Upgrades and hiccups

Matthew Stoops
September 25, 2009 | 1 Comments

Hi, it's me, Matthew, part of the Development and I.T. team at RenewableEnergyWorld.com, coming out of my cave to say hello for the first time since I started here 6 1/2 years ago (how many people remember SolarAccess.com?). I would like to use my first blog post to give a general system update, and an an apology.

On Tuesday night, we migrated to a new server, which has given us a much-needed power boost over the old system, which has served us for the last three years.::continue::

I'm one of those geeky people who gets fired up about 15,000 RPM SCSI drives configured in a RAID-10 array, quad-core Xeon processors, lots of RAM and Linux.

What does this mean to you?

Simply a much better user experience on our site. We've experience some growing pains, especially over the last year, because our traffic has increased so dramatically. I'm sure we've all groaned on a Wednesday or Friday when the site has started to crawl because our weekly Renewable Energy e-Newsletter has brought so much traffic back to the server. Hopefully those days are gone for good. We've still got a ways to go, optimizing other places on our site -- off-site Javascript calls that block a page-load, figuring how to serve ads without too much of a performance hit, database queries that need more optimization, as well as server and database engine tuning. But we're getting there. Stick with us, things are only going to get better.

And my apology. Sometime between the roll-out on Tuesday and early Thursday (tired, cannot remember), I made a 'small' change that was supposed to have fixed an issue, but ended up breaking things for some Internet Explorer users. Of course I've pushed Firefox in our office, so we didn't really uncover the root issue until today. Hopefully now, I've exorcised our last big demon (Unix users would have me use daemon), so here's to smooth sailing from here on out...

Matthew

The information and views expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of RenewableEnergyWorld.com or the companies that advertise on this Web site and other publications. This blog was posted directly by the author and was not reviewed for accuracy, spelling or grammar.

1 Comments

Thomas Prendergast
October 7, 2009

I have been around solar energy for over 20 years. I have over the past 5 years made more money betting people when Solar would be come viable. The biggest problem now is the manufactures. They have been in love with California and others living in the south west. It seems they forget that the USA has many areas that would actually be better then that area. I commend those states for their push to get Solar and to keep it as their baby. I have noticed a small but steady increase in Solar in the South east , But , I notice that New England and New Jersey are moving much faster than the rest of the Eastern States. I decided to jump into the Solar business from Bio-diesal , Not letting that go, but a two edge sward always works better. I found the biggest problem was a work force of Installers. I had to create my own school and then worked with the Commonwealth to formulate a certification. The next problem is getting the Solar Manufactures to take us on as viable customers. I thought that a great credit score , education and a large pile of Orders would help. O, I forgot , cash that would carry this company into the next 10 years. I don't know what else I have to do ,but I am leaving the USA to companies that will work with me. That is what is wrong with the USA Solar Industry. Tom

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Matthew Stoops

A number of years ago, I decided to leave the corporate computer industry and go into Renewable Energy. I took courses at Solar Energy International in Colorado, and following that found a couple jobs, where I worked in many capacities,...