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Queens Speech reaches 100,000 story milestone!
July 17, 2008 – 3:58 pm
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 men being portrayed as a ‘normal’ couple).
Now we’re delighted to announce that we’ve passed the 100,000 stories mark! That’s over 100,000 stories, fully searchable, categorised and available on QueensSpeech for you to read and enjoy. We’ve also increased the number of information sources that we search (every hour), tripled the capacity of our hosting servers (to improve page loading times) and we currently have a range of exciting new features in development - which we’ll be announcing over the coming months.
We still have a long way to go, and lots of work ahead of us. But for now, a very big thank you to everyone that has helped and contributed to the project so far!
Same sex ChaChaCha
July 13, 2008 – 5:30 am
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 been fans of Current Tv for quite some time, so we thought we’d share their video, Same Sex ChaChaCha, with you.
The original story by Clay Cane can be found on the Media Rights website.
Caching Phase II Launched
July 6, 2008 – 4:52 pm
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 rolling out Caching Phase II, we are now experiencing acceptable speeds across the network - a marked improvement on recent weeks!
Caching now enabled
June 7, 2008 – 5:56 pm
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 an unacceptable level. Even though we’d upgraded our main hosting servers, the extra traffic almost cancelled out the new hardware installation.
After reviewing both commercial and open source caching solutions on the market, we decided instead to develop our own simple caching engine, with the overall goal to decrease the number of dynamic calls to the database.
Phase I - we cached articles the homepage and ‘most read’ content blocks. In Phase II we launched caching on the ‘tag content blocks’. I’m pleased to say that since both phases have been rolled out, load on the servers has decreased. http://queensspeech.com now performs a lot lot better, with pages loading much faster and rendering times greatly reduced.
New tagging engine now available on QueensSpeech.com
June 2, 2008 – 12:58 pm
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 to connect the items. When you select one of the tags, you’ll be presented with a summary of all other content ‘tagged’ with that keyword or phrase (example).
We’ve also created a ‘tags overview page‘ which provides a visual summary of the most popular topics and conversations published across the QueensSpeech network. The page is broken down to most popular subjects for today, this week and all time. The larger the font used by a tag, the more stories that have been tagged with that phrase.
More tag related functions will be introduced over the coming months.
QueensSpeech Server Performance Boosted
April 29, 2008 – 4:49 pm
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.
Dramatic increase in traffic affecting servers
April 28, 2008 – 6:55 pm
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 the server until a full optimisation review can be completed. The site should now perform to an acceptable level. Thanks for your patience.
The Queen is on Twitter
April 21, 2008 – 3:21 pm
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 by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. “
So why are we doing this? Well sometimes we may want to discuss or promote something that doesn’t warrant a full blog post. It may prove to be a complete waste of time, however so far we have been lucky enough to meet some really cool individuals lurking in the depths of the Twit network. Here are some great people to follow:
- http://twitter.com/LuisDrayton
- http://twitter.com/ryeseronie
- http://twitter.com/morwyn
- http://twitter.com/xenijardin
You can follow QueensSpeech here. Why not make friends and follow us? Please send a message to @queenspeech if you do, we’d love to meet you.
Dedicated RSS Feeds Page Launched on QueensSpeech.com
April 6, 2008 – 4:02 pm
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