December 20th, 2006 by gregr
Yikes…I got tagged with the meme - gosh, thanks Nick. ;-) Not one to spoil the party, here are my five things:
1. I live in Colorado, but I haven’t been on snow skis in probably 10 years. This is one of those “oh, you live in Colorado! Do you ski?” questions that’s for some reason inevitable when meeting folks that live near an ocean. :-)
2. When I graduated from college with a degree in electrical engineering, I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do…but the one thing I knew I did NOT want to do was write application software. Funny how things change.
3. My biggest pet peeve is people who throw cigarettes out the window of the car. For a long time I’ve wanted to get out, go pick it up, and throw it back in their car, but I’ve never worked up my nerve to do it.
4. The three artists most likely to be playing on my computer at home are Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan. Somehow, a while back, I convinced myself I liked their music, and now I actually do.
5. I used to race cars - specifically, a Spec Racer Ford in SCCA club racing.
Ok…now I get to spread the fun. There are a bunch of NewsGator folks with blogs now, I just _know_ they will love doing this, and I’ll get to see their faces when they realize they have to. :-) So my gift of meme goes to John Carmichael, Karyn German, Brian Reischl, Glenn Berry, and Anita Taylor.
Category: Uncategorized |
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December 19th, 2006 by gregr
…your first server running your startup company, that is.
Back in March of 2003, I was just about fed up with the reliability of shared hosting for www.newsgator.com - and sometime thereafter, purchased some hardware of my own and moved it to the colocation facility at ViaWest. There were two servers back then, running the whole enchilada - one Dell PowerEdge 1650 for the web site, and a PowerEdge 2650 for the database, both purchased secondhand from a former client of mine.
The 1650 running the web site had two processors, and two physical disks mirrored by software in Windows Server. Never mind that I had no idea how to boot off of the backup drive if it became necessary; I just felt better knowing there was a mirror.
The 2650 was also two processors, and had three drives in a RAID 5 array. Omigosh, this beast was definitely going to be able to run the SQL database for a while. Or so I thought. :-)
The online site was pretty much just a sales brochure and commerce site through the end of 2003; but in January 2004, what is now called NewsGator Online was launched, and the traffic (and load) started building quickly. Here is a snapshot, courtesy archive.org, of the original NewsGator Online services site - being run by these two machines.
The sites quickly outgrew those original machines…but I still have a soft spot in my heart for them. Especially the 1650 web server, for some reason. That server, still affectionally named with its original name, still lives in our data center. The only thing still running on it is my weblog - but that’s ok.
Imagine my surprise when it lost one of its disks, and one of our operations guys asked me if we could just move my blog to another server and retire that box. Ha…I think the words out of my mouth were something like “over my dead body!”
Ahh…you never forget your first server.
Category: newsgator |
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December 14th, 2006 by gregr
We’ve rolled out some new views in NewsGator Online. The new options are:
Summary view – this displays a short excerpt of each article, including a “+” expando button to expand the full text of the article.
Headline view – similar to summary view, this shows just the headline from each article, along with the expando button.
Some more detail on the new views is in this NewsGator forum post.
Both of these views were inspired by user requests, many of which came from FeedDemon users who had been using these views for quite some time. They’re highly efficient for reading lots of stuff – I encourage you to give them a try.
At the same time, we’ve rolled out advertising in the NewsGator Online web reader. Ads are shown alongside excerpted articles only; we do not show advertising against publishers’ full-text content.
We’d love to hear your feedback about the new views – let us know what you think, and whether the new views work for you!
Category: newsgator |
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