Hi Everyone, I’m Vid Luther, CEO and Founder of ZippyKid. We’re the new hosting company for TTAG. We’re a managed WordPress hosting company; we specialize in hosting sites that use WordPress. Over the weekend, you may have noticed some hiccups, and some changes. On behalf of Robert and the crew, I want to explain what’s going on . . .
Faster Load Times
The website should be loading faster. We’ve noticed an average page load time of about four seconds over the past 24 hours. Load times should decrease further as we make more changes.
As of 30 minutes ago, I’ve enabled the content delivery network (CDN). All the images on this website will now load from servers closer to you. Theoretically, if you’re in California the images will load from a server in California, as opposed to our main data center in Chicago.
Commenting System Overhaul
TTAG has over 145,000 comments and it’s growing fast. We’ve turned on the livefyre commenting system. Comments are loaded from a different system than the actual content. Splitting the load help keep things . . . zippy. It also enables direct conversations with people in the comments section. If you want to comment on a post by a specific person you can reply directly to his comment. You can even mention that person directly by using the @name convention, similar to Facebook and Twitter.
On the fly optimization
Sometime next week, we’ll make another change that may make the site a bit wonky for some of you. It’s called HTML Optimization, where we’ll do some things to make the website load even faster on your browser. (Sense a theme?) If you’re using Chrome we’ll make specific changes for that. If you’re using IE, we’ll do something else. On a mobile connection? We’ll optimize for that as well.
All of this is complex and definitely not fool proof. When we turn it on we’ll keep an eye out for abnormalities. We have automated monitors checking the health of the system every 60 seconds, but I’m also reading the comments to get an idea if there’s any system issues that the automatic check isn’t catching. Your help in the comments below and patience is most appreciated.
Closing Comments
I’m excited to be hosting this site. I’m new to the firearms community; I don’t [yet] own a gun but I’m intrigued by guns nd gun rights. I hope ZippyKid and TTAG will have a long and mutually profitable relationship, providing the Armed Intelligentsia with a fast, reliable and user-friendly service.
Would people be happy with Disqus perhaps?
so wtf is going on with the comment system here? it has completely reset at least twice. didnt anyone try this migration in a test environment, before taking it to production? are comments going to reset every 6 hours from now on?
hey we can finally edit again. can you bump the timer back to 15 minutes rather than 5?
I’d like to be able to post photos as I can on almost every other forum I visit.
There is nothing stopping you from linking to an outside photo in your posts. I promise you that if the rest of your comment is interesting enough people will click through.
There’s no reason that the comments section should allow inline photos. It just plays havoc with page length & width, site formatting, etc.
Other forums seem to be able to figure it out… and a picture is worth… but I can live with posting them somewhere else.
Other forums have run “show us” pieces instead of “tell us” pieces to attract a wider audience. There are plenty of photogs out there, and a couple of them are speaking to your opinion here 😉
http://kevinwalshphotography.smugmug.com/photos/i-5rx5msq/0/L/i-5rx5msq-L.jpg
Oh, and I liked the feature of Livefyre where I could subscribe or follow a post without having to click Confirm in an email every damn time. I clicked the box, I’m not real sure why I have to click Confirm in an email <30 seconds later as well. That's been a pet peeve of mine for as long as I've been posting here.
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