homepage and you’ll see a new module called “Most Fed Articles.” They’re AP articles ranked by the number of times they’re being used in the top newspapers in the US within the last six hours. It’s a quick and easy way to see which AP news stories are most popular across the U.S. It’s one of the methods that I’ve been using to gauge which articles to feature as the top story, and now I’m making it available to you.

I’m working on a new site using Drupal on a LAMP environment. One of the things I want to install is APC - Alternative PHP Cache - for opcode caching. When I did it with Wopular, I’ve noticed the effects immediately. Because the site crashed so often before using APC, I had to have a script to automatically reboot the server, fixed db errors, and reload the site whenever server resources are used up. It works, but sometimes I would end up with a corrupt database and had to spend hours to days fixing it or restoring it from a backup.

I've integrated Facebook's Like Button and Like Box to Wopular's homepage and subpages. I don't think they're effective traffic drivers, but did it just to cover my bases; I think, in general, that's true for most small to medium sized sites. They're pretty easy to integrate.

I’ve finally replaced the MySpace button with Google Buzz across the site. In order to do that I would have to first create a profile for Wopular on Google. The funny thing was I had actually created a Google profile for Wopular a while back, but had forgotten about it. I only found out when the profile name was taken when I tried to create a new one. Unfortunately, I’ve also forgotten my login/pw for that original profile, but after a while, I figured it out.

I did some house cleaning over the last couple days with some feeds on the site.

I removed Bloglines from Search because the site's closing down in November. Ask.com, which owns it, thinks that RSS readers are going the way of the dinosaurs. That's not good news for me, but I'm just gonna chug along.

Digg v4 reshuffled some of its categories, so some feeds no longer work and had to be removed - Digg Travel, for instance. Same deal with Yahoo Buzz.

I did an Interview for IndyBizShow.com, a new business site focused on independent entrepreneurs. It’s created by Sean Saulsbury, the co-founder of BoxOfficeMojo.com. I talked about - what else - Rotten Tomatoes and briefly about Wopular.com.

The latest version of Digg - aka Digg v4 - is getting a lot of negative feedback from its users, especially the power users. They’ve lead a Digg Revolt by pushing articles from their rival, Reddit, to Digg’s homepage. Now, they’ve defaced the site’s comment system by littering it with anti-Digg comments.

So Digg has released a new version, and one of its new features is that it allows you to submit your RSS feeds and have your articles automatically dugg. It's a controversial feature because it has the potential to open up a can of spam. Anyway, I'm testing it out with this article. So far, it hasn't work, but I'll give it several hours.

EDIT: It worked. You just have to follow their instructions and wait several hours before pressing the verify button.

It was announced last March that this would be the last season of "At The Movies," the iconic show started by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. I read a couple articles on it, and for some reason, some writers blame Rotten Tomatoes.

So far, I’ve only heard of two people who are willing to pay for Twitter - Guy kawasaki and Roger Ebert. If you search on Google, you’ll probably find more, but those are the only two I’ve read about. They have one thing in common - they each have over 100,000 followers.