I'm feeling pretty cranky today.  This week.  This month. Part of it has to do with not having had a single day off since Thanksgiving.  I even worked on Christmas day.  Every day. 7 days a week.  A few weeks ago I pulled a 111 hour week.  The last week or so I did over 80. I'm tired. Very tired. Last week I had to temporarily take down JoeUser since the site, which is not a business enterprise, eats up around 30% of the database bandwidth of our critical ...

The GalCiv II launch was a much greater success than we ever imagined. Of course, that also meant it was a much bigger load on the servers so we had to keep JoeUser.com down a little longer than we expected. But we're back now! Sorry for any inconvenience.

Due to the popularity of JoeUser.com, we're going to have to schedule a couple days of outage when GalCiv II launches so that all the database bandwidth is available for it.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

JoeUser.com is a pretty popular site.  Ranked in the top 20,000 websites worldwide, it gets a decent chunk of traffic. But compared to some of our other sites, it's a drop in the bucket. We had the site down today as we tried to narrow down what was eating up our database bandwidth. Answer: JoeUser. This Spring we're going to have to revisit how JoeUser is coded and figure out why it's so intensive.  Part of it has to do with how database driven it is.  The content you are s...

Merry Christmas everyone! It's hard to believe that we've been doing this now for over three years!  Wherever you are, have a wonderful holiday! And with that, whatcha get?

My younger son isn't doing so well with his academic career.  At least so far.  Luckily, it's just kindergarten.  But according to his teacher, he's at the very bottom of his class in both numbers and letters.  He's 5.  And can only count to 13.  Can't spell his name and hasn't quite gotten the whole alphabet down.  The teacher explained this to us in our parent-teacher conference. I asked, "Well, is it possible that he's...well...you know..just..dumb?"&...

Atrophe. I think that's how you spell it. I could look it up but that would be work. And that brings me to my problem - I've become so lazy that my muscles are starting to atrophe.  I think I should do something about that..but yet..the chair beckons..

Last night the master database became corrupt and one of the machines had a catastrophic failure.  I kind of "perfect storm" of failure -- two bad things on two seperate servers.  For a few hours, JoeUser ceased to exist. It was the worst case scenario. However, LUCKILY, we do daily backups on all your blogs. So this incident can at least provide some assurance that all your hard work, your thoughts and written record are being treated with respect and care. It does mean, however...

Okay, here's the deal.  It's okay for people to vent on THEIR blogs about things.  The main golden rule is that you may not put the person's real name or full handle into the title of an article (since JoeUser is so popular, what you write here ends up on Google pretty quickly). That said, you post it to the forums and then it becomes our business.  When you make an article, by default it has a checkbox that says "post to forums too".  If you're writing something that is e...

"Having your own business".  It's a phrase I have heard friends and others use.  But what most people think of when they say "Having your own business" is having a business that includes themselves and maybe a couple other guys. In nearly all cases of companies that have 30 or more employees, the company is founded either by venture capital or through a group of friends/associates who build the business together. My business I founded on my own.  I didn't have partners. ...

http://top500.feedster.com/ According to Feedster, JoeUser.com isn't in the top 500.  Which is surprising given our relative traffic. It makes me wonder how their system works. Perhaps we aren't even registered in there.  So I'm creating this blog item to make sure we are. No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:f531b608b914eec2d8483a525d3a2174

The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness.  It doesn't exist to encourage competition.  It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more. The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership.  It doesn't care what you write about.  It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative.  It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are.  It simply designed to promote thos...

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site.  Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log. I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant.  Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know...

Does JoeUser.com seem like it's faster? In the past week in the course of trying to fix the site, we (and by we I really mean T-Man and Alberto) have been working like madmen to optimize the site code to make it more efficient.  Hopefully, getting to articles and such feels a lot faster.  How does it feel to you? It should feel significantly faster so if it doesn't, let us know. Thanks!

JoeUser has been going up and down and up and down.  What's the deal? This is going to be a bit technical but we want you guys to know exactly what is happening. All Stardock community sites share the same underlying Stardock.net database structure.  Your UserID and Password will work on JU, GalCiv2.com, TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, SocietyGame.com, PoliticalMachine.com and even in Stardock.com's forums.  The same is true of the blogs/posts. When I write a blog...