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[Not news] [Blog stuff] Just a small thank you note to everyone

| Feb. 21, 2021 746 views  |  Comments are off.  

Skip this if you’re here for PAD news only, no news here, but just some behind-the-scene things like a real blog.

Featured pic: Valkyrie with mask on a break, by Shinnosuke Hino.

Tl;dr: Thanks for bearing with this awful, fail-level site owner.

Stream recap post crashed the site

We knew walking in it’ll be a long stream for anniversary, but what I didn’t see coming was site spitting error at me. Those who has been on blog since 2018 probably remember how anniversary stream always led to site death, this year was no exception, but it was definitely worse than what I remembered.

I literally sat at the computer trying to update the stream post for 45 minutes straight with no luck. Clicked “update post” and was immediately greeted with that 500 Internet Server Error. Press back on browser (uh bad idea usually), and repeat process for miracle.

When this happened in 2018, I could intermittently update the post between the errors. 2021 Blogging Mama is way higher in traffic, and the error becomes way more frequent.

Sad times.

Desperate measures led me to pull the plug and shut the site for a while.

I have not done this since a year ago, since the other incident when site crashed hard. During this down time, I actually put up a note asking for help since I was banging my head on the wall already. While waiting, the lower traffic allowed me to successfully update the stream post (the irony).

The solution?

Thank you for those who reached out to me to offer possible solutions and gave me some pointers. To name a few, Cate, River, Esti, and Shadowvenger were god-send in helping me emotionally and technologically. With the suggestions, I did the first logical thing – Contact site support.

This was at 2am, and thankfully they gave me a temporary solution which worked for the time being. Next morning, I went ahead and disabled a whole bunch of unnecessary codes, plus reinstalled some things. That worked – I have not seen the error so far.

In other words, I turned the site off and on again and it seems fine again.

I do believe that there are some plugins or spaghetti coding conflicts behind the scenes that caused all this, and it definitely didn’t help that I was constantly updating the stream post and increased the load on site.

So really, I caused all the problems (as usual), lol.

Going forward, what now

Stream recap posts. They really are different from the news details post – Much more hype, much fun, and occasionally with information left out in posts. A package of excitement.

The downside to them, though, is that always a huge time sink to make the posts. Screenshot, translate, and summarize/format nicely while paying attention to things verbally mentioned the stream. Then we add site errors to the mix, while trying to everything as “live” as possible. Just too much stress. So I came up with a really obvious solution…

Starting from next stream, instead of doing “live” updates, I’ll just put up the post when the stream content is done, and all information in place.

I think that will put a bit less stress on both the site and myself, but still have the stream recap for everyone to read and enjoy.

Another thank you

Just to end this with a really positive note for everyone:

Thank you for all the donors and Patreons for all donations – I woke up in shock (nearly in tears too)!

Thank you for all the comments on the stream post. I do see every single one of them, and they are really heartwarming (especially the recent one telling me to go sleep).

Thank you for those who reached out to me to offer possible solutions and gave me some pointers. To name a few, Cate, River, Estina, and ShadowVenger were god-send in helping me emotionally and technologically.

Without you all, I probably would’ve quit ages ago. Thanks for keeping me going with this.

That’s all, back to staring at Marvellous Marvel! (and I’m going to bed finally – Hopefully the post is actually readable, I’m sleeeeepy)

Published by Reni

Site owner, PDX moderator, Miru Bot/Tsubotki admin. Always Pikapika and Tamatama. Still struggling with Japanese. NA main (Rank 950+) with JP alt (Rank 960+). Super busy transitioning to her new job and moving. zzz

29 Replies to “[Not news] [Blog stuff] Just a small thank you note to everyone”

  4. Um, you and the staff are total badasses! Any info I get -during- the stream is just a bonus to me, I’m pretty happy if things are up the next day. Thanks so much for all the work!!! (I just signed up to the Patreon, thanks for mentioning it!)

  7. We really appreciate all the work you do!

    I wouldn’t mind slower updates, you guys do sooo much for the community

  8. We love you! You put so much effort into the helping the community for a little puzzle game that really does mean a lot to us. God bless your tender heart.

  9. Suggestion, use Cloudflare. For additional better caching, try plugin called WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache. Seriously Cloudflare cut CPU resource so your site could handle larger traffic with ease. This also cut bandwidth because most asset especially image will be cached. If you not sure how to setup, just contact bluehost.

    1. Looked into it a while back except that Bluehost needs the Platinum version of Cloudflare for SSL to work. I tried it once and it was… a night of chaos to deal with to undo changes.

  10. I wouldn’t put too much stress on yourself to get streams done live.

    You do a great service for the Pad community and it should be done on your own terms. If English PAD users can’t patiently wait for your wright up, than they will have to put in the effort to learn Japanese so they can translate it for themselves. <3

  11. I’m happy if streams are done afterwards and not live – appreciate all your effort and hard work

  12. Thank you so much for your efforts!!!! I’ve been using this site ever since it was created and it helped me through a lot of jp news that I couldn’t read. Please keep up the good work!! 🙂

  13. Your hard work is appreciated! I really hope you know that we appreciate this blog and what you do. I could never put this information or do a fraction of the things that you do here. Thank you again.

  14. “Starting from next stream, instead of doing “live” updates, I’ll just put up the post when the stream content is done, and all information in place.”

    Thank you so much for even doing this! I am really grateful to even get to read a summary of the stream in English! Thank you TL team and Reni!
    😀

  16. Thank you so much Reni (and all at Blogging Mama). I really enjoy your work, which has helped me so much with PaD. No live during big events is a good idea in my opinion. There is just too much info and I don’t mind waiting, especially as it may limit the risk of big IT issues.

  17. We stand behind you one hundred percent with this decision. Your mental and physical health is of the utmost importance. We can all live without live translations. The excitement we have will certainly not die down. Speaking as someone who usually watches the streams live, I get a second round of excitement to see how much of the Japanese I managed to catch, and what I missed. Getting the translations on a delay is no problem at all.

  19. Thank you for the translations, Reni!! You and your team are very excellent at what you do. Apart from this site, you also have the discord server to manage. Honestly, without you guys none of us NA players would be able to play a PAD JP without understanding Japanese. Hopefully you find a a much easier for or an alternative way to do this to give you more space in your life.

    Again, we thank you for your dedicated work!

  20. Reniiiiiii
    ily please don’t stress yourself doing live updates
    and also please go to sleep by 1 am and just generally take care of yourself the blog can wait

  21. Appreciate all the hard work!! Really helps for NA players on knowing what may come in the future 🙂

  22. yea, serously don’t worry about coming here after you been posting for what seems like 24 hours stright, to respond to people who are telling you about spelling and grammer and minor issues. Like you were saying mistakes are inevitable. Don’t feel like your forced to do this. And if its becoming too much, just take a break. Honestly PADX went down for a few months and we were fine. It’s ok to take a break Reni

  23. We appreciate all that you do! Honestly I don’t read these posts for instant, live news; I think that you taking time and just posting when it’s done instead of trying to go through the hassle of updating repeatedly… that makes sense! And you should totally do that.

  25. Thank you all so much for everything you do. Everyone that contributes to this blog has made my PaD experience so much easier and way more fun. You guys are saints and your hard work is greatly appreciated by all of us.

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