Since we re-launched back in November 2007 we’ve been busy scouring the web for some the most talked about, and most popular stories affecting gay communities around the world. We’ve covered everything from the drawn out US Primaries to Heinz pulling one of their tv ads (because a few people complained of a two gay [...]
Last month we covered a story by Clay Cane discussing how the media has had an effect on the evolution of the ballroom scene. As a follow up, Current TV got in touch with QueensSpeech to let us know about a short film that they had just produced on gay ballroom dancing in Hollywood. We’ve [...]
Finally, we’ve successfully rolled out Caching Phase II. Although we were happy with the speed increase introduced with the first phase of the caching engine, we still were experiencing slow load times with the popular tags module. This was particularly bad on the homepage where we display popular tags from the last seven days. Since [...]
We have now activated a simple caching engine on the homepage and all other pages featuring ‘most read’ and tagged content. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a continued increase in load on our servers due to an rapid increase in visitor count. This, unfortunately on some days, caused QueensSpeech.com to slow down to [...]
We’ve quietly rolled out a simple but powerful tagging feature on all aggregated stories. Every time a new story is found and published, we evaluate the content and then look to identify appropriate tags (Wikipedia definition) to attach to the story. This helps create contextual relationships between similar stories by using one or more keywords [...]
Following yesterday’s rather large traffic day, we have permanently upgraded the capacity of our main hosting environment. Our traffic has been progressively increasing, but yesterdays’ surge caught us by surprise. Therefore we have taken the decision to add new new hardware to cope with this increased demand.
We are currently experiencing extremely high traffic on our main hosting server - which is causing a slow down to page load times. We have doubled the capacity of the server this evening and are now looking into optimising the database even further. Please bear with us.
[Update] We have removed several intensive database queries off [...]
You can now follow our daily thoughts and stumblings on Twitter. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that in the current words of Wikipedia is
“a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed [...]
We have just launched a dedicated RSS feeds page that allows you to subscribe to content from each of our six main categories which includes Gay News, Opinion, Gossip, Blogs, Sexy and Adult. So now it’s even easier to subscribe and view the content which interests you the most.
Take a look: http://queensspeech.com/feeds
Yesterday evening the LLGFF (London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) opened with a diverse range of shorts and high profile queer-centric film and documentary. I’ve listed some of the festival highlights below:
Tied Hands
Uzi, a gay former dancer dying of Aids, is being nursed through his final days by his mother in her Tel Aviv apartment. [...]