CDN up for HD and American Gladiators

Today we finally resolved that as long as the pages are being cached at our CDN, then we don't have to rewrite every img src and link to point to the absolute url. That was such a giant relief!!

After finding out this wonderful news, I went back to the HD site, which I'd already changed most of the links, and switched them all back. At least I was smart enough to start with the smallest site.. imagine if I'd chosen to do Stargate first! *groan* The best part of this whole CDN business is that the sites should be faster, especially for people outside the USA (since our servers are based in Ohio).

Aside the the CDN run around, we should be going live with a new contest on Monday (for the movie Wedding Daze) and I've just about finished writing that. Thank goodness I spent such a lot of time setting up a "contest" interface outside of Stargate last year.. made this one much faster to create.

American Gladiators site is live now, but better than that! It's actually behind the CDN. I wanted to switch stargate today, but there was a snafu in the cname update request through our host. They thought when I said "setup the cname on stargate.mgm.com" that I really meant.. "setup the cname on www.stargate.mgm.com". *sigh*

Our content manager today asked me to write her a new form for the administration site. Apparently she has SO many images to upload.. she gets tired of doing them all on one page. I'll write her a page where she can do 5 or 10 at a time, make it quicker.. that's what I'm here for! On a sadder note.. sounds like some of the Ark of Truth images will be coming off the site. Most of the ones she will take off haven't actually gone up yet (I wrote a nifty start and end date into the admin site so she can do things in advance).



Thanks for all the wonderful comments and recommendations for fanfic! In answer to some of the questions, I like it all (gen, het, slash, ship, au, etc). I have a fondness for SGA DH & JF, but definitely like SG1 as well.

I didn't quite get done reading "White Walls" this morning, but in my lunch break I read "Between the Lines" by Sholio, a.k.a. friendshipper. I will definitely check out more from her, and all of the other links and authors suggested!
I remember the first story I read, was by liketheriver called "Velocity Asymptotic". That got me hooked! I've read so many now that sometimes I honestly can't remember if some instances are an episode, or a story I read that was so vivid that I can "see" the images from it!

Mostly I copy the text into a text editor, then spell check. My only "peeve" with some fic is that not all typos get found or fixed. It can really distract me from the story.

Looking forward to reading more of it of course!

BFN

Stargate fan fic

It must be hard to concentrate with a camera so close to your face!


I know SGA fans don't have a fondness for this ship.. but I sort of love their non-shipness even more!

I need to take a break from working on something entirely too frustrating.. so what better to talk about than one of my favorite things! I am not sure if I'd mentioned previously, but I am a HUGE fan of Stargate fanfic. I read as much of it as I can get my hands on (which luckily is a lot). Some of it I don't like that much, some of it is brilliant, either way I love it all.
Every morning I run (well jog/stumble) and recently I've been using the treadmill in my apartment building as it's dark outside that early. Since it's mind numbingly boring in there, and all I have to stare at is myself (wall of mirror = evil) I have taught myself to run and read at the same time. I print out the story I find, punch holes in the margin, and put it in a large binder which happens to fit perfectly on the display of the treadmill. You'd be amazed at how FAST 2 miles goes by when you're busy reading! I usually set the treadmill to cross country or some such program, so that it varies the incline and speed for me.

This morning I almost finished reading one of the best I've read lately, called "White Walls" by Eildon Rhymer. Got some nice whole team whump, plus major character growth for all of the team.

Any suggestions for good fan fic will be greatly appreciated! Apparently we're not supposed to accept "scripts" but heck.. I'm a programmer (in no way a writer or related to production), and these are such wonderful stories.

Thanks for all your kind words about Steger. A few of us went to visit him last night, and take him presents (teen girl magazines.. although he wasn't as enthusiastic about them as we expected!) and plant life. He's doing much better, although it seems the worst part of his whole ordeal was the Angiogram, sounds quite unpleasant.

BFN

Quick sad post

A member of our web team had a minor heart attack last night, but he's OK now, obviously in hospital and we're taking a trek out there this afternoon to see him.

He's our Front end developer, and the one I work most closely with (besides my boss). He's only 25...

BFN

CDN link irritation and more bts

After finally getting the time to read the documentation for setting up the sites with the new CDN.. we discovered a rather large issue. We have to change all the src and links to everything on all the sites. Doesn't sound so bad? We have literally thousands of pages, and ten times more images. Luckily at least a chunk of Stargate and MGM.com are actually content managed pages, so that won't so too much of a drama.. but there are tons of micro sites (sites specific to each movie) that will have to get changed once they are written.

The solution I came up for inserting the correct absolute URL and still have development and staging work is pretty simple. Just get this: $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] and assign them to a var, and stick them in front of every url. Ick.. anyhow.. I guess we'll do high traffic stuff first, and work our way through the rest later.
I had quite a panic on Friday night. I was watching SGA with the BF, and I saw our ad come up (Unlock the Gate Sweepstakes) and went WHOOPS! I didn't test to make sure I'd set it to turn on, and check that the word was right! I dashed over to my computer, and attempted to browse to stargate.mgm.com only to have it.. fail?! I go to google.com, jeninason.com yep.. they work fine.. only stargate.. I find my phone, frantically dial my boss, leave him a message. What to do! I reloaded a few times.. and _finally_ after at least 5 minutes of trying I got the page to load. Yikes.. that must have been some crazy traffic spike. I guess it's safe to say we'll be putting contest and sweeps pages behind the CDN. Slowly my breathing returned to normal, and I had to rewind part of what I'd missed on Harmony.

