Site Downtime
Some may have noticed that the site went down for a few hours of scheduled maintenance last night. What does it mean for you? Well, not all that much at this stage. BUT we now have an excellent foundation to start adding the new features have been in the pipeline.
Another reason for the maintenance is the simple fact that things need to be constantly monitored to cope with the mahoosive levels of traffic our ‘little’ site attracts. Last month we delivered over 5 million pages! No really!.. to a quarter of a million unique users! A few weeks ago we switched on our third dedicated server that is currently being prep’d to handle the massive job of delivering video and advertising to these pages.
Now, while we prepare for the switch on of some quite significant new features, there are a couple of things that might interest you. You can get straight to your ‘edit profile’ page on the top right of the site. And if you sign up to the Singletrack mailing list – which we will start sending out on a weekly(ish) basis very soon – you’ll get a voucher for £25 of free wine, 5% off at Swinnerton Cycles, and 10% off at Evans Cycles (Evans voucher runs out on July 12th, so hurry!).
In the forum, stories have a ‘Voices’ count. This tells you how many people have added to the discussion. There’s also quite a few bug fixes here and there. Oh, and the theme has been revamped to shave vital seconds off page load times.
If you are having difficulty logging back in after the site upgrade then have a look at the top of our forum for some simple technical help.
Sorry for any inconvenience but normal service and shortly some radical new services will be with you soon 
If you’re having trouble logging in then you need to clear your cookie for STW. Instructions can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=32050
Categorised as:
Posted on: July 8, 2009
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Sounds good…the page loading – I hate to admit this (for fear of a banning) but the issue seems to be due to the amount of ads being served and type of ads…I have adblokcer on Firefox and the site absolutely flies – nothing on IE and it is much slower (and running IE6 at work the site just crawls…content loads but nothing is usable until all the ads have loaded. I’m running latest versions of Flash on all machines.
Page load time is important (and so is advertising) but there needs to be a happy medium…if the page is loading quicker then the medium is getting closer which is good…but please try to improve the delivery of the ads so they don’t hinder the site.
Bug – When you look at another users profile, and they have signed up for the newsletter, you can see the prom codes for the newsletter freebies.
Cheers Dougal. Should now be fixed.
DickBarton > I assure you we are looking at ways to increase the speed of the site all the time. As discussed many times before the ads are required to pay for the large running costs of the site.
been a long journey since the old Go-Far site days, keep on trucking(or vaning)
btw some of the buttons eg forum are not showing on my firefox?
Should the top banner ad be that low down?
Wow…just loaded the site in IE6 for the first time ever, it is slow but not life threatening.
Also mouse overs on the buttons don’t work…get a white blank when I ‘hover’
Consistently great site guys, thanks! It’s great to see that, despite changing and upgrading things, you keep the user interface simple and free of clutter – and that you have a sense of humour too. You are doing great things for cycling..
Happy vibes..
deadlyhifi – I’m not knocking the ads, I appreciate the money for the site has to come from somewhere…I’m only asking that the delivery of the ads is looked at to reduce the ‘lag’ on the page load before you can start using the page i.e. scrolling down to read content or getting content to display.
Personally I’ve never clicked on an advert on this site BUT that is only because I’ve already got the sites bookmarked so I’ve no need for them…but other people will find them very useful – so keep them, but please look at improving delivery.
Thanks Dick.. I’m so happy you mentioned the ads.. I’d completely forgotten all about them and no one here had given the delivery system a second thought.. Wow! If it wasn’t for you currently Tom would be sat on his arse staring at that third server we just mentioned in the story up there wondering if it could be used for anything more useful than propping open the kitchen door.
We will be right on that delivery issue now you have mentioned it. How could we have overlooked that.. cor.. Sillies we are
I’d not use a server to propping open the kitchen door. From experience you end up tripping over it more often than is acceptable.
Ad delivery lag shouldn’t impact to badly since they are mostly iframes, which any decent browser will load as it can, rather than waiting for the full content to be completed of the ad. But then, for someone who blocks ads, do you care? No. In fact if STW would like I have some nifty javascript that makes pages for people blocking ads nice and fast (ie, blank). You don’t pay (by viewing ads) you don’t get the content ;D
We’ve looked in to that. It’s easy to block those who block the ads. At the moment the proportion of ad blockers is so small that’s it’s not anything we are considering.
If the buttons/mouse-overs aren’t working in Firefox then clear your cache (Tools/Clear Private data)
If you can’t login then clear your cookies (Tools/Clear Private data)
I really like the approach to ad blocking here:
http://www.avforums.com
works well enough to guilt me into unblocking there, and funnily enough, here too!
Glad I reminded you about it…
I’ve no issues with the ads other than making the page load slower…so back to my original ‘complaint’ – if the delivery of the ads can be improved to reduce this lag then I’m a happy bunny – I only block the ads at home to make browsing quicker – if that gets me banned, then fair enough – I’m not going to loose anything from it. I don’t have the choice at work and I’m also stuck on a rather old version of IE6 so I’ve got to put up with that technology – and that technology seems to have a lot of issues with everything – not STW’s fault, but if things can be done to improve it then it’s a bonus.
I’m not bothered about the ads, but I’m not keen on webpage load times slowly my browsing experience down – I’m happy to sit and do nothing when I’m reading the content, but doing nothing for it to load isn’t that great.
It’s ok though, I’ll stop going on about it as it seems to be flaring up into something it wasn’t intended to be about…