Videos and Weblists

I love how folks are starting to embed videos into their lists - some of these are really entertaining.

Check out Wiseguy's recent lists on 2008 Campaign Ads and Awkward Political Moments.

Survey

If you get asked if you'd like to participate in a survey while surfing RIA, don't panic. It's legit. We are looking for some specific feedback on a couple aspects of the site.

Images

Guys, we made a pretty significant change as to how we handle images. Specifically, we've moved all of our 5GB worth of images (profile pics, item pics, list pics) over to Amazon's servers. This should fix some of those nagging issues related to changing or deleting a pic. Sometimes this would work, sometimes not. Now it should always work.

Also, the images should load much faster now.

If you see anything screwy with images, please let me know.

RateItAll Bebo App

Guys, we just launched a RateItAll Compatibility app for Bebo. We need your help testing it. You can add the app to your Bebo profile HERE.

As soon as you add the app, make sure to click the "join/login" link so you can sync your Bebo RateItAll account to your main RateItAll account.

It should be getting pretty clear what we're trying to do now - we want you to be able to post, share, and access your reviews from any site - not just RateItAll.com.

Thanks!

A Trusted Network?

Guys, we need your help. What's the best way to describe the folks that you have added to your "trusted network?" We somehow feel that "trusted network" doesn't quite do it. Any ideas?

Here's the list - please send in suggestions.

Improvements to Google AdSense Revenue Sharing Program

Guys, we rolled in some important improvements to our revenue sharing program.

Specifically, we are now sharing revenue 50/50 with program participants on every Google ad block on qualifying pages; Your Profile Page, Your Lists, Items You Contribute to Others' Lists, and your Review Pages.

I expect that this will result in a moderate increase in earnings for participants.

Also, we've made it MUCH easier to link your RateItAll account to an existing Google AdSense account.

To sign up for the Google AdSense revenue sharing program for the first time or to link your RIA account to an existing Google AdSense account, just go to your profile page, click the "Edit Account" link on the left hand side, and check the box that says "Sign Me Up for Google AdSense so I can earn cash."

Then choose whether you'd like to sign up for a new AdSense account, or link an existing AdSense account to your RateItAll account and fill in the fields.

You will get an email from Google confirming your enrollment. Also, you can check the status of your AdSense account (approved or pending) right on your RateItAll account page.

Rating Lists vs Yes/No Polls

One of the things that makes RIA so great is the creativity that folks have shown in using our Weblist tool to build fun and engaging content. We've seen the RIA rating engine used for everything from product rating, to travel diaries, to music rating, to video rating, and even reviewer rating.

But every once in a while, I believe our lists can start to stray from RIA's wheelhouse of rating / opinion related content, into things like general self expression tools, or yes/no polls.

And I don't want to go in that direction. RateItAll is an opinion / rating community. That's what we do, and we're not going to overreach.

An example of what I'm talking about are some of Dyna's recent lists like "Do You Remember" and "Have You Ever." It's been fun seeing folks tell stories about different experiences that they've had. However, these are not rating lists. It's very difficult to rate, on a one to five star basis, "Do Your Remember Your Very First Car."

We're not total hardasses about this - occasionally, a self expression list or two will slide on by. However, as a general rule, we're going to stick to rating stuff. That's our world, and that's what we know. So if you see some of these lists go invisible, that's me just trying to reign things in a bit.

Did you know...

It's now time for our ongoing, tri-annual series entitled "Did You Know?"  In this segment, we examine little used, but monstrously helpful features that are cleverly hidden from most users.

Did you know that you can sort our list pages by:

- # of ratings

- # of reviews

- alphabetic

- (and my favorite) Low to High

Low to high is particularly useful for finding the lowest rated item in a list (ie "worst song of the 1980's).

Just look at the bottom right of any RateItAll list.

Welcome Vijai and Lena

Guys, two new folks recently joined the RateItAll team: Lena, who is a UI designer extraordinaire, and Vijai, who is a super sharp senior web developer.

If you have a second, please shoot them a note and help me to welcome them to RIA.

Putting a Moratorium on New RateItAll Reviewer Lists

Guys, there's plenty of ways to rate each other as reviewers, as well as other ways to scratch each others' backs. I'm going to be hiding all new "rate the reviewer" lists for a while.

Couple of Minor Display Changes

Guys, a couple of minor display changes were made to the site today:

• We are now showing the top 70 items on any list page before making you page. This will only affect long lists, like this list for Horror Movie Reviews, for example.
• Similarly, we are now displaying up to 70 reviews on any item page. Here's an example.
• We are hiding reviews of fewer than 10 characters from appearing on the item page. They will still show up in the recent comments page, or on a reviewer's archive page, but not on the item page. The way we see it, if someone just writes "sucks!" (five characters), they probably just meant to leave a rating anyway.

