Yeah, I hate that too.

Anyways, it picked a reasonable time to be down.  Most visitors to site are in America and that would of made it go down between 11pm and 7am depending on where in America they were.  On a Sunday night that’s not so bad of a loss.

I am however glad that I have a cron job setup to “check the health” of my server though.  It was designed by my friend to help me survive getting slammed by traffic by kicking people off and restarting the web service so that new people could get to the site.  The bonus is that it determines server load by checking to see if it can load my site via the web.  So this morning I had 60 emails telling me that apache had restarted ever time that job had checked the site. 

I highly recommend a script like that to everybody who runs their own server.  Just cURL your own server with cron job and if unreachable restart apache. 

Anyways.  I have been adding lots of new features lately.  Most of them for my site moderators/admins, so it might not have been noticed by everybody else.  However site will soon be automated and have constant new stuff on it, as well as noticeable improvements in user experience and interaction with the site.

So everybody be sure to make an account on the site.  You login once and you will stay logged in for the next year so it shouldn’t be too much of a nuisance.  I am working to make Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts authenticate on my site as well.  Technically they already do, but I haven’t gotten them to “link together” with existing accounts, which I feel is important.  Still even though you don’t see it you can already connect to site with your Facebook and Google accounts.

So I have devised a method that will allow everybody to get what they want… Since nobody seems to have any problem sending me emails telling me all the stuff that I should be doing with my time.

1st you will notice the Priority list on the main page. It’s pretty hard to miss…. The top item I need to do to survive at this point, and it is taking 90% of my time since I am broke so I am advertising slowly by walking around and telling people that they need my services. Until income starts flowing nicely that one cannot be changed in priority unless a sizable donation comes in.

All other priorities can be moved up. It costs $1 to move an item up in priority, but it only moves one number. So if you want to move item 10 to number 2 then you would have to pay $8. However by doing this you will guarantee that I will work on that task within 48 hours and if the task is small enough I will complete it then.

Please note that all donors will also be logged and prominently displayed once I get the login / profile pages created for the site.

There are other things that can be done to support the site. One of them is picking a task and helping me with it. For example: I am more than happy to teach people where to find movies, and how to add them to this website. If a bunch of people were to add just a couple movies a day then I could remove it from my priority list all together!

If I get enough donations I will buy a better, faster server. NOTE: I won’t upgrade unless I am at least doubling my ram and processing power from what I have now, but this would make an amazing difference.

Either way, if you donate or want to help just use the contact form to send me an email. All help is appreciated and goes to support the site.

Thanks in advance,
TSA

You can break it down any way you want so if you visit a certain site now that has something that works really well or something that you know how it could work better and it could be good please write it down.

I plan to make this site integrate all the other big sites so that it is using the tools created by the other sites instead of trying to compete against them. So knowing your favorite sites and the aspects of them that you like will be very beneficial.

I am very devoted to this project and plan to get investors to help me hire staff and people to help me create this site. I will be hiring programmers, article writers, promoters and whatever else I deem needed.

Understand though, that I do not want a sloppy badly coded site like MySpace, I want a site that people will want to go on and contribute to, one that they will be proud to display their profiles on.

Anyways, now is your chance to get in on the ground floor of the ultimate website. You guys know I can build it (especially if I am getting paid), so just tell me what you want it to be!!!

[INSERT LOTS OF COMMENTS BELOW]

The catch is I am already working on 7 different projects for the site and my focus is so split that I can’t do it alone, and I can’t afford to keep running this website at a loss and spending most of my time on it. Figured if I had a staff it would be easy to make this site succeed and eventually profit since I pretty much own the word smartass (or smart ass, thesmartass etc..). However I am running low on funds and time to get this to work. So I need investors who can see my vision.

I thought about it and no matter how it works out getting money for a website called thesmartass would be difficult, but getting money for thesmartass based on plans to further develop it’s gray area content in the hopes to make profit would be a very hard task indeed.

When I started this site I really was a smartass, and had an answer for everything. As I have grown I have become less sarcastic and more focused on helping people to learn.

So I have rethought my approach. I will make a social network, but with a better goal of creating a site to help people to learn how to do everything as effectively as possible. You can learn anything on the internet now but you just find so much garbage. So I figure if I make a site where people can post educational books, videos, tools etc and the members can vote on what is the most effective and what sucks.

