Video
Video not working? Watch it at DeafVIDEO.TV
Hello Long time no SEE!
I’ve made a few posts lately but none of them were vlogs for the past month or so. When you’re busy, vlogs are harder to produce as they take more time. Also, those posts weren’t as important as others, so when I need to reach out to a wider audience, because of its importance, I try to make it into a vlog. So yes, I wanted to make this post into a vlog.
There have been a couple of blogs that had a concern about not being included in DeafRead. We have no reason not to include them–unless. There is one blog that was banned almost a year ago. The blogger harassed in e-mails sent to Human Editors. It was unhealthy for our team. We tried to deal with the blogger–diplomatically. Even during this time, we continued to publish entries by this blogger. But when started receiving harassing e-mails, that was the end. Thus the ban. We continued to receive harassing e-mails some months later from this blogger. Unfortunate.
That’s the only blog that’s been banned in almost two years. Since then, it’s been smooth sailing. There’s been no reason to expel a blog from DeafRead–our tolerance is HIGH. We realize that the moment we start censoring–people will have grounds to question our neutrality and trust. We certainly do not want to go into that direction. We care about DeafRead and know that changing our policy could result in its demise.
We run DeafRead on a dedicated web server. This means a whole server is almost fully dedicated to DeafRead. A server is layered in “racks” in a data center. This single server is quite powerful and is not shared with other websites (that are outside our control)–which eat away at our server demands. Only a few websites run on this server, leaving abundant power to DeafRead.
Here’s the reason why DeafRead requires a lot of server power: the RSS feed fetches that we do hourly. We subscribe to between 450 and 500 feeds. When DeafRead is fetching RSS feeds, it uses a lot of memory and CPU power. If we ran on a less powerful server, it would impact the speed at which you are able to visit DeafRead because the server is slowed down, possibly crashing it.
Our server “guy” let Jared and I know that it was hard on the server when feeds are checked for new entries. So we worked to make the code more efficient and to take less time to execute. When we are checking approximately 500 feeds, it can take as long as 6 minutes. The script is quite fast, but when you have this many feeds, it does take time. One strategy we thought of, to reduce the processing time, was to skip feeds that hadn’t been written in months.
(If your blog was de-activated after being quiet for some months, let us know by e-mail and we can easily re-activate it. We just need to be notified.)
To reduce the number of blogs, we suspended subscriptions to approximately 40 blogs that were “dead” or, rather, on haitus. 
We continued to list inactive blogs on our DeafRead Subscriptions page because we still wanted to send traffic their way, although they hadn’t been written to in a while. This page has been re-vamped.
Active blogs appear on the top of DeafRead Subscriptions, and on the bottom, there is a separate section that lists inactive blogs. Currently, there are approximately 153 inactive blogs at DeafRead.
If you write to your blog after a long period of silence, here are the steps to take:
- Is your blog in the active subscription list? If not, e-mail us!
- Is your feed working? At your DeafRead Profile, click “Check now”. Example DeafRead Profile
- Was your entry published to DeafRead Extra? We publish everything–either to DeafRead or DeafRead Extra.
- If your blog is marked as inactive, wait 24 hours or more. Our new script that checks inactive feeds runs once daily. More about this below.
Regarding #4, it is rare that we completely delete an entry. Since the deletion feature was added, I think there’s been only 2 or 3 entries that was completely deleted. They are extreme cases. For example, pornography will be deleted. We cannot publish pornography at DeafRead or DeafRead Extra.
If your blog is active, the blog’s RSS feed working, and the entry not in DeafRead Extra, and it’s still not appearing on DeafRead, notify us and we will gladly look into it for you!
Here’s the link to the inactive blogs list on DeafRead Subscriptions.
I forgot to add one more thing. Today, I added a new script. Like I said earlier, active blogs are checked hourly for new entries. The new script will check inactive blogs every 24 hours. We are fetching new entries on active blogs each hour as usual; and now are checking inactive feeds too, only once a day.
In this case, if you’ve written to your inactive blog right after this script has checked your feed, you will need to wait a full 24 hour before it is picked up. Also consider the time it will take for Human Editors to login and moderate incoming posts.
So we are now checking ALL feeds, whether they are active or not. Those that are inactive will be checked less frequently–once a day. I hope this solves the issue!
Watch for another post coming sooooon!
As for the hidden feature, first notice that the box showing the numbers of “hits” is no longer labeled with “views” but rather with “visits”. This is a more accurate label because if I visit a link twice, the counter increments only once. If we displayed “views”, it would increment once for each click, which opens itself to abuse.
