Today has been circled in our Socialexis calendar for months with the code “TWL Bndl” in digital red marker. But we’ll get back to that.
A few months ago Alexis and the team launched a site designed to help writers called The Write Life. I was minimally involved in the first-time set up, as I was still coming on board with the team at the time. Right out of the gate, the site got more traffic than anything I’ve ever been a part of, quickly reaching 30,000 unique visitors in a month by October (its 4th month). That number has only trended upward, closing out nearly 90,000 unique visitors in February (a short month).
The secret sauce is that the content is really helpful and targeted toward an engaged niche on the web: people who want to make a living by writing.
A few months ago Lexi announced to a few team members her goal of launching a product bundle. It’s a bundle of digital products worth nearly $800 bundled together and sold for $79 for a few days only.
She tasked me with the “tech side” of delivering the digital product and shoring up the site to be able to handle a flood of traffic without crumpling under the server load. I was also on hand for minor website tweaks and extensive testing of sales flow.
I am proud to say that with the help of a few really smart people, we feel ready for a flood of traffic this morning.
So, tell all of your friends who are writers or want to be: this product bundle is a STEAL. Go pick up your bundle today. After 11:59 PM on Wednesday March 19th, 2014 you’ll have to go back to paying $800 for all these goodies.
But as the server-side tech guy, can I ask you all to form a single file line to visit the website, just in case?
Update 10:45 AM:The site is doing fantastically. Credit it to the Media Temple hosting and some sweet server-side tweaks we’ve put in place. I went ahead and upgraded the server to the level 4 tier just to be safe. It was literally less than 5 seconds before I saw this happen to the memory usage (the brown line) What a difference a few moments make.
Woohoo!
I prefer phones with no case, and only a screen protector.
My wife is far more prone to hand her high-end communications device to a three-year-old with peanut butter on his fingers than I am. Thus, we knew that getting her both a case and a screen protector was an inevitable part of the process of switching to Republic Wireless.
We got both case and a three-pack of screen protectors on Amazon (and thanks to our prime membership got the shipping for free). Disclosure: none of the links below are affiliate links thanks to North Carolina lawmakers and Amazon not playing nicely, though I do get a free screen protector from the manufacturer by leaving a review (not necessarily a positive one) on a public website.
Here’s a link to the case we got.
The short version of my review of the case: It’s very protective, but makes the buttons on the side extremely hard to push and sometimes the flash on the camera washes out photos by reflecting off of the case. That said, it’s well worth 7 bucks.
The screen protector is very good, and very easy to apply (given that I have a history as a professional applier, your individual results may vary. I’ll give you some insider tips in just a sec.) As long as you center up the protector, it does not interfere with this particular case.
Quick tutorial on applying the Halo screen protector
The key to applying the protector is two finger-length pieces of clear Scotch Magic Tape. Also extremely helpful is a can of compressed air. But the clear tape is mandatory.
In a well-lit area, clean off the surface of the phone as thoroughly as possible. Pay close attention to dust, as it is the primary bubble-culprit.
Peel off the first (phone facing) side of the protector’s packaging, and blow on the screen one last time to remove any dust. Center up the screen protector by gently folding it in half vertically to form a semi-circle (don’t crease it) and lining up the microphone cutout and the speaker cutouts. Allow the protector to come to rest on the screen by letting go of the two sides.
If you are some sort of magician, you’ll have gotten this right the first time. If you are like the rest of us, it’ll be slightly off center and have at least three bubbles on the screen despite your best efforts of getting the dust away. No matter if it’s centered up perfectly or bubble free, at this point I peel off the second piece of packaging.
If your screen protector looks good, congrats. You can stop reading and go work on your other magic tricks.
If there are bubbles, you’ll need your pieces of tape.
Use one piece of tape to pull the protector partly off the screen (if you are centered up correctly) or fully off the screen (if you need a total redo). Then, using the other piece of tape, isolate the dust particles causing bubbles, and use the tape to pick them up. Some will be on the screen and others will be on the protector.
Once you’ve gotten all the bits of dust, your protector will be virtually invisible. The Halo protector seems thus far to be quite durable, as we’ve wiped peanut butter off of ours several times.
The brochure for “being your own boss” has pictures of laptops overlooking beach-side cabana decking and a lot of creative latté foam art.
Here in the real world, being my own boss has meant pinching pennies and saying “no” or “not now” to a ton of opportunity. More accurately, it has meant putting my priorities front and center and evaluating every decision in light of how much money it will take to make it work.
As I sat in my apartment parking lot watching my boys ride their bikes down the pine straw-covered hill recently, I couldn’t help but take a deep breath and appreciate where we are right now.
For us, the keys have been a relatively crappy old minivan and prayer (not necessarily in that order).
We don’t have any car payments, we’ve never paid for cable TV, and the only debt we still have hanging around is the battered remnants of a student loan. That meant that when I was shown the door at my not-even-that-lucrative sales position, we had a little bit of wiggle room and that nobody was going to come haul the minivan off on a flatbed truck.
