Fall 2008 Review
November 2, 2008
September and October were both pretty great months. We did some re-arranging of our service systems and opted to change our backup system to Amazon Web Services for all our content as well as our database backups. This was something that we thought would be more beneficial than syncing the content across multiple servers at this level.
We introduced some pretty amazing functionality onto the Onvertigo service and decided that we would change the name to Onvertigo Social Network instead of Onvertigo Bloggers since the majority of our functionality is geared towards more twitter and facebook type things and blogging is just an added component. The functionality that we are running is through Buddypress and the amazing work being done on it now. We have officially launched to more members to test this functionality out and it is going great.
Traffic was considerably larger this month due to some promotions that we did for the WPMU plugin content as well as the new sites we launched for our private network. This isn’t going to impact the system at all as our cache and acceleration code is running perfectly.
We are still in testing beta mode for offvertigo.com which is our new “youtube” type service. It is a place for uploading all videos and audio from our members. We have it working really well, but not in a place to make it public past our beta testers for multiple reasons.
Looking forward to the next few months that will bring along some great changes and more fun for everyone 
Summer Review 2008
September 1, 2008
We held back on the review of July and decided that a review for both July and August would be more appropriate. We did quite a few things over the summer and traffic is getting larger on a monthly basis both in terms of pageviews, hits and unique visitors. Here are some of the things that we also worked with:
- Fine tuned our backup system adding even more redundancy. We are making more frequent database backups with the backups rsync redundant to another server. The entire server is on RAID now. All files and configurations are also backed up on a daily basis to Amazon S3 making our backup solution very tight for everything.
- We released the first BETA of our Onvertigo Media system which is much like YouTube. It is based off a software called phpMotion and really is great! We even have a system in place to get your videos off YouTube over to our system very easy so you don’t have to upload your videos again! Currently we are doing it on a “closed” basis, but if you are interested, let Trent know.
- Keeping up with the best functionality of WPMU, we have a complete copy of Onvertigo Bloggers working so we can test out the latest development releases and implement only the best functionality to our live site between releases.
- We still have a small community but have opened up the signup process to the public with only people that know me being able to answer the signup question. We also have several filters in place to stop spam signups keeping the site clean.
- For those of you that want your own domain name, we have a system in place that you can point a domain name to the server and add it to your blog for FREE! The domain registration is still there, but having a domain name on your blog on our system is 100% free.
- Added a Global Posts system where all blog posts will be added. All links are back to the original blog posts and it should help with people finding your blog content and keep everyone is the best position in terms of the search engines. It is at http://tags.onvertigo.com
- We have did away with the “upgrades” and “premium” services for now, but still appreciate donations to keep this service 100% free forever.
- We have added another 20+ “premium wordpress themes” that are not offered to my knowledge on any other blogging system. They were payed for in an attempt to keep this service more unique.
- Still in the process of adding a better stats system for individual blogs and will keep working on this
We are very happy with where we are on this system and hope to keep making progress. Thank you for your interest in Onvertigo Bloggers
June 2008 Review
July 2, 2008
My father is always telling me that “simple” is the best way to do anything. Over complicating can be an OK thing if it pays or is worth it, but simple is always the way. That is pretty much how I can sum up June 2008 in saying that we tried to simplify things.
The first thing that we did was make yet another move to a dedicated server as after great lengthy reading and discussions, having one server that has more resources is a better way to go than having multiple points of failure for the site with multiple VPS servers. It is also easier to manage. That is why we picked a beefy box with multiple cores, processors and more RAM than is required. We still have a VPS for testing and redundancy with files and databases so that our original strategies still are present.
In terms of our service, we also have looked at a more simple approach and took away all the things that might be nice to have, but were just not popular. This is turn also increased the speed of everything and we are a lean and mean machine again. We also introduced the newer WPMU code that has Google Gears to speed up your administration area.
Traffic was great again this month and we introduced a solution to have advertising that is geared towards those that are not logged in and not shown to regular visitors of your site. It should be a nice solution moving forward that is a great compromise to revenue to keep the service free versus upsetting users and their regular readers.
We have also turned off “user” registration on the service until we can find a better way to slow down the spam and unwanted registrations. All blog creation is available to existing users so you can keep making new ones! All new “user” registration will be done by myself manually and you can send requests to me through my contact form.
The social networking features that we plan on releasing will only be released when the “completed” releases of BuddyPress become available as it is too difficult to keep testing features on our production site and I don’t have the time to test them on our VPS. We want this service simple and bug free. That is the best way to do anything.
All and all, July looks like another round of getting the service even better and more important, simple.
Trent Adams