Folks, we are on a new server! Please leave a comment or email via the main contact form of any problems, page loads, access to your accounts.
Feedback on the new server as well as the site is greatly appreciated! We should now have the resources to make a lot of changes to the site itself.
If you can't get through at all, the gmail is oak.robert.
Below is the reason for the move. We're on a VPS with Wired Tree for all geek readers.
About last Thursday we wrote the below:
The Economic Populist was literally disabled by Bluehost hosting company with no warning and no real technical details for the cause. Therefore, The Economic Populist is looking for a new host, a new server home. This will increase costs to run the site.
If you like The Economic Populist, please consider making a small donation, to cover new server costs.
Obviously, out of the blue with no warning, having an entire web hosting account completely disabled under nebulous terms at best is unacceptable by any measure of hosting service, so we must move the site.
Be aware site features are also being disabled in hopes of keeping The Economic Populist online and getting a smooth transition to a new web host. It's still unclear the reason for Bluehost shutting down the entire account without warning and while we are attempting to reduce server load by reducing features, it's anyone's guess on their reasons. We cannot obtain concrete metrics on server load to make sure we meet their requirements. It's Kafkaesque.
Authors, please save your posts. I just cannot guarantee if the site is freezed and while I'm downloading the latest databases, it's possible I cannot save everything.
Sorry for the inconvenience and please consider donating for the server costs if you like the site, want us to keep doing our groove economics thing!
site move
Just wanted to let you know I love your site and made a (albeit small) donation.
Thank you to those who are donating!
I'm right now hunting for a new home. I'm looking at what is called VPS, Linux based. If someone knows of a good web hosting company, please share, but we need to move up to a VPS due to the site popularity and traffic. There are a lot of bad web hosts out there. Basically I'm going to bump up the server requirements so the site will run faster, load, plus run some of the more sophisticated community site features. I hope to make the first move this weekend.
site move update
Just to let you know, hopefully you won't notice the change. What's happening now is I've railed up against the limitations of bluehost, I'm shopping for a VPS, zeroing in on a few and hopefully will start migrating the server over tomorrow. If this goes right you should all not notice anything, beyond probably the site down for a small time during the "final transition".
Server costs are more expensive, which frankly I'm a little disturbed about, it's not like we're the New York Times here in terms of participants and readers.
I am currently looking for VPS that deals well with what is called burst mode. What happens on EP is we have a loyal audience, participants, which is a consistent number of hits per day, our typical traffic.
But...periodically we get picked up on by the New York Times or reddit, or some major site, business week, reuters and go on, which spikes out the site hits to their level.
Bottom line is sometimes our writings get picked up on in the MSM and then all hell breaks loose on the site traffic. So, I had to get a system set up to deal with those spikes, which last maybe a day or 2. We want those spikes. We want to get read by that number of readers, so I don't want the site to crash when that happens.
That makes this a little more tricky in terms of finding the right VPS and the right resources...
but I must have our own mySQL server, that I configure. We've just grown too big! (which is a good thing I think!)
still haven't moved the site, keep posting
When I'm reading to migrate the site I'll post something about it. I should be able to capture any posts or comments to make sure all is transferred.
The problem is there are 12,000 bad web hosts out there so I've had to do a lot of research to make sure we're not moving from frying pan to fire. I'm zeroing in on two, so should have it happening Monday or Tuesday.
Thanks again for donating, for server costs just went way up, but hopefully this will result in more features and faster load times.
VPS selected, server migration process in play
Well folks, after spending 4 days researching out web hosts and configurations, reputations and all of that rot, I finally started the move.
Hopefully you won't notice a thing! Because this is Drupal, odds are there will be problems but hopefully all of that will behind the scenes.
You should be able to just go ahead, use the site, write what you will. I will attempt to capture every post, article and comment to make sure it's all available, seamless transition to the new server.
When we're up and running on the new server, I'll post a comment saying so. I'll be looking for feedback on page load, site speed and so on.
The site initially should look the same but with a VPS, I hope to redesign it for more features, cooler look and so on, which I had to limit due to server load issues.
