Not just a message board

I am not sure how much exploring you have done on our little network, but I wanted to bring to your attention the fact that this is not just a message board. The software we are using provides a social network that is kind of like Facebook in many ways. I know what the world does *not* need is yet another social network, but the thinking behind this being here is that you might want to be sharing stuff that is dharma-related that you might not want to share with your "other" friends.

So please feel free to check out what is under the "Share" menu item.

Related to this, is there something else you would like to see? You can, for example, see that I have a placeholder for a learning wiki, where we might collect information about stuff relevant to the dharma or awakening. But I can see that as being a bit redundant, too, with other outside resources. Comments on that are very welcome.

We are also contemplating enabling blogging. This is also a potentially redundant thing since some of you have your own personal blogs. But part of me is very attracted to the "casual blog", where you don't write on a very regular basis because you (a) don't have the time, or (b) have that much to say. My model for this is medium.com, and I would love to get something like that going here. So "your" blog would actually be "the" blog, and you are a semi-regular (or highly irregular) contributor. Comments on that idea are also very welcome.

And, uh, any other comments are very, very welcome.

That is a possibility, Laurel, but we are looking at that specific problem from a number of different angles, the more automatic approaches being far preferable to the manual ones.

Mike (and everyone) we do have rules here. You can read them on this page: www.awakenetwork.org/index.php/forum/rules

We do not claim ownership of your words. You own those. You can repost what you say here anywhere you want, although we'd appreciate it if you'd put in a good word for us when you do that.

Fair?

Feedback?

Constance, can you tell me if you are on broadband? No one has mentioned the timeouts before, although the site is slow - we plan to upgrade to a higher bandwidth Amazon hosting service soon to ameliorate that.

Can you describe a little more what "sensitive" and "hyper" mean in relation to the interface?

As for where to post your movie review, I'd do that here:

awakenetwork.org/index.php/forum/105-rea...wing-recommendations

Okay, thanks.

I get the 2-3 second delay as well. Not all the time but about 95% of the time. Maybe there is a caching issue. That said, bandwidth tends to help with a lot of ills.

I'll try the site from my iPad today and see how that goes, too.

andy wrote:

Chris Marti wrote: ...although the site is slow - we plan to upgrade to a higher bandwidth Amazon hosting service soon to ameliorate that.

I notice a lag of about 2-3 second when clicking on pretty much anything in the site. I wonder if there is something on the database or forum backend that is sufferering some sort of delay. The page itself downloads and renders almost instantly once the delay is over, so I'm not sure higher bandwidth would help that.

Just to be clear, when we are talking about beefing up the back-end resources at Amazon, it is not network bandwidth that we are talking about. Rather, it is the size of the virtual instance the server is running on: a bigger CPU. There are a number of things I can do to make the system perform better, and the nice thing about Amazon is that you essential get what you pay for. You need more power? No problem. But each boost costs incrementally more, and it is a little tough to justify the additional cost as present.

Not bandwidth, CPU - check.

I'm getting faster load times now, although there is still a slight delay when I navigate from place to place.

Russell wrote: On this page I got (at the bottom) "Time to create page: 5.98 seconds"

That's really long in internet load times. I am on a 50Mbps connection.

What is the server running on now. I can offer my Virtual Private Server for you to test on if you want. I can install the platform and see how it loads. It is just Joomla with Kunena, right?

Russell,

For me, the "time to create page is under 4s", but regardless, the issue here is clearly one of server horsepower. Once constructed, the page should load/render very quickly, so unless you are on dialup your personal pipe size is probably not a factor at all.

Yes, it is Joomla and Kunena (and MySQL, of course), all running on a moderately small AWS instance. Where is your VPS hosted? We could install there and run a head-to-head comparison, if you are offering it up as a permanent home.

If we stay on AWS, we can double the horsepower and see if that helps significantly, and if I wanted to get really fancy I would separate the database and web server. But that all costs something, and for the most part Chris and I are footing the bill here so we are kind of sensitive to anything that increases our costs.

Perspective --

We moved here from a free message board system because we wanted to avoid the disaster that just occcurred to KFD; a faceless company that runs free message boards one day deciding to clean house for unknown, unstated reasons and deleting all our precious content. We purchased and opened this domain, we were careful to move almost every post (we missed a few because of glitches on the host's side and their failure to reply to our requests for more recent backups) and Tom and I have since been footing the bill for the AWS services this site runs on. The good part is we own this place and can't be shut down or deleted by an uncaring host. We did all this because we believe in what we're doing and believe it has a lot of value for a fair number of people, including us.

Agreed, this is not the fastest website around, and offers of server space and technical assistance are welcome. Also welcome are donations to help both defray our current cost of operation and future enhancements.