Website Fixes, Improvements and Upgrades

I've been hard at work the last few weeks; editing and fixing the source code, adding new features and making changes here and there, big and small.

Here's a partial list of what I've been working on:

     • We are now on Facebook! Stop by and 'Like' us! 
     • A Facebook activity stream and like box has been added to the blog homepage.
     • The missing icons for the Media Gallery have been fixed.
     • Upload limit for the Media gallery is now 64MB, up from 7MB. PHP.ini settings have been tweaked for more stability and speed.
     • The problems with embedding Vimeo videos has been fixed in posts and the Media Gallery.
     • The theme for the blog (homepage) has been updated with a newer look and feel.
     • The default font size for messages is now 12 point, which makes it easier to read.
     • The new VinylAudio.net store is open, powered by Amazon.com!
     • MySQL database issues have (hopefully) been ironed out with out hosting company.
     • The MySQL databases have been optimized for faster indexing.

Projects that are in the works:

     • Classified Section - for buying and selling items (similar to Audiogon.com).
     • Bi-weekly or monthly newsletter - with website news and updates, latest posts and forum activity.
     • Chat Room - create a chat room system by Integrating AjaxChat.
     • Bookmark system - add any message to your own bookmarks making it easier to keep track of topics that interest you.
     • And a whole lot more!

We are coming up to our 10th month of operation and I just want to say thanks to everyone for your continued interest and support. If you have any comments, suggestions for improvements, or need to report a problem or issue - let us know!

       Admin: admin@vinylaudio.net
       Forum Moderator: Brian Demeter - bdemeter@vinylaudio.net


The Vinyl Audio Team

I'm still trying to work out the problems with our hosting company. The website was down most of the day yesterday with the MySQL server going down or failing to respond. Page load times were terrible, if they even loaded at all. Transfer speed from the server for images and larger files was peaking out at 10k/sec.

Because of the holiday, nobody was in the office to handle my problem ticket. I do have a complete backup of the blog and forum from May 24th which, worse comes to worse, would be a restore point if the problems with the current MySQL server is not resolved. This might also be a good time to explore making the forum the landing page for website. Making a major change like that would wreak havoc on search engine ranking, but I do feel placing the forum in a sub-folder of the blog was a mistake; especially since the majority of user activity is in the forum.

The most surprising thing to come out of all of this is my new understanding of how complex and in-depth the issues are with running a website; from SEO, to memory limits in php.ini, to web page optimization, editing style sheets and writing PHP code. It's a full time job just to keep up with it.

Truthfully, this website is a one man operation - me.      I'm a Network Engineer by trade, with 25 years of computer experience under my belt. I'm also an audio fanatic who happens to love vinyl records.    It's really hard to venture out and try to accomplish something on your own and so much easier if you're part of a team. Unfortunately, for now, it's just me, so I do apologize for the interruptions, delays and website outages - especially to the long time users of the site and guests who may be hesitant to join because of the website performance issues.   

I have no idea what the problem was yesterday, or why it seems to be hobbling along good enough for me to write this message. It's pretty bad when your in the MyPHPAdmin panel and it fails to respond, throwing a 404 error message in the middle of exporting the database. I have 3 trouble tickets open, hopefully someone at the hosting company will be able to find the problems and correct them.

I'll know more when the techs get back to me later today. I'd really like to know what would cause ftp up/download speeds to drop to 10k/sec, along with the MySQL server failing to respond to queries.

-Brian D

Looks like most of the performance issues have been worked out. Most of the problems were due to how the MySQL databases were configured on the server; they were all under a single name and sharing resources. I separated the databases and the speed and reliability has picked up.

If you get any error messages at all, please let me know.

Man, managing a forum must be really a hard work!
10 months, seems to me I joined yesterday!

I spend hours every day working on the website, mostly working on a 'non-production' clone of this website on another server; changing, modifying, tweaking and testing new features. But lately, I've been dealing with the fact that my hosting company is having major reliability issues with their database servers. The problem has been escalating to the point where I'm considering moving the site to a new hosting provider.

I don't know how often you've encountered an error message where this site could not connect to the MySQL server, but I see the error message multiple times a day as I work. Browsing a website and seeing an error message is no fun and should never happen when you're using a commercial hosting company. I'm constantly opening new trouble tickets everyday but the problem still remains. No matter what tweaking or optimizing I do to the code, the reliability of the MySQL server connection is flakey. It's frustrating beyond belief when the site works fine one minute, then goes down the next. 

I'll know more in the next week or two what course I'll need to take to make sure the user experience is fast and reliable. If I don't get an answer or help from the hosting company, I'll have no choice but to relocate VinylAudio to faster and more reliable hosting company.

Anyone have any suggestions for hosting companies?