By Jared Evans on Sunday, October 8th, 2006

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all the blogs that have been publishing plenty of content to keep the rest of the world in the loop about all the recent events! We know that it’s hard work to keep on writing high quality blog posts, especially during times of stressful conditions. We take our hats off to you all and salute you.

Automation saves the day!
We were happy to see that the programming codes that Tayler and I have fine-tuned over the last few months have been sufficiently battle-tested. We were fully prepared to handle the deluge of posts arriving in waves after waves.

We have automated our systems as much as possible so that DeafRead can stay on the top of the game and lead the way for all the Deaf blogs. Often, we have been able to easily process all the new posts within minutes after they have been published at their original blogs. The automation also has afforded us the luxury of adding new features to DeafRead even during the times of heightened activity.

Throughout the whole week of hyperactivity among the blogs, DeafRead was down for about 5 minutes when the database crashed on Friday morning but since then we have been able to keep it up and running. We are keeping a sharp eye on the server to ensure that it continues to serve all of your reading pleasures.

Powerful effects of networked Deaf blogs
We are excited to demonstrate for the Deaf Community the power of the networked Deaf blogs and how they can help each other get the word out quickly to many people. Despite the greater number of blogs covering the recent events at Gallaudet University, the number of hits has increased for everyone across the board. We, at DeafRead, don’t view the Deaf blogs as competitors to each other but rather as a strong collective that help lift everyone to the next level. No one is stealing traffic from others, but rather sending even more traffic to each other. It is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved at DeafRead.

We would also like to give our special congratulation to RidorLIVE for reaching over 20,000 hits on Oct 6th, 2006. We believe that Ricky has made history as being the first Deaf blogger to enter the exclusive club of “A-list” bloggers (at least 20,000-30,000 hits per day). We are all in together for the long haul!

Systems stayed up and running!
Being programmers and system administrators ourselves, we know what a thankless job it is for system administrators, especially when everything continues to work flawlessly. It’s when a good system administrator ensures that systems run so smoothly that it becomes too easy for people over time to forget that it takes a lot of hard work to make this happen.

We would like to thank the system administrators of Crazy Web Hosting for making sure that our server keeps chugging along without any major downtime!

Lastly of all, we also thank our loyal fans who have kept sending in words of encouragement. The messages help keep us going as well as the donations we have been receiving. We particularly enjoyed the fan vlogs that were created last week!