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 [...]
This week we passed the 30,000 articles mark! - the number of individual stories we are tracking across the QueensSpeech social publishing network. To support this increased number, our in-house analytics application is now tracking over 770,000 events relating to those articles.
I’ll be spending the next few days re-optimising the caching system used on our [...]
This week we’ve added the search bar (top right of the screen), this will allow you to search through the 18,000 stories on QueensSpeech, and growing daily. We hope that you will be able to utilise this vast resource of news, views opinion, gossip and much more to find stories of interest to you.
We are [...]
We have recently launched a new feature in the News, Gossip, Opinion, Sexy and Adult sections which will make it much easier for you to find the freshest and most popular content published on QS.
Introducing the new ‘content filter’ bar:
by default, content published within the last 24hrs will be displayed in descending date order. You [...]
Last weekend we went live with our new ‘related’ stories feature. Now when viewing a story, directly underneath the summary you’ll see a list of up to 5 similar stories identified by QueensSpeech (view example).
We had originally been using Yahoo’s Search API to pull together this content, but in recent weeks the quality of Yahoo’s [...]