I have just put a ticket in with my hosting company for an upgrade to the “semi-dedicated” package.  I am hoping this will significantly reduce load times for your blogs.  There may be brief loss of service while the switch is made, but the results should be well worth it.

Thats right, there are only four days left until the CCP Sponsored Crazykinux blog banter competition kicks off.   To enter, all you need to do is write a blog post on the following subject:

Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why?

Get your thoughts down, but DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR ARTICLE UNTIL THE 30th of June.  Save your post as a draft and post it when the competition a starts.

Here is a quick reminder of the prizes:

1st place: Gurista’s Hoodie

2nd place: Poster (winner chooses 1 amongst 3 different posters)

3rd place: EVE Mug (winner chooses 1 amongst 4 different mugs)

Honorable mention: Keychain Bottle Opener

Building on the success of his last EVE Blog Banter, with over 40 participants, Crazykinux decided to spice things up and have a little contest for this next banter, which is sponsored by CCP.

Contest Starts: June 30th, 2009 – Ends: July 6th, 2009 (end of day) :: DO NOT PUBLISH BEFORE!

Email Crazykinux for details: crazykinux[at]gmail.com

For those of  you who are unfamiliar with blog banters of the past, the format for the competition is quite simple.  You are given a topic to blog about, and you write as much or as little as you feel you need to.  At the bottom of  your post you link all the other participants, which will be available on crazykinux.com.

Articles will go live on the 30th of June. You’ll all have a week to participate by posting your article and emailing crazykinux its title and URL before July 6th, end of day. Once all the articles are in, these will be listed at the end of my article, as they always are. The deadline this time though, will be thoroughly implemented.

The judging will be done over the next few days, with the results being announced on July 13th, which should give the 3 judges sufficient time to read through all the articles (hopefully!). The judges in question will be none other than Richie “Zapatero” Shoemaker (EON’s Editor-in-Chief), James Egan (Writer and EVE Online Game Lead at Massively), and by Crazykinux Himself.

1st place: Gurista’s Hoodie

2nd place: Poster (winner chooses 1 amongst 3 different posters)

3rd place: EVE Mug (winner chooses 1 amongst 4 different mugs)

Honorable mention: Keychain Bottle Opener

What might the subject of the next EVE Blog Banter be you might ask? Read on…

“Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith “WebMandrill” Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?”

You may have noticed some server issues earlier in the week.  This is due to the unprecedented popularity of podlogs and the sheer number of visits we have been recieving.

We don’t have that many downloads or large images, so bandwidth is not an issue.  The problem is with CPU overload.  Measures were taken to speed the service up, and without going into too much detail a Cache system was put in place that makes a static html copy of the dynamic php pages and serves them out instead.  This has reduced the load by around 30%, and the scary “overheating” message was replaced with “semi-high” usage.

I had hoped that these measures would buy me at least a week or two, but by the looks of things I will need to upgrade to a semi-dedicated or a dedicated server this weekend.  This will take my bill up to either $35 or $99 per month which I think we can all agree is a big step up from the $8 I am currently paying for my “unlimited” shared hosting.

I will be able to foot the bill of this for the first couple of months, but if advertising doesnt start paying off a little better there is a real danger of the service either getting closed, turned into a paid service or perhaps even sold (to someone else who may or may not make it into a paid service)

What can I do to help?

Funny you should ask that! There are a number of ways you can help keep this a free service.  

• If you like the look of what the banners burried within the stories are selling, click on them! These actually pay out quite well, and could be podlogs salvation
• If you were thinking of buying an eve boxed set, but it through the podlogs/amazon affiliate store.  I get a small commission on all sales, I also have a few eve books and many other games listed
• Donate.  Yes, I know that you all signed up for a free service… but some of you might be feeling generous!  There is a paypal donate button on the right hand bar of this site, please  use it if you like this service!

Podlogs Store

Buy the eve boxed set for only £17.99. You get 60 days of playtime and if you are thinking of making a new toon, you also get a shiney limited edition shuttle.

Podlogs has managed to attract a lot more readers far more quickly than I could have anticipated.  As such, there is the possibility that I will shortly have to upgrade to a dedicated server.  This new server hardware is likely to cost me in the region of $60 a month, which I think you will all agree is a rather hefty leap from the $10 per month I am currently paying for my unlimited shared hosting.

I would like to keep podlogs as ad free as possible, so to achieve the level of service I know you all deserve I have set up an affiliate store with amazon.  If you buy from my store (and please, only buy stuff you were already thinking of buying) I will recieve around 5% comission.

Please do not make me resort to google ads!!

Lots of love,

Eddie Gordo

Podlogs is experiencing technical difficulties as a victim of its own succsess.  I dont want to bore you with the details, but the hits have been so high that I have been forced to try a more advanced caching plugin.  

Unfortunatly though the process of installing it is somewhat tricky and there may be a temporary loss of service (for example, at the moment none of the images are currently working)  I will either get this working or revert things back to their original state ASAP.

Have installed a nifty new youtube plugin. All you need to do to include a youtube video is to include the whole url as you would normally, but instead of putting http:, you put httpv (or httpvh for high def)

Check out the example below..

A rival blogging site called myscribe has been hacked, which you might think I would enjoy. But let me tell you that I don’t find it funny in the slightest. Especially when my site is used by name!

Whoever did this has tarnished my reputation with the eve community, probably forever.   I have been playing eve for six years now and I like to think I have built up some positive Karma with the playerbase.  All I can do now, is say that I had nothing to do with the hack, and hope that people believe me.  Some will I’m sure, but there will be others who always doubt me.

I don’t expect whoever did this to come forward and admit what they have done, I’m not that naive. But I would ask that when gamescribe does comes back up again that you leave it the hell alone!

I have spoken with the owner of Gamescribe, and he assures me that all the data is safe, its just the system files that run the site that were deleted/replaced.

Yours Sincerely
Eddie Gordo

So I was looking into a solution for the buggy avatars, when in my search of alternative plugins I found this curious looking plugin called buddypress.

It claimed to be an all in one solution that would not only fix my avatar problem but also enhance my wordpress hosting site with social networking features. One look at the website and I knew I had to have it!

Buddypress will give you:

Your own profile page
Ability to make friends with other bloggers
Ability to create and use groups (both public and private)
Private messaging

Here is an example profile (mine!)
Here is an example group (pvp)

It probably does more, but its very late and I havent had a full chance to play.