I’ve been rolling out several features behind the scenes that many of you most likely haven’t noticed just yet. But here they are:

Voting has it’s own table.
User networks have their own table.

This has caused a TON of changes behind the scenes with the code. I’ve had to change the profile pages almost completely along with the voting on each poem and pencushion page. Yeah, that’s only four pages, but it was a lot of code to work around.

Of course, that wasn’t all the trouble I had to go through to push these changes. I have a semi-new laptop which I got at an excellent price (gotta love duel core!). Stupid me, I didn’t have the MySQL database on my laptop. And with the database being as huge as it is… I couldn’t download it during the day because my ISP has a bandwidth cap except between 1am and 6am. So trying to stay up that late and actually remember downloading the database once I got there was a feat I had to conquer.

I ended up not bothering with installing MySQL on here, instead I opted for using XAMPP (which is a totally awesome lite server you can put on just about anything) on my 2gb memory stick I’ve had for several years now (you can get them for ~$10, mine was $65 when I bought it… oh how technology changes!).

I haven’t been coding as much as I’d like to lately, so trying to remember some things weren’t easy. Plus, stupid mistakes are my forté. I’ll think I have something finished and WAM! Stupid mistake which may take me a few hours to find–error logs be damned.

Hopefully everything is working fine. The members section should be faster now. But I don’t guarantee anything. The code was using less database selections and more code to make up for it. Now I am using more database and less code. So let’s see how this works out.

If you run into any problems or have some ideas, feel free to leave them below!

EDIT: Forgot to mention what the change on the MyCafe actually was. The MyPoems Comments actually works now, the Cafe voted now uses the new database table, and cafe commented now includes your new network friends as opposed to your old ones.

The page seems to load in the exact same time as before with the added MyPoems Comments. With the old table, MyPoems Comments was taking up to 3 minutes to query–lots of resources used. That’s why it was “out of order” until I could move some of the tables and recode some of the pages.

I’ve been a bit lazy updating this blog on what has been going on over at PoemofQuotes.

The good thing is, I haven’t been all that lazy. I’ve simply decided you guys would appreciate what’s going on over there more than simple updates here.

Here’s what’s been going on the past few weeks:

• Tons of new content! More quotes, more holidays, more articles.
• A few back-end updates on the members side. Some of the editing has caused other problems, which I will definitely fix when I see them. Yes, you can now delete your poems.
• Changed the quote template. Now the quotes pages should be easier to read. I’m not guaranteeing that, however, since it’s still in the testing face.
• I will forever be working on the 503 errors. I know what the real problem is–lack of CPU and RAM–but I will continue to track down problematic code to hopefully act like a temporary fix until I can get a good server.
• Ever changing ads. I’ll be testing ads once again. I know, I hate it too!
• I’ve moved some content from this blog to the main website and I’ll probably be moving more sometime soon. Stuff on here can be hard to find and is ‘evergreen’ so there isn’t too much point to have it here. The next move might be the poetry. I think I may prefer all the poems to be in the same place.

If you’ve ever wondered where the majority of PoemofQuotes users connect from, here’s a nice little map to help.

Hmm… it’s a bit distorted, but click on the image and you’ll get a better view.

The World Cup starts in just a few days. If the US can take 1st in the opening groups, I really think they can get to the quarters… call me crazy, but just look at the teams they would have to play and tell me it isn’t at least possible.

Anyway, I created a World Cup quotes page just for this week. Check it out.

If you’ve ever visited PoemofQuotes through your mobile phone (besides the iPhone) you might have run into a few problems. The pages looked huge, you couldn’t find what you want, and the overall design looked amateurish at best.

That’s now changed–at least, hopefully. Mobile phones (aka cell phones) now have their own css template. A lot of things are stripped out, like navigation, images, and the side bars.

Not only are the pages “cleaner” but the pages are also easier to read! Hopefully this helps you out when you are away from home/school/work and feel like reading some poetry!

Memorial Day may be tomorrow, but Father’s Day is coming on fast. There are hundreds of different pages to view about fathers, but I just created a few more!

First, you can see all the Father’s Day pages here: Happy Father’s Day!

But if that’s not for you, you can check them out individually:

Father’s Day Presents – A gift guide to buying fathers that perfect gift.

Father’s Day Weekend – Father’s Day doesn’t have to be just one day, it can be three!

Father’s Day Humor – A “funny” story (even though it really isn’t) along with a few jokes involving fathers.

If Father’s Day is on your mind, you may also want to check out: Father’s Day dates, Kids Gift Ideas, and Father’s Day Activities

Of course, there’s always more coming! This is known as the “Father’s Day update”!

Lately I’ve been trying to find out new ways of keeping visitors on PoemofQuotes. Not only does it look good in the stats, but it also makes me feel better about the website.

This is what led me to read up on squeeze pages and what DoshDosh refers to as a reference page.

Anyway, I thought that would be great for the visitors of PoemofQuotes. I haven’t with everything yet, I’m just testing the waters.

So if you’d like to check out Like Poetry? then that would be great.

You might have noticed some major changes to PoemofQuotes over the past couple weeks.

There’s a not only a new design, but there are also quite a few changes under the hood you can’t see, but you definitely felt while browsing the site.

Here are a few of the changes:

• New colors.
• New header.
• The left moved to the right.
• The navigation changed to the top of the page.
• New intermediate pages such as Poetry, Quotes, and Poets
• New footer which includes links to all the major pages.
• Added zip compression for faster page downloads.
• Added increased cache support so loading of pages you’ve been to before is faster and smoother.
• Added the Poetry T-Shirts to every page.

As you can see, there have been a ton of stuff going on over at PoemofQuotes.

Sunday is Palm Sunday, so it’s the last Sunday before Easter. I hope everyone has bought their dye and egg stickers.

Other holidays this coming week include: Passover, April Fools’ Day, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Saturday. Phew, what a busy week!

So here are a few PofQ pages to get you going!

Palm Sunday quotes
Passover quotes
Funny April Fools’ Day quotes
Holy Thursday by William Blake
Funny Easter quotes

I hope everyone has a nice week!

Finally, I added a couple pages to PoemofQuotes! It’s a celebration, a cele-bration! Wah wah, yeah!

Alright, I’m not that excited. Well… maybe I am, but you don’t have to be. They are just a couple quote pages for the upcoming holidays:

Palm Sunday
and
Passover

So check them out!

Moving on…

I’ve also been working on a few more lenses over at Squidoo.

Here they are:
Gary R. Hess Lensography
Free Advice on Life (updated)
Free Advice on Grieving
Free Teen-Life Advice
Free Advice for Men

Yep, tons of new pages on Squidoo. Check them out and rate them if you like ‘em.