The Shures Network

On 11-12-2010, the Shures Network will be 10 years old. We’ve been here together through the hard times and the pain. On this day, I’ll have to celebrate you baby like I should.

I’ve completely revamped the Shures Network website. I hope you like the changes.

It’s lean and clean and now loaded with nothing but Shures content.

When a website gets featured on a popular social network, thousands of visitors may start flooding to your website. To prevent yourself from ending up like the others whose servers die when this happens, you need to plan ahead and take the steps necessary to streamline your website.

To prepare in case, I have implemented bandwidth and server load conservation for this site. I installed the WP-Cache wordpress plugin to turn the dynamic PHP pages into static HTML. I also recently switched the default background to plain white. These two changes along with the Custom Query String plug-in I’m using should do the trick.

I think we are prepared for any Digg Effect.

By default, WordPress only has a global setting to control how many posts show up on each page. For small sites, this is fine. But as the multimedia heavy Shures Network website has grown in size, I’ve struggled with how to keep the home pages loading fast but also have all the archived content easily visible to visitors.

I tried using the < ?php query_posts('posts_per_page=X');?> command in my PHP files, but had trouble implementing it correctly. It works to control the posts per page, but caused other things to break.

After doing much soul searching, I finally ran across and installed the “Custom Query String” plugin. It works like a charm. I’m now able to individually control how many posts are shown in each area of the site.

After getting inundated with spam in the Shures Network shoutbox, I was considering removing it. But Pierre from France was kind enough to leave me a shout about his improved version with spam filtering. It interfaces with WordPress’s comment moderation and blacklists to ban or block undesirable shouts.

So far, after implementing the new code, 97.4% of my shoutbox spam is now being blocked. For some reason, a few are still being able to slip by with words that are on the blacklist. I’m sure this number will improve once my list of moderated IPs grows to encompass the shoutbox spammers.

Did you notice the new URL’s in your address bar? Try a catagory to see what the new links look like.

I turned on WordPress custom permalinks to make this site more browser and search engine friendly. I had to due a little Googling to get it working, but the final solution was easy. I just needed to change the Apache web server configuration file httpd.conf to AllowOverrides for the .htaccess entries needed by the mod_rewrite module.

Controlling software in Linux in a breeze. Most of the time, all you have to do is edit a text configuration file or two. Then restart the service (program) to implement the changes. The Shures Network runs on an all open source Linux platform.

The Shures Network is coming in strong in the search engine races.
It’s in the top 5 for most of them.

Search results for “Shures”.

Google : #2
Yahoo : #4
MSN : #1
Ask Jeeves : #2
AOL : #2
Altavista : #4
Netscape : #2
DMOZ : #0
Alltheweb : #4
Dogpile : #1

Try it.