I will also be developing “apps” for the site like the one I was currently making for this site (Tripnosis) which will be a dreamachine that helps people to focus, meditate and explore higher states of consciousness. Anyways a lot of good stuff coming from me if I can get somebody to invest in me working on a website all day for a living. I will not abandon this site and it will become an affiliate with my other site which will probably make it become an even more fantastic version of what it already is. For now the development will be a little bit slower for the moment. I will keep you posted on both this site and my new site gr0wth.com!

Thanks for all your support.

Many years ago he sold me the rights to the Genesis emulator but promised updates, fixes and save support. None of which was provided because he decided to start making some other type of emulators and abandoned his old console emulators. Seriously the man is a genius to be able to create what he did, but I was always left dissatisfied having paid a large sum of money for a license that included updates and never getting a single update.

So lets hope he decides to continue to support the Sega emulator and possible make some more and maybe he has a better version of the TG16 emulator and I can license that. Of course to do so I would have to take donations as I already lose money on this site every month as it is.

Now previously I had a “fix” where I told you to edit about:config and search for caching and turn off memory caching. If you were doing that before you might want to turn it back on since it does speed up a couple websites to have it on. It was a very annoying bug in Firefox that had caused me to want memory caching off so I am glad they have fixed the bug.

Now I just need to fix everything else that’s broken :)

Good times ~

Now today I am also going through the old artwork and throwing it in a folder called “bored” so even when I mix the new artwork with the old stuff I will have cleaned out all the artwork I was bored of seeing. I mean I am not joking when I say there were 600 pieces of art on random, but if you visit the site every day like I do then you would know that it still likes to show you the same 40 pieces of art all the time for some crazy annoying reason.

I have seriously tried 3 different random scripts to fix this but there really is no such thing as a good random script. I need to write one myself that has some kind of memory so it knows how often it is spitting out the same artworks… Anyways that is for another day.

For now, if you don’t like the artwork that shows up click the artwork button to the upper left corner and change it. If your browser doesn’t load a new piece of artwork hold the shift key on the keyboard and click the browsers reload button. This will force it to reload my page without using the cached artwork.

Enjoy the new art ~ Soon it will be in a database and you can pick and chose only your favorite artists to show up.

Site has been down virtually all day. Now the hard drive for my server has been replaced and the data for it cloned to a different server.

So that’s one less issue for site to have.

Lets hope site stops having meltdowns, so I can work on it and then get it to the point where a new, better server could be purchased.

You load the games page and each game you load will very briefly use 1 to 3 % of the CPU power of my server. Once the game is loaded it is no longer using any of the server CPU and is just using your CPU. However ever since the additional traffic came to the site from collegehumor.com, 80% of my traffic just plays games. So if 90 people decided to load a game at the same time, the server flips out because it is using too much processing power and it prevents anything from working. So when this happens the site becomes unreachable and those people not able to load their games probably still can’t load the games.

So now, when too many people are doing things at once the web server will go off for a couple seconds, which will prevent whatever they were trying to load from working, however in a couple seconds they would be able to load their game and new people will still be able to get to the site.

Okay, it is obvious this is just a “quick fix” and not a real solution. I’m sure nobody likes it when apache is restarting and they can’t load their game or change page. So my more permanent solutions will be:

1) Cut down the CPU load of my games page. Hopefully the new design will do this, though honestly I have no idea if it’s the java applet or the current design causing the extra processor load, so new design may not fix it. This however will need to come pretty soon in case it is the design and the way the games load.

2) My dedicated server only has one processor. Seems as my site is getting more popular it can’t handle the extra traffic with just one processor. So I need a more expensive dedicated server with 3 times the ram and 4 times the processor. Funny thing though. I lose money on the site as it is paying for my current server. Not enough to bother me, but enough to not be willing to pay for the new server myself.

So as soon as I get the new games page up I will be looking for a good deal on a new dedicated server (I’d like to stay with current company as they don’t bitch about my content at all) however I WILL NOT buy it until I can get at least 2 months worth of the cost of a fast new server in donations.

Site is expanding, and I have been spending too much time trying to fix the speed instead of making new content. Not to mention that I have been working on the site and not on my computer repair business so I am starting to go broke :(

Anybody have a good cloning device?

Now the reason it was tricky to figure out is the control panel still said it was pointing to the correct path and why wouldn’t I trust my control panel? 

I will be leaving nasty posts on the control panel forum tonight.