Thanks again for donating! Hopefully this increases site usage and traffic so the server costs down the road are paid for. But you all came to the rescue and cover the first two months of server costs!
site server move
Of course things are not going smoothly. I'm still working on it, the email system on the new site is broken, which is a show stopper before we can move over.
I've run some test page loads and the site is about 5x faster on the new server. Hope that stays true, but the move is still in process. No surprise, this site is Drupal based, notorious!
folks, buried up to my eyeballs in server, drupal config
going to be slow authoring while I'm working on this. This is a full bore server, plus a port of a very complex site, so lots of bugs and configuration fun.
EPers! NEED TESTERS!
If you see this email me offline. I'm going to need a few people to just test out the new site before the final move. I'm checking a lot of features but how it goes, the feature others are using is the one that breaks and I do not check.
server migration news/update
If nobody helps me test the test site, well, you're going to have to live with the bugs as they pop up and I set out to fix them.
I'm looking to migrate the site over to the new server, if all goes well, in the wee hours of Friday morning.
live test site location, help me test, give feedback
The test site (ignore the content, this is the test site), is now live on
http://www.economicpopulist.com
This is NOT the real site, which is here.
Anybody reading this, esp. those who have accounts on EP, I could really use some feedback on page loads, making sure you can log in on the test site, making sure the email to reset passwords is sent to you and so on.
DO NOT MAKE ANY CHANGES TO YOUR ACCOUNT ON THE TEST SITE!
The database on the test site will be replaced with the most recent entries from the live site, so any changes you make on the test site will be lost!
If all is good, I plan on migrating over the site this evening to the new server.
If I don't hear anything from people, well, I sure hope we don't crash in the process, but it would be very nice to find the bugs before I move over the site!
admin domains or the site URL
You might notice a switching between .com and .org. As long as you can access the entire site, don't worry about it, it's all the same site.
I'm considering making the mainURL for the site .com instead of .org because we're not a non-profit and .com is much more common.
Long story why I didn't start out with .com as the main URL but since we're switching servers I want to see if I can swap the .com and the .org as well.
Logged On
I logged in to write this note and it seemed allright.My campaign website was a bear to set up but probably isn't as tough as you have it.I don't know all the tech lingo and don't know if godaddy would work for you with your needs.The tech staff helped me with all my questions and very reasonable on price.I have had days where I recieved 20 plus hits in a day and no problems,I have yet to be contacted by MSN thoughTEEHEE.I hope this was helpful
Frank Rutherford
Thank you!
I'm still working on the domain issues. I'm wanting to move the top level URL to .com from .org, since we're really not a non-profit.
Let me know of any other problems and I am ESPECIALLY interested in page loads, the speed of the site.
No one is commenting, so I'm going to assume it's ok but how fast the pages come up is something I am very interested in now that the resource/server issues seem to be fixed.
There are a bunch of issues going on that I am addressing.
Don't worry, be happy on the technical details, but this site now has it's own server and the reason is the traffic, which is why I'm asking about how fast the pages load for you.
I am aware there is a domain conflict going on and that's because I'm trying to transition to the .com from the .org
so anybody really stuck to the point they cannot even email,
use oak.robert
that would be the gmail.com extension.
site bugs, won't works
Hi ya,
I have found one bug and if you noticed, I'm trying to do something to migrate to .com from .org, which I'm working on as well.
Right now we have a bug with the post image/file uploader writing into the posts. I'm working on this and I hope if there are other bugs people tell me about them.
more admin stuff to know about
Hey folks, I'm playing some games with domains, so you might run into problems with suddenly being logged off. Just re-login and let me know about any problems.
The issue is I want to move the site as functioning on two different domains, economicpopulist.org and economicpopulist.com
There are a lot of tricks to do this, but some slow down the site and reduce Google page rank, which is very bad, because most people find us via de Google.
So, I'm trying different stuff to make this work. I tried one thing which added a 2 seconds of page load time and screwed up Google finding our posts for their news.
Now I switched back to keep the .org as the top level to not break aggregators and am trying to enable session cookies, which tells the site where your blog is, where your comments are and so on, to work across both the .com and the .org domains.
What a hassle.
Sorry this is geeking out on you but bottom line if you are logged on, just relog in and let me know about problems.
google page rank, please no more duplicate posts!
