Daily Paul Upgrade & Ebay Poster Update
Posted February 1st, 2008 by Michael Nystrom
Dear Friends,
I've looked into a variety of options regarding updating the Daily Paul. I've spoken to a slew of consultants, web hosts & developers, and this is the story as it stands: The software that the Daily Paul runs on -- an open source platform called Drupal -- is going through a major upgrade cycle, from version 5 (currently 5.6) to version 6. Version 6 is not quite ready, and many of the modules required for the upgrades I discussed last week would rely on these modules. The bottom line is that it wouldn't be a wise use of resources to invest a lot in software upgrades on the current system, since they'd be obsolete in a few months and would have to be redone. I made this mistake last year with another Drupal site I was running, when I spent a considerable sum developing a Drupal 4.7 site just as Drupal 5 was released. I don't want to do that again. So as far as major updates go, I'm going to have to wait for a couple of months. I'll begin on some of the minor upgrades that I can do myself next week.
As for the hosting, John VanDyk continues to help to squeeze the most out of our dedicated server, which for the most part is holding up admirably. The new chat feature is hosted offsite by a third party to help reduce the server load during peak periods. For the time being, I'm using the money raised last week to pay for the hosting. The $3,000 we raised (thank you to everyone who contributed!!!) will pay for about nine months of hosting. It is sitting in my Paypal money market account (I just learned that Paypal has a free money market that pays over 4%!), waiting to be deployed when the time to make the updates arrives.
On the Rare poster front, the bid on Ebay went up to $1,525.00 today!!! Unbelievable. That is way more than I expected but I'm very happy for it, and the campaign should be, too! My wife and I made a donation to the campaign for that amount -- $1,525.00 -- on her credit card in today's money bomb (I'm already maxed out). The auction closes out on the afternoon of Super Tuesday, and we're donating the balance of however much higher it goes, up to her limit of $2,300.
I also just learned that my Ron Paul poster is going to be featured in an upcoming issue of the indie music & art magazine Redefine, (!!) along with one by Shepard Ferry of Obama. I've long been a fan of Ferry's and his Obey project ("Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989"), and I must say that his Obama poster is pretty cool. His run sold out, but there are still a few copies of my limited edition I Support Ron Paul posters left. But once they're gone, they're gone. So you better get one quick.
Thank you all for your continued patience and support. This r3VOLution is only the beginning of the movement to take our country back.
Yours in liberty,
Michael Nystrom
Editor
www.dailypaul.com
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MANYSTROM
If you would like I could help you set up the site in wordpress... I know just the theme I could customize to make this site great. Would speed loading up, and also If we moved the forum, to YABB or something to that effect, it would, in my opinion, be much better...
I would be willing to help you with this for no $.
Contact me at alex@politicallore.com
Your friend in the revolution,
Alex
eWeek article on Paul's (&Romney's) websites
Hi,
Saw an article in eWeek about Paul's & Romney's web site infrastructure outsourcing. May be interesting to the more "geeky" among us. ;-)
Another indication of how the campaigns reflect the philosophy of the candidates.
Romney opted for outsourcing from his business experience & Paul went for the cost/convenience.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/...
Upgrade
The verison is now drupal 5.7 and I run a bunch of drupal sites it a great peace of softeware but I will not upgrade to D6 till all the modules I use are ported to to the new verison. They need to slow the prossess down it hard to keep up with it. Just my throught
Go Ron Paul!!!!
Thank you
Michael for your dedication and support. You have been an inspiration.
In case no one is reading
In case no one is reading between the lines, this is a great way for those who HAVE maxxed out, to support others who have not. They can buy things from them on Ebay. Then the seller can donate his "profits" to RP or anything else he wants to do with them.
query cache
I'm not talking about caching on the mysql server, but on the client side. I use Joomla for many sites, and recently implemented some code to monitor SQL queries and cache results. The cache is removed when the table is modified. It greatly reduced the load on the database server.
A measure like this would reduce the load for all users, logged in or not.
Implemented
Yes, this has been implemented. Thank you for the tip!
I would ask if you could
I would ask if you could please get an RSS feed up in the meantime. That's all I really want. I think Drupal has one built in you just have to enable it. Thanks :)
Will do.
I'll check into that this week.
Michael
Yes! An RSS feed (or
Yes! An RSS feed (or multiple separate) would cut down on a lot of page requests when all we want is to see what new posts there are in the forum or the front page.
I can assure anyone that has the means that ...
if the actual sale price becomes $2300.00, every dollar of the difference would be realized in increased value due to the added little tid bit of provanounce.
update
Thank you for all that you are doing now.
Hardware?
Hi Michael!
Do you have any details on the hardware you're using? Separating the web and database onto two separate servers may go a long way in helping site performance. I don't really know what your bottleneck is but some database tuning may also go a long way in helping with periods of high load.
Paul supporters tend to be of the technical variety, so let us know what you have and need and we will help. I prefer that any cash you get goes to the good Dr. :)
There are many many good, quality hosting companies out there. Check out www.webhostingtalk.com to see who people are ranting about. If there's anything I can do to help let me know.
In liberty,
Jerret Kinsman
jerret@oregoniansforronpaul.com
www.oregoniansforronpaul....
The DP runs on 2x Intel Quad
The DP runs on 2x Intel Quad Core Xeon 5310 with 4GB of RAM and two 250 GB hard drives (one is a backup). At this point, everything is on that one box with no load balancing. I'm currently investigating hosting the database on a second server to increase performance. John VanDyk literally wrote the book on Drupal (at least one of them!) and has squeezed every ounce of performance from this machine. As far as I can tell, it usually runs pretty well, but just runs into physical limitations under very high loads.
Improving Drupal Performance
Try running it out of a java servlet container:
http://quercus.caucho.com...
http://www.caucho.com/res...
Thanks for the update,
Thanks for the update, Michael. You are truly one of the heroes of the revolution. I don't know what I'd do without dailypaul. I'm sure I speak for all the regulars here when I say I salute your for your time, efforts and money spent to keep us all updated and give us a place to come to stay in the forefront of the action. Thank you a thousand times.
www.paulforronpaul.com
On the contrary
Thank you. Thank you for your support of Ron Paul, and for helping to keep the flame of liberty alive.