CAT | sL News
Can you feel the speed? Hopeful you’ve noticed something at soLinkable over these past few days: It’s running much faster.
The server loads in less than 2 seconds...
How far we’ve come
When I first started almost 2 years ago, soLinkable was merely a side project. It was a chance for me to play around with PHP, javascript, and web design. Since then it’s grown to over 17000 users, serving more than 10000 unique visitors and 55000 pageviews each month. And as we’ve grown in size, so have our needs – It’s no surprise then that soLinkable would be going through some growing pains and big changes.
One of the biggest projects, which has been in the works for the past month, has been the move from shared hosting to a private server.
Now, you may be surprised to learn that soLinkable has been on a shared host this whole time. I’ve got to give credit where it’s due: HostPapa has provided us with exceptional service at a very cheap price. Even with some daily spikes of 800+ users, our servers held strong and never flinched. They were well worth the price, no question. My only complaint out of otherwise great service: They charged me $26 to transfer a “free” domain to me after I told them I wouldn’t be renewing my service… But that’s it.
Our new servers
Our search for a VPS brought us to Linode. Throughout my search they seemed like the obvious choice: Constant praise from their users, numerous benchmarks declaring them the fastest VPS available, full root access, well written libraries, and, of course, the excellent price ($20/month for 360MBs RAM/16GBs space/200GBs transfer). No matter what metric was being rated, Linode came out on top. Now, after a month and a half, I can honestly say all these claims have been verified.
Setting up the servers was a breeze. Through their excellent libraries and the helpful people on their irc channel, I had the entire server set up and functioning in a single night. Using linux can be daunting if you only have little previous experience (like me), but with help like this, learning is easy.
And lets not forget the speed. The transfer rate is impressive and the website load time has noticeably decreased. But where I’ve noticed the greatest improvement has been in the submission process – I can’t believe how fast it moves through each step.
Looking forward
Full access and modular servers also allow for easier development and scalability in the future.
With Linode, we have the ability to add on memory when we need it without moving the physical server (just a quick restart). Is the mySQL server starting to struggle? With a few mouse clicks I can allocate more memory to it in seconds, and alleviate the bottleneck.
Full root access means we have complete control over our environment. We can tweak the PHP and apache variables or install a 3rd party program and easily integrate it into the website – Basically, we can tailor the server to perform the way we envision, free of any restraints.
I’m sure we’ll go through more growing pains in the future, but with this upgrade behind us we are stronger than we’ve ever been before.
…I sort of suspected that our contact form hadn’t been working as we hadn’t gotten any mail in almost three weeks. Turns out I was right! But more importantly, it’s fixed.
The biggest issue here was that there was no mention that the message wasn’t being sent, it just appeared to work normally. There was a reason for this. Not a good reason, but a reason. When I was doing my testing I commented out the actual “mail(…)” code for obvious reasons. Then, when I uploaded my tested code, I forgot to comment it out… and test it live… And so here we are. But no worries, all is now well.
So, to make a long story short, if anyone has attempted to contact us in the past few weeks, please resubmit and we will happily reply 
Another update has come and gone for soLinkable.com. This update saw the creation of a number of new categories including Business, Internet, and Green. We also split News/Politics into their own separate categories. The additional categories should be a good fit for the soLinkable community and I can easily change them or add new ones, as requested by the community. I decided upon the new categories based on what type of stories I’ve been seeing posted recently. All old stories will remain in their proper categories, with any stories posted to “News/Politics” remaining in the new “News” category. If you guys have any other categories that you would want to see be sure to let me know, I’m always up for new ideas.
This should be the beginning of improvements to the category section. I still see some outstanding issues with the system that’s currently in place. I also hope to write a sort of “subreddit” system. I really like the idea and it’s definitely a great feature (if you’re unsure about what it is, head on over to Reddit and check it out). It will be a bit of a challenge but I think I’m up for it.
I also made some huge improvements to the actual core code including many optimisation improvements. We effectively cut the number of calls to the SQL server in half for an average page load. The issue here wasn’t with the existing SWCMS framework, but rather with features that I have chosen to omit (as they didn’t quite fit with the site – ie. the pageviews table). A typical user won’t notice any of these changes, but as long as I did them correctly, our server will definitely thank us 
.
I have also updated the “About Us” page and given it a better overall look. It now has a short bio (and picture) featuring both myself and Krystal. Be sure to check it out (and comment on Krystal’s flower hat).
Thanks again for your support!
I know. You’ve been waiting for this update for some time… I mean, boy, that old one was ugly. The new form uses the proper soLinkable typography and colours. I also added the “remember me” functionality so that you can stay logged in as long as you want. Let’s just forget that slightly grey, imageless, and overall ugly popup login form ever existed.
On another note, we have a very slick new feature on its way. Seriously. Not to give it all away just yet, but we will be doing away with that awful websnapr.com thumbnail. I never enjoy relying on a third party in order to properly display my site. Expect a release in the next week or so.
Also, we have a few ideas on the way for the category system. Think subreddits.
More to come in a bit!
It’s here! We have finally redone the logo. It’s now far more inline with web 2.0 styles, and more importantly, looks MUCH better than our original logo. With so many new members daily, we really wanted to put our best foot forward.
We wanted to include all three of the main soLinkable colours (black, blue, and green), whereas the previous logo only included a shade of blue. The huge focus on blue took away from the logo and made it fade into the background. With the new green hue, the logo is given more prominence and brought to the front of the page. The idea is that the logo will have more of an impact in the mind of the potential user.
So, without further ado, I present the new soLinkable logo, and it’s derivatives:
We put a lot of thought and effort into these logos, but I know that there is still a lot of work to go. We are far from finished. Thanks to all of you for your support, and look for more great updates in the near future!