The Blog Studio

Being that this is a family friendly website, I don’t have the words to publicly describe the past 24 hours. To say it’s been a bit stressful would be an understatement.

In short, a couple of days ago, our server, hosted at serverbeach.com started to act flaky. Over three or four days, site performance slowed to a crawl, then finally gave up the ghost yesterday. We made a couple of requests to repair or replace the failing hard drive. These were never directly answered, instead we were told that the server had been restarted and appeared to be working. That was acceptable after it stopped once. Even after it stopped twice. But after the 4th restart the hosting company should have pulled the obviously faulty drive.

The drive was finally yanked yesterday. It took almost 24 hours for a new drive to be installed and properly configured. Every request for help would result in a 2 to 4 hour wait for a response. In 80% of the cases, the information in the responses was either incorrect or incomplete. We’d do as instructed, discover it didn’t work, then have to wait for another 2 to 4 hours for the original request to be fixed. The errors involved things like not plugging in the drive correctly, not installing the control panel software, and overwriting a bunch of files. These are very basic problems that would have been easily avoided if the tech people had taken a moment to test their work.

This didn’t just affect theblogstudio.com, but a number of our friends and client’s sites as well. To those folks I deeply apologize.

We’ve changed server companies, and so far are very impressed with mosso.com. Not only are they literally half the cost of serverbeach, they have actual human beings in tech support you can reach 24/7.

That’s it for now. I’ve got a couple of days worth of work to catch up on, and a beer somewhere calling my name…

Peter

Posted by Peter F on May 7 2008.
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The Blog Studio has new a new home! After a couple of years of doing the “virtual office” thing, we’ve bit the bullet and opened and honest-to-god office. Things are still a bit of a mess, so I’m not going to share pictures quite yet. Suffice it to say though that we’re in a very cool creative space. There’s a lot more news to share in the next couple of days. But for now, back to painting the walls!

Posted by Peter F on May 5 2008.
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Yikes. After a couple of years of constant up-time, our server has recently developed the rather nasty habit of shutting itself down for naps at rather inappropriate times. As such, I’d like to apologize to anyone who’s had trouble accessing our site over the past week. We’re in the process of moving to a new hosting provider. Fun!

If you try to comment on this article, you’ll find that comments have been turned off until we’re done with the move. Seems there’s some kind of low-level demon living in our commenting system. We’ll be performing an exorcism while transferring the files to the new machine.

How come this always happens when one is at their busiest?

Peter

Posted by Peter F on May 1 2008.
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WordPress 2.5 is available today for a sneak peek. It looks like the most major overhaul to date of the entire backend. I’m going to install it on a test account. Unless you backup your own blog daily, don’t use this test version.

Posted by Peter F on March 18 2008.
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The Blog Studio is adding a Lead Developer to our core team. In the three years or so that we’ve been in business, we’ve worked with a broad range of clients, including Turner Broadcasting, Fox News, Unicef, and 100s more all over the world. In addition to our client work, we’re about to launch a fully funded network of socially driven content sites, designed to compete with the very best on the web.

In order to help us grow, we’re looking to add a full-time lead developer to our core team. This person will work with the project manager and myself on project planning, strategic direction, and implementation.

Our ideal candidate is a master of PHP, with mad skillz in javascript, xhtml and css. Ideally you have experience with CodeIgnitor or other PHP frameworks. We do a lot of work with Expression Engine and WordPress, so experience with those content management systems is a big plus. You should also have some degree of experience setting up and configuring Linux servers.

Although we’re located in Toronto, we’re not super picky about your location. We’d prefer to meet in the same location a couple of times a week, but are willing to be flexible for the right candidate.

On the money front, we offer a competitive salary, extended health if you’re Canadian, and shares in our new media wing.

If you’re interested in this position, please watch the short video above for further details. Resumes can be submitted to jobs@theblogstudio.com

Posted by Peter F on March 14 2008.
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We’re back from SxSW in Austin, and everyone wants to know about the EE 2.0 preview. Rather than telling you myself, why not get the info straight from the horse’s mouth (English has some very strange expressions…)

My two cents? It looks very, very slick. There’s a lot of new technology under the hood. It’s too early to comment on the details, as I expect the product that launches will be pretty different from the early peek we’re getting now. None the less, I’m excited to start using it. Launch is expected for “Summer 2008”. In other words, don’t hold your breath!

Posted by Peter F on March 13 2008.
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Lucia and I will be out of the office from March 6th through 12th while we attend the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. Email, phone, and responsibility in general will be put on hold while we “learn” and “get inspired” through extensive late night “brainstorming” sessions.

This year, I’m bringing Purell and am going to be totally germ phobic. No bringing home the black plague this year.

In all seriousness, if you need to reach us, email will probably be your best bet. Expect up to 24 hours lag for a response.

See ya soon!

Posted by Peter F on March 4 2008.
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Most of the work we do is business-related. It’s not often we get the chance to really get wild and totally creative. So when Robin approached us a few months ago about redesigning her personal site, we jumped at the chance.

The site is filled with fun details, from the post footers:

to the date container:

to the bee that follows you as you hover over the links:

I just want to say thanks very much to Robin for letting us have so much fun!

Posted by Peter F on February 21 2008.
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We’ve been very hard at work over at PrimetimePolitics.com adding new features and refining the design. The Featured Debate is now loading using Ajax, which speeds up the page load quite dramatically. I also recently added a bit of javascript that pulls in the favicons of the sites we’re linking to, which gives an immediate visual cue to what the site is about.

The hard work is really paying off. We’ve seen average daily visits jump from the low hundreds to 1100+ in just a few days. Of course, the content might have something to do with that.

We’ll be rolling out a very cool addition to the site early next week that we hope will really increase the usefulness of this already useful site. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Peter F on February 21 2008.
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This is probably not the most appropriate venue for this rant, but I’ll live with the consequences.

People: like you, we work hard. Like you, we have families, friends, hobbies, and passions above and beyond work.

Especially on long weekends, we like to get out of town, unplug, and recharge.

As a general rule of thumb, emails sent and voicemail left after close of business on Friday will be replied to when we’re back in the office the next working day. Please do not send email freaking out when we haven’t responded by Sunday.

Thank you, I feel better now.

Posted by Peter F on February 19 2008.
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Done in one take!

Posted by Peter F on February 8 2008.
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The Facebook Application we built for Primetime Politics is really starting to take off. If you’re a facebook user, please check it out!

Posted by Peter F on February 7 2008.
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I’ve just redesigned, my personal blog almost cool. Rather than try to find the time to come up with insight or original thought, I’ve started to quickly post shiny things that catch my ears and eyes. I think the content has improved ;)

Posted by Peter F on February 5 2008.
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Congratulations to the talented team at The Budget Fashionista for being nominated in the best fashion weblog category. The Blog Studio recently completed a complicated data migration/merge and total redesign of this very popular website.

The Budget Fashionista is in some very fine company. Category compatriots include Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself, Fab Sugar, and The Sartorialist. (Danger: high likelihood of major surfing distraction)

Please do us a huge favor, and vote for The Budget Fashionista for best fashion weblog of 2008!

Posted by Peter F on January 30 2008.
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Posted by Peter F on December 21 2007.
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