Folks, I just checked Google page rank. You MUST "fake out" Google and put an "originally posted on" line in the article piece subheading.
In other words, changing the title or the content of the first two paragraphs is key.
We have a page rank of zero, which is very bad news, that means Google has deemed us content copy. That's hardly the truth but why I have been asking people to put clearly where a post was originally on.
I make a point to only write on EP, in part because I'm so vested in the site, but also to make sure it's known this site has original content.
I'm all for cross posting, it's clear people read different sites and economics is usually mixed in, and misunderstood on many.
My hope is EP grows, after all it is the only community economics site where anyone can write and have their own blog.
Please help out and modify your posts.
user guide updated
Please read the updated user guide.
Now that we have this screaming server, I'm working on other issues which cause the site to slow down, page load, including images.
One issue is cross posting and due to Google classifying us as "copy spam", which is hardly the case, the site has a new requirement for duplicate posts (cross posts) to get us recatagorized as original material (which this site is).
registration, signing in, new menus
I'm seeing some folks have problems registering and signing in. Every time I look into it, they have cookies disabled for the domain economicpopulist.org.
That's in your firefox and ie privacy settings. I'll help you get on the site, just use the contact form under the "About" section in the menu for help.
Also, new menus and features are slowly but surely being added.
Now that we have this big honkin' server, I can add more features that are resource hogs.
I get little feedback on the site in terms of problems, technologies, features, so if something is broke, I must be made aware of it to fix it.
Thanks for using EP. It seems the site has become more of an article/newspaper, but the reality is we have powerful tools on the site for sane discussion too.
site changes, all votes reset
All of the votes or promotes/demotes were reset as I upgraded the voting mechanisms for posts and comments.
I'm still working on this.
I am making changes to the site, so any problems, just email me.
Check out the tagadelic! I don't know how useful in reality it is, but I found it fun for some reason.
Any requests, suggestions are appreciated for improving the site.
posts closed for comments after a period of time
Due to trying to better manage the size of the site, comments on posts will be closed after a period of time. I'm still playing around with this, but rest assured the time out will be a good year from the publication date.
This is the new plan to also create archives of posts over two years old. Many are actually great references, explaining what a CDS is, a CDO is, choice facts from hearings, but I think they will be easier to even locate if eventually they are moved to a static archive and also offload additional database queries by disabling further comments on these.
Anyone upset about not being able to write a comment on a post that's over a year old, let me know.
comments closed but new features considered
I hope that's ok, but the plan is to "revive" beyond the meta data tags, some of the older posts.
Some of the writings on EP are more like reference articles. While search engines pick them up well, especially google and places like Business Week and so on reference them, I want to add better navigation for some of these older posts which really are great reference and educational pieces.
The traditional is "archive", but I could just create a new page or even subdomain that lists posts by information and quality (not reads, these would have to be hand selected)and do a reordering by that first, then the subject matter being written about.
pre-upgrades site might go down
Pressflow installed, working on Varnish cache. Site might go down. New articles to be sparse.
Varnish running, along how well is yet to be seen.
site upgrade plans changed
Beyond less posting and articles, the game plan has changed. We're going to have to load up a test site and do at least a little load testing. The work is dramatic, it was discovered the entire database has to be significantly altered for one.
As far as EPers go we hope to get something up by the 1st of the year, although with so much redesign making sure it's not slow as a turtle is ongoing and as much prep as I can do, odds on there will be problems after the upgrade, so when it happens, please report any errors.
Just a little update for those wondering where all of the articles are. I'm neck deep in Drupal and swimming in Apache, drowning with ridiculous techniques to rewrite some PHP code in order to make sure the site can handle automatic upgrades.
Mobile Menus - Toggle Added, TouchScreen
Please let me know if there are any bugs, some new menus for mobile are added and then turn the menu into a large toggle, touch screen sensitive.
Please let me know of bugs and secondly, would you like this added to tablets? Right now it will pop up on narrow displays.
Generally speaking all mobile users, please give feedback to make this a true mobile site, easy to use. It's hard to really test for all devices since there are so many out there.
