Blogs

You had probably noticed that the site was down for a couple hours on Monday and hadn’t been updated until this morning. I was on my way to the airport for Cannes and, of course, the site had to go down. It’s not my fault though. There server crapped out because of hardware issues, and my site had to be moved to another one. That took about three hours. Well, actually, it only took about half an hour, but I didn’t know the site was down and out until two and half hours later.

Yesterday, I had database issues. Today, I have computer issues. I started my morning off early today, and was ready to catch up with stuff that I placed on the backburner yesterday while trying to repair a corrupted MySQL table.

That didn’t go according to plan. I was about to start work, notice ASUS and Windows decided to do updates. I let them, and before I know it my mouse stopped working. Shortly afterwards, my touchpad stopped working too.

The site crashed yesterday morning at around 9am, although it’s hardly noticable until a couple hours later. I didn’t notice it until I started picking stories to feature on the homepage. Whenever i tried to feature an article, it would stop the site from loading up.

From that, I knew that the MySQL database must be checking for corrupt tables. And if it’s doing that, a crash must have occurred. Checking out stats at my ISP confirmed that the server was restarted at 9am.

In our current poor economic times when the government and businesses are having trouble balancing their budgets, we’re seeing them come up with some creative ways to derive additional revenue.

It seems like whenever cities need to balance their budgets, one of the first areas to cut is education. School districts have resorted to selling advertising on school websites. I’m all for it as long as the ads are clean and don’t offend any parents.

I’ve installed the All-in-One Sidebar add-on for Firefox for a while now. When I’m updating news in the mornings for Wopular, I open up over twenty tabs and Firefox has been corporative. A couple days ago, I’ve noticed that after opening a handful of tabs, the browser became unresponsive.

If you, like me (probably not), was wondering what happened to Kony 2012’s “Cover the Night” event, it happened … last Friday, April 20th. I did see a sign, and my wife claimed to have seen a sticker or two while we were driving, which prompted us to wonder if the event had happened yet.

Yeah, the event wasn’t all that successful. It didn’t cover the night, the night covered it. Most people probably have no idea if it even occurred.

Kony 2012 started with a sizzle, but did it end in a fizzle? It depends on how you look at it.

When Google first launched Google Chrome, I installed it and give it a test drive. I was fairly impressed. It had a super clean interface and was really fast. Pages rendered noticeably faster than Firefox.

Back then, even though I wanted to take the Chrome plunge, I couldn’t. It didn’t have all, or even half, of the apps I needed for web development and maintaining the content on Wopular.

It might have started a couple months earlier, but this is eerily similar to the summer of 2008 when gas prices were at record highs, which is around $4 per gallon. Back then, congress proposed a bill to regulate oil speculation, but nothing came of it. It was shelved when people fought back by driving less and using alternative methods of transportation, lowering gas prices to the point where it no longer became an issue.

I just noticed in the last couple of days that the sharing platform AddThis has removed “via @addthis” at the end of tweets using their widget. I use AddThis throughout the site. It’s a handy little widget that allows users to share articles through any social bookmarking/sharing site, like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest.

As a website owner, I use it to tweet articles to my Twitter account. I used to manually get rid of the “via @addthis” suffix each time to give me more available characters and to make the tweet cleaner.

The Arkansas Supreme Court turned down a law forbidding teachers from having sexual contacts with their over 18 years old students, citing constitutional rights as an adult.

The ruling was related to a case against David Paschal, a 38 year old Arkansas teacher sentenced to 30 years in prison for having a five month relationship with his 18 year old student.