I know some people think the painting was mean for Shep.. and I agree to an extent.. but it was SO funny.. I can't help but love it! I spent a while this morning after I got to work trying to find out if we had any decent hires images of that painting to no avail! Oh well.. I put up some other random pics for today!

In response to a couple comments specifically:
Achimedes on the Hollywood Ashes; Looks like that's what our ex-cricket captains are up to! I was terribly sad that there weren't more people there, but I guess Americans for the most part just simply don't understand cricket. That's just not cricket I say!

Crownglass39; I too would love that picture on a t-shirt.. if only I could get a really great image of it! Thanks for the "bad day" comment too.. as I said.. it can be hard not to take things personally but now I think it's quite funny.

Kristen; Sadly I don't directly get any content. I wrote the pages that display the content, and an administration system so the content people can upload things and turn them on without anything coming near me. I do _sort of_ get a say in content, but usually only if my opinion is asked (being the resident SG fangirl) and each Monday the content person asks me what I want this week's poll to be, then she rewords it so it fits and sounds much cooler. Funnily enough PHP is my main language right now, but I started out in Perl, then some ASP, Java, C etc. Most of our sites are PHP with either Oracle or MySQL as our databases.

Morjana; Yep.. me too.. I save the eps on my DVR, and watch them all weekend, sometimes I just play them over and over as I'm doing housework. My workmates hate that I can sometimes recite the script verbatim.. addicted I tell you!

Rose; I honestly was sure I wasn't going to like Harmony. What a pleasant surprise! Plus I just love the McKay/Sheppard thing too.

Achimedes (again ;)) ; That's such a great description, Bing Crosby-Bob Hope.. definitely!

Ruffles; I agree with the poor John, he worked so hard and got the snub. Still.. was funny :)

A-Pilgrim-soul; Thanks for your kind words! I'll try and keep the pics coming.

Finally results of last week's poll. Wasn't very popular.. could have been both the topic, and the fact that it was without the submit button.. scared people off?
Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown?
Don't hold your breath. - 43% - 2166
Maybe yes. Maybe no. - 27% - 1393
Yes. They're MFEO. - 30% - 1537
Total: 5096

BFN!

Quick SGA eps thought

Didn't you just LOVE the last scene.. my bf and I were rolling all over the floor at that last scene.. precious! I wish I had a screencap of that.. just brilliant!

BFN!

Busy day with DNS/faux sites for Natpe

Next week americangladiators.com goes live with a new site, so we've been scrambling to setup the CDN to sit in front of it (for all that crazy traffic!) and work out where it's to be hosted.. where the DNS should go. I think it's much more complicated than it needs to be.. but that's pretty common!

Morning started with both our designer and front end developer's calling off sick. Seems something is going around the office, and I sure don't want it! Sadly that meant that I spent a large amount of my day putting my fingers in the dike. Edited a page that will be a "faux site" called KMGM, for NATPE, that will showcase upcoming syndication stuff like Reno911 and Chappelle's show. Fun stuff.. great videos good for a laugh!

I'm looking forward to watching Harmony tonight, hopefully I won't have so many DVR problems like last week!

Thanks to crownglass39, morjana (who is always the best!), kristen, rose and omglawdork for your kind words. Sorry I went a bit ape yesterday.. I guess I take things Stargate related a little too personally! I just love the show tons, and get tired of "fanatics" always dogging things we do, and calling us all sorts of nice things (yes I lurk on Gateworld!). We are human, we make mistakes, it's not because we don't love the show that these things happen.

I love it when you guys leave me hints as to what's broken (morjana has helped me tons of times!) sometimes we're in a rush, and don't check things properly.

Specially in response to kristen, I'm not actually the "web master" per se, just the web programmer. I started at MGM about a year and a half ago, and we didn't even work on the Stargate site until April last year. I had seen the show, and I am a sworn sci-fi fan (movies, tv shows, books you name it!) and I have all the toys and posters in my cube to prove it. I became a dedicated fan when we took over the site and watched all the episodes of SG1 and Atlantis back to back over a few weeks, here at lunch, then after work (turned my BF into a fan in the process).

I love the reactions of the fans to most of the polls, and how people get quite adamant about who should win! I report on their progress to our team, who all find the results interesting as well.

Anyhow.. it's late Friday night, time for me to go home! Everyone have a great weekend! Tomorrow is Australia Day (26th Jan) so everyone have a beer for me (or raise their glass!)

BFN

Limited space creates miscommunication

Apologies in advance for this rant:

The one thing that we have problems with when creating new poll questions is space. We only have a small amount of space to work with, without the layout on the page getting screwy. Another problem is that many fans are so into finding things we do wrong, that they misunderstand the question.

My original question : Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown in the future. Sadly this didn't fit, so it was shortened to the current question: Do you think McKay will propose to Katie Brown?.

This has prompted fans to "correct" my error. Pointing out that the proposal was in Quarantine last week. To which I'd like to respond that in fact.. it didn't happen at all. McKay never asked Katie.. she just found the ring, and he told her what he was planning to do. Then at the end, he said he wasn't ready. From this I thought it would be neat to ask if you think it would happen at all.

TPTB here don't give a crap about the poll. They almost never even see it, ask about it, or in any way comment about it. If it weren't for me insisting that we keep it, it would have replaced by the hideous ad that appears below it months ago (I don't like the ads on the site either, but that's for another rant).

Anyhow, sending emails correcting the poll is only going to achieve one thing.. the removal of it.

For those that do understand my cryptic haiku like questions.. here are some more results from past polls:

Favorite Atlantis Slash Pairings
Sheppard/McKay 67% 12703 Votes
Teyla/Weir 13% 2529 Votes
Ronon/McKay 20% 3784 Votes
19016 Votes

BFN