Revised prices

So many people complained about the prices of the items in the store (and I agree they are high) I've decided to cut them to $2 over the Cafe Press wholesale price. In other words, there's $2 profit per item. For those of you who (over)paid for items, send me a note and I'll gladly refund the difference. My apologies for the inconvenience. I do appreciate the response to the Leoville store. It's not going to be a great money maker (I've earned about $60 so far) but it does help pay for the expenses of running the web site. And I think it's nice to be able to offer the items for the folks who want 'em.

The Mob Returns

Jade Charles at TextAmerica has responded to my concerns about comment validation on the Mob. Overnight (!) he installed a system to require that commenters be registered TextAmerica users. That's not all. He's working on a way for me to require Leoville registration before commenting. That solves all my concerns about unruly comments. In fact, it makes TextAmerica better than TypePad for comment validation. (I'm sorry to have to require registration of any kind, but I'm sure you understand why.) He has also turned on full-size images. So I'm turning off the Telephotos mobile phone blog on TypePad and returning to TA, with comments turned on. Frankly I was getting worried about the throughput requirements of the photo blog on TypePad. I'm already 319% over my limit for the month. Ben and Mena haven't set up pricing for excess bandwidth, but I hate to think what that would cost. For some reason TextAmerica doesn't seem to mind how much bandwidth I consume. They must be getting a good deal from Rackspace! So thank you, Jade, Chris, Tina, and Janet. TextAmerica rocks!

I Hear You Knockin' But You Can't Come In

Yes my message boards were down for almost 24 hours yesterday. As were Cat's, Morgan's, and Megan's sites. They're all hosted by the generous folks at Annex.com. The outage was caused by a server move that took a little longer than expected. Mike Chandler from 2Xtreme media explains...

Greg sends his humblest apologies to y'all for the downtime but asked that I brag a bit about the new facility, so here goes... Faster pipe with BGP routing for redundant feed, 24 hour NOC, impressive power generators to keep your site online in the event of a significant power outage, and 24 hour security to ward off evil server bandits. As an added bonus, our 2Xtreme Media servers will be neighbors in the same colo facility, so I'll still have hands on access to your server as needed (that's more of a bonus for me, I suppose). We appreciate the fact that none of you tried to choke Gregory or the Annex crew yesterday for keeping you offline, but we still feel bad. Hopefully the swifter connection speeds and greater uptimes will make up for yesterday's outage.

Apology accepted. And thanks for the continued great service. Leoville Town Square alone sucks up about 30GB of Annex's bandwidth each month. I really appreciate their generosity! That's one of the reasons I spread the site out over four servers now. It's all accessible from Leoville.com, but if any one site is down, you can always reach the rest by going there directly:

Leoville.com, the main site	http://www.leoville.com
Leo's Mob, my mobile phone picture blog	http://leoville.textamerica.com
Two Shows Nightly, my text blog (you're soaking in it)	http://leo.typepad.com
Leoville Town Square, the message boards	http://leovilletownsquare.com

RSS Feeds Fixed... Again

There was a mistake in the RSS feed links on the left at the bottom. I've fixed it, thanks to John Shepard who let me know about it. If you subscribe to the feeds, make sure your links are correct. The RSS 1 and 2 feeds are subject only. The Atom feed is the full story. Please let me know if you'd like to change these feeds or how they work. I want to make sure you can get the blog in a way that works for you. There are feeds for the whole blog, just the announcements, news, life of leo, and moblog - so you can read just what you want to. The RSS feeds might be a good choice for people who hate the design of the site, or find it too confusing. Just subscribe to the part you like and you'll see it with minimal formatting. And remember, this is still a work in progress. But I'm getting there! Off to Toronto now - I'll be seeing you.

Viva Vizaweb

We had kind of a meltdown on Leoville today during the radio show. So many people were hitting the server simultaneously that it bogged down completely. We have two dedicated servers already running 2GHz Celerons and 1GB of RAM each -- Leoville.com and Leoville.tv run on one, the message boards on another -- but they still couldn't handle the traffic. We peaked at just under 8MBits/second several times during the show. So far this month leoville.tv has used an astounding 409GB of bandwidth. (That doesn't include the message boards or this blog. This blog is at 25GB for the month; the boards 41GB. All told the Leoville sites are on track to do nearly a terabyte in October.) Vizaweb, my host, very graciously donates all that bandwidth, and I'm sure it's a lot more than they bargained for. Their solution? Instead of giving up and asking me to move somewhere else they're suggesting an upgrade to a dual Xeon 2.8GHz with hyper threading so it registers as 4 CPUs, two 73GB SCSI hard drives, and more RAM. Wow! There may be a slight disruption during the move -- the blog and the radio wiki will probably close temporarily, and some stuff may not work quite right for a day or two, but once the kinks are worked out we should be so much better off. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Vizaweb!