FOSSwire

Hey FOSSwire readers, Chris here (FOSSwire's resident manager) to tell you about the "Great Reader Survey of August 2007". We are growing faster than ever thanks to you, our readers, and we want to learn a little more about you. What distro do you use? What's your day job? Vi or Emacs? All these things help us focus our content more accurately.

Not only is this survey good for helping us determine the direction of the site, but you also get a chance to win free stuff! If you voluntarily enter your email address (which we won't ever release) at the end of the survey, you are entered for a chance to win a free FOSSwire T-Shirt! We will ship anywhere (I will personally make it happen) - so international readers are eligible too!

The survey will be active for the next week, and then we will pick a winner. Take the survey here.

Well, we're back now and the site is running fine.

I'd like to explain the cause of our downtime yesterday, as it wasn't the normal case of "too many visitors."

Yesterday, as visitors came flowing in, a programming glitch was the cause of our downtime, although the Digg article triggered the glitch.

The banner on the sidebar of FOSSwire.com (the Oratos banner) was a handy little applet that let you readers know what was going on in our network. Each time a page was requested, the banner script would pull in updates from YouMakeMedia, GizBuzz, and FOSSwire at the same time and display them on one page. However, it wasn't caching properly.

The result: Each time someone visited FOSSwire, they the server would fetch:

1. the FOSSwire page
2. the banner FOSSwire article
3. the banner YouMakeMedia article
4. the banner GizBuzz article

Since GizBuzz is hosted on the same server as FOSSwire, the server was serving three times as many posts as it needed to.

Servers don't like that.

So, we've removed the banner, and now everything chugs along just fine. The same downtime should not happen again on this site, and especially later this year around FOSSwire's first birthday as we make some changes.

Major props to our hosting company for helping us solve the problem and get FOSSwire back online.

Sorry for the inconvience!

Jacob

I was excited to get an invitaion to contribute to FOSSwire. I hope that my postings will be enlightening for all who read them.

I am an Ubuntu fanatic and lover of FOSS. Ubuntu is the Linux distribution that convinced me to switch to becoming 100% Linux at home. Along with being a wonderful distribution, Ubuntu has a vibrant and dynamic community, which I am proud to be a part of.

I spend most of my time helping as a staff member on Ubuntu Forums, where I also serve as the Forum Council Secretary. I am also a part of a wonder group of individuals that aim to spread the use of Ubuntu in the great State of Ohio, known as a Ubuntu LoCo team. The Ohio LoCo team is an official team of the Ubuntu project. I am also a mentor for the US LoCo Teams project, which helps new or struggling teams in the United States establish themselves and become approved and officially recognized teams. I am also a Ubuntu Member.

Thanks again for the invitation. I look forward to sharing my experiences in FOSS with you. :)