Have a great and safe Fourth of July weekend....

RateItAll's Randyman Interviewed by Ringside Report

RateItAll Randyman writes well on just about any topic. But if there is one area where he reaches back just a little bit more, it's in writing about boxing.

What you might not know is that Randyman hosts a popular boxing blog at boxing-ring.blogspot.com where he talks about the LA fight scene. The photos alone are worth a peak, and not surprisingly, the writing is top notch.

Randyman was just interviewed by the Ringside Report - the interview is pretty in depth, and Randyman shares a lot about where his love for the sport comes from. He also plugs RateItAll, which we very much appreciate.

Anyway, congrats to Randy for his blog getting some well earned attention.

App to show off your RIA Reviews on Facebook

RateItAll's friends over at iWidgets built us a neat little app that shows off your recent reviews on Facebook. Here's what it looks like (and you can add it yourself, here):

Doing a Little DB Tuning at Midnight

Guys, we will be tuning our database tonight at midnight. We expect the site to be down for twenty to thirty minutes.

Debrief

Late yesterday afternoon, we had our best web server fail. The traffic load was too much for the remaining two web servers to handle, so performance tanked. Our host was unable to troubleshoot the issue, and we were told that they would take another shot at it Saturday (today) AM.

So, at this point, we knew a couple of things; we knew that our remaining two servers were not up to our traffic load, and that there was no guarantee that we would be able to get our big server back online today.

So yesterday evening, Automatt and I made the decision to try and migrate the service to what is called a "cloud computing" hosting provider. This is a new type of host that gives you virtual machines, and the ability to quickly add capacity as your traffic grows. It's all self serve, so it's conceivable that we would be able to get back up and running late Friday night.

So we configured five virtual webservers and a database server, migrated our database over to the new host (which took a few hours as it's pretty big), and pointed the "RateItAll.com"domain to the new IP address. By the time everything was ready to go, Automatt and I had worked through the night and it was after 6AM PST. Unfortunately, when you update DNS information, there's not an immediate update across the Web. In our case, some folks were not able to access the site until about 1:30PM today.

Once we had RateItAll up an running on the new service provider and everybody around the world was able to hit the site, it became quickly apparent that our new virtual host did not have the computing power to handle RateItAll's load. Many more virtual servers would have been needed, and it was unclear that even then, these virtual servers would be able to handle the dynamic nature of RateItAll.

Around the same time, our original host got back to us and let us know that they had managed to repair our big web server that had gone down late on Friday.

So at this point, early this afternoon, we made the decision to go back to our original hosting configuration, which we were sure could handle RateItAll's traffic. Some of you may still be seeing an IP address as opposed to the RateItAll.com domain in the web address line - this should be resolved back to RateItAll.com shortly.

Once we pointed the domain name back to our original IP address, for whatever the reason, bots from Google and Yahoo started hammering us at much higher intensity than normal. This has impacted performance today, making the site very slow. We are now working to slow down these crawlers to get the site speed back up.

It's been a brutal weekend so far with very little sleep and a lot of stress. The good news is that we learned some valuable info - mainly, that cloud computing (at least the provider we tried) is still too early in the game to be a viable host for a big traffic site like RateItAll. We also learned that although we have multiple servers, we are very much dependent on a single server to maintain our quality of service - this will be changing this week.

Thanks for your patience as we go through this.

Caution: Server Maintenance in Process

Guys, we are working on the site. Tread carefully rating stuff... site performance will be dicey for a while.

I'll post a full debrief shortly of the last 18 hours - it's been an interesting experiment.

Site Coming Back

Site should be available to all over the next few minutes. Thanks to Automatt for the long night of work put in to get us live.

Status

We are making progress, but expect it will be another hour before we are back online.

Update

Automatt and I decided not to wait to see what happens with our lead web server tomorrow - we're moving over to another service provider tonight, so that we can have a snappy website through the weekend.

We expect to back online by 1AM PST.  More update to follow.

Hardware Failure

Our biggest, baddest web server fell off the grid a few hours ago, and is not responding.

So, we are currently running on two smaller web servers, which are pretty much pegged under our regular load.

We'll know more tomorrow AM about whether this box is recoverable - best case scenario is that it's just a power supply issue, which would be resolvable.

Expect performance to be sluggish until we get this box (or a replacement) online.