We've been Buysse
I have to tell you, there is very little that gets me as aggravated as having Velominati go down. Its like having kids kicking down my sandcastle when I was a kid, watching helplessly as your labor of love collapses right before your eyes. We’ve spent the better part of the last month with the site staggering like a drunkard between being online, offline, and painfully slow. Its no way to live.
I’ve been unhappy with our host for a while, but I’ve been reluctant to move on because of the risk in changing platforms and the downtime associated with such a move. But, as my VMH cleverly pointed out on Sunday afternoon while I was tearing my hair out, I might as well take advantage of the downtime to change hosts. So we did.
After a careful evaluation, I settled on a WordPress-specific host called WP Engine. All these guys do is WordPress, and their servers are tuned specifically to the unique loads this platform imposes. They are like the Classics specialists of WordPress hosts. To my surprise, however, once I moved the site and data over to their platform even they couldn’t accomodate it without getting some of their specialists involved. I had a feeling Velominati imposed some unique demands on the platform, and it was a bit cathartic to have them express surprise over the volume of data we have. The Rules in particular has such a high volume of traffic and posts (several million hits a year and 11k posts and counting) that it simply causes things to choke. They also helped me find some optimizations in the code that helped reduce the load on the servers.
Part of the optimizations include changing how the photo upload tool works; you can still upload multiple photos into your posts, but the album tool is dead. I built that myself as a way to share photos with my family before we ever launched Velominati; it was never designed to support the kind of traffic we have here. So DM Albums is dead. Let us thank it for its service and wish it well. A-Merckx. On the plus side, you can now add captions to any photo you upload, so that’s kind of cool.
Anyway, we got it all up and running and last night I poured myself a stiff drink and flipped the switch on the domain name to point to the new boxes. Words can’t express my relief when I woke up this morning and everything was humming away nicely. We’ll give it a day or so before posting up new content just to make sure we’ve got everything squared away.
Its great to be back; let us know if you notice an improvement in site performance or anything that doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Vive la Vie Velominatus!
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View Comments
Does anyone have even the slightest curiosity about the special edition bike to commemorate the Prophet's 70th birthday. It is steel and it looks awesome...
In honor of the Prophet's 70th birthday...
@Jay
$17,500 price tag cooled my interest somewhat...
@Mikael Liddy
Since there are only 70 being made and only 69 up for grabs I know that at that price I won't ever have one. However, it is an intriguing machine.
If money were no object, my order would already be in the queue...
@ChrisO
I think the longest time I've ever endured on a trainer is 2hrs, its the tedium that gets to you. I suppose I should be doing more of it as it's currently awkward to disappear for 1/2 day on the bike as my partner is not well and sometimes has to dash to hospital. Still on the plus side, I'm being made redundant and will have plenty of time on my hands in 3 weeks time.
@markb
That sounds pretty crap for both of you, sorry to hear it.
Really if you want to spend some time on the trainer get the Zwift app. It's still in beta testing and they aren't charging for it (yet).
I think the PC version is pretty open now, but the Mac version is still a limited test group.
Really helps to pass the time and you get to know people when you see them regularly, then chat on Facebook or the Strava club. They've based the virtual environment on a real island, so if you link it to Strava it shows as if you were riding around the island, and also who you were riding with. Very clever.
At the moment quite a few people are setting up group rides where they meet and do laps together, sometimes steady, sometimes racing each other for the climbs and finish points. They say the plan is to roll out more courses and options, and also to have races and competitions.
You need a power device, although they do have virtual power estimation where they can estimate power on certain trainers (expanding list) based on your speed, but that seems to be a bit dodgy. There are some guys doing impossible power and speeds using that. Still it's a way on if you don't have a power meter.
And the only other thing needed is an ANT+ receiver for your computer to receive the signal from speed/power sensor - they're quite cheap and just slot into your USB port.
Couldn't get back to earlier comments using the page numbers.
They link to http://www.velominati.com/v-announcements/v-announcements-were-back/comment-page-1/#comments or similar.
Editing that back to http://www.velominati.com/v-announcements/v-announcements-were-back/comment-page-1/ got me where I needed to go.
Of course I should say how lovely it is to have everyone back together again.
@markpa
Have been making some tweaks; the comment linking bit wasn't working right for some time...try cleaning out the ol' cache etc and see if it isn't working right now. If its not, please be more specific or friend me and message me there to get into the nitty gritty. You might be doing something I haven't thought of.
@ChrisO
Zwift looks like fun! have to have a play around with it.....
@ChrisO
Yeah, Virtual Power equations fall apart when you start comparing to other people. It's a fine method for tracking day-to-day individual progress (since all things being equal, more speed = more power on a trainer) but it's all, as they say in physics, "to a constant".
I have a friend raving about Zwift, using it to pass the time through the snowstorm we're having (SNOW! IN THE FUCKING DESERT!) and preparing for an Everesting in May. Cool stuff. I'm a Sufferfest man myself, keeps me motivated and on the edge of death - just set a new power record last week without intending to, and broke the W' algorithm. Gotta revisit the maths...