Also, any desktop issues, including legacy browsers. The site should support ie8 browsers (although consider using firefox!)
working on comments, 8,25,13, issues, bugs, let me know
Hi Folks,
I'm working on the site comments and adding additional security. So, please let me know if there are any problems using them. This will be ongoing, still working on it and will edit this admin comment when completed.
Unfortunately Drupal comments truly suck so this is all hand, custom code and quite nasty to also add security, keep out the comment spam.
Any UI suggestions would be most welcome. It is supposed to work like an accordion to save space, especially on cell phones. Also, the reply forms should be "in line", no new page load and I'd like to get "add a comment" to do that same thing (last feature, no page reload).
For those of you with cell phones, smartphones, tablets, PLEASE try reading and using the site with them and let me know.
There is another bug which I am working on for cell phones and that is 1 ad covering up a partial front page column so I know this is a problem and that ad needs to be responsive.
But other than that the major problems have been worked out (I think), especially the menus.
Also, if people want toggle menus on tablets, larger smartphones, please let me know I can change the menus, navigation to do that same thing as in "narrow view" on a smart phone.
Squish down your browser to a pencil wide width and you'll see what I mean (in FF, Chrome, IE8 is legacy so the site will just display).
Thanks for your patience!
Amazon Sucks! Sry #Amazon Kindle readers
Amazon if you can believe this, SHUT DOWN the kindle/advertising account claiming I didn't "fill out" some form saying we do not have children material on our site, when of course I did fill this out a while back. What rude jerks. The good news is they pay so little, financially their pennies hurt us not. The bad news is there are some subscribed via Kindle.
I STRONGLY suggest just reading the site via your browser. The site will scale for tablets of any size and you will save a few bucks since you don't have to pay Amazon subscriber fees (of which we got very little of!) If that isn't OK, just email me offline.
I personally am disgusted with Amazon. We are an upstanding site and very obviously publish no smut or any untruths, etc. Not only did they never pay anything for their ads in reality, to shut down an account over pretty much nothing and refuse to reinstate it is absurd. All I can say is, way to go Amazon, you lost a free advertising site, you paid pennies, and on top of it, you lost a group of customers who purchases tally over $30,000 a month. Unbelievable and they paid PENNIES to us!
From the thousands of complaints with the Better Business Bureau and elsewhere it's pretty clear Amazon could care less about treating advertisers and many others so badly.
Same for all "too big to fail" companies
With all the mergers and acquisitions, these huge corporations can do pretty much what they want with little fear of retaliation.
I once had a bad experience with Verizon, so I changed carriers, and later they bought them out, and I was stuck with Verizon again.
Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!
If one company has a monopoly on the market, you can't boycott them.
And many of these mergers and acquisitions aren't even in related businesses. Hypothetical: A company making paper clips buys out a company making toothpicks.
No wonder we can't "Buy American" — If we want a certain product (like a TV), they're all made overseas. Are we supposed to go without TVs?
The Comcast-Time-Warner merger would have resulted in a huge media monopoly controlling our news (when already only 6 corporations are currently controlling 90% of the media).
Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!
We don't just have to break up the big banks, but end mergers and acquisitions. Those billions of dollars could have been spent on reinvestment within the company and hiring people and raising wages. (And mergers and acquisitions cause layoffs).
I have books for sale at Amazon and they set the price (far above what I would ask) and pay about 1 penny on the dollar.
Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!
how about an article on Bernie's economic policies
Tech companies like Amazon get away with murder because they have bought and paid for government officials at every level. This is all well known, after all, GE got a seat in the white house via Obama and Hillary has a host of corporate "donors" as does Rubio and so on. If one looks at the state of Washington Senators, Cantwell is literally out of tech, as if, "hey, you lady, get out of our company and go represent us (corporations, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) in D.C.
Same with Carly Fiorina. Writing a detailed policy difference article would be really helpful. Most coverage on the election, even on "issues" is superficial at best. Last night Fox business actually did a good job in terms of asking relevant questions, yet they have their own corporate agenda so they don't nail them on how their answers won't work, will throw people out of work and so on. Trump, by the way wants to get rid of all of the NAFTA style trade deals and renegotiate bi-lateral trade agreements. That's an issue that Bernie probably agrees with. Note, the two not taking corporate money say this.
I might write an article about "social media" and the penny payment plan they have.