It’s amazing how freeing it is to not have a payment. I purchased a relatively high-end commuting bicycle a few months later for the cost of two oil changes and a set of tires on the minivan, and now not only do I get great exercise daily on my way to and from work, I am saving the $50 to $100 per month in gas. Related: my two boys will grow up with memories of riding bikes with their dad. Often.
Furthermore, being forced to look within a bike-commute’s radius for a new rental house means that even after our move we are still a stone’s throw from our church and the community there.
Saying “no” to a nice car or even a $150/month car payment has made room in my world for deeper connection with my wife, my kids, and my church. The only downside is the commute on mornings like today.
That’s after it warmed up about 10 degrees. I’ll not pretend I didn’t consider taking the minivan.
What payment can you eliminate in your life in order to make a family memory?
Here’s a snippet of the cover. Very well done stuff!I have access to a free copy, but I believe in what she is doing so I went and forked over the extra dollar to read it myself. I just spent the last hour or so breezing through it.
Spoiler alert: this book is refreshing.
The only critique I’ve got is that if you don’t know Lexi, you might come away from this thing thinking how impractical and pie-in-the-sky some of the ideas she shares are. Surely nobody could practically put into action the things she talks about, in the real world!
But if you do know Lexi, say for example you work alongside her every day, you’d know that she’s simply saying out loud what we see every day. This is her play book for actually enjoying her job.
The way Amazon works, they reward (and showcase) books that are popular, which makes them more popular. Launch day is crucial. The more people who buy it today, the better. Also, leaving a review helps tremendously.
I am not an Amazon affiliate (I live in North Carolina where that is impossible because our lawmakers live in 1998), so you can know that I am legitimately trying to help Alexis with her first e-book.
Think of your WordPress web site as a (relatively disorganized) drawer in your garage. In serving up a website, a browser and server work together to organize the contents of that drawer according to what a user wants to see. Each page has potentially dozens of resources associated with it, from tracking scripts to images to CSS files to php scripts. Each time a new resource is needed, it’s as though your web server is having to open the drawer, root around inside for the resource, and close the drawer.
Depending on the size of the resource and the bandwidth it takes to deliver it, you are often looking at “opening and closing the drawer” hundreds of times for even one page. Multiply that type of action with even a modest bump in traffic, and it’s easy to see why your $3/month hosting package crumples under the weight of your WordPress site.
What makes a WordPress site so great (usability, simplicity for even the most novice end user, etc) is precisely what makes it such a generally sluggish website platform, especially over time.
But that doesn’t have to be true, with the right planning and optimizing.
Our goal in optimizing the site is to take as many resources as you can and put them elsewhere. Think of it like an embedded YouTube video. Though it is appearing on your site, all of the bandwidth (the “opening and closing of the drawer”) is on YouTube’s side. The process I’ll outline below takes almost everything on your site and houses it on Amazon’s server, making Amazon open and close all those drawers for you. Your WordPress install will hum like the first day you read the words “Hello World!”
Amazon’s storage service is called Simple Storage Service, or S3 for short. Though not a true Content Delivery Network, it will act as one, serving content to users without taxing your server.
First off, this process does cost money. You have to have a card on file with Amazon to even sign up for the service. But, behold the costs I accumulated 14 days into my February billing cycle:
I’m safely within a less-than-a-gumball territory.
Also note that I host my church’s podcast and their web files on my personal Amazon account. Come to think of it, there are about 4 different domains using my S3 resources.
If a faster website is worth a couple of pennies every month, then read on.
After you’ve set up the account, return to your WordPress Dashboard and install/activate two plugins: Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3 and Cloudfront These two plugins will automatically upload any new media files (like when you add a picture or an audio file to a post) to Amazon.
A new link named “AWS” will appear in your dashboard’s left column, toward the bottom.
Only a couple more technical steps to get things up and running. Bear with me, here.
Then, using an FTP program (I use Cyberduck on a mac) open the file wp-config.php (located in the root of your WordPress install) and add the following two lines (replace the stars with your copied keys): define( 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', '********************' );
define( 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', '****************************************' );
Save that file back to the server.
Now, click the “AWS” link in your WordPress dashboard, and the “S3 and CloudFront” link that drops down.
On that settings page, you’ll need to name a new bucket. S3 bucket names have to be unique (in the whole world) so I recommend going with your URL. It’ll also make it easy should you decide to create 35 websites and host all of their content on S3, for like 45 cents a month.
You can ignore the CloudFront settings, and here’s how I have ticked the boxes on my setup:
<img src="https://benandjacq.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM.png" alt="Settings for the Amazon S3 and CloudFront plugin." width="549" height="214" class="size-full wp-image-347010755" srcset="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws buy tamiflu.com/benandjacq/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM.png 549w, https://benandjacq.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-shot-2014-02-11-at-11.33.00-AM-300×116.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 549px) 100vw, 549px” />My settings for the plugin.
Once that is saved, you are all set going forward. New images and other media that are uploaded to the site will be placed into Amazon’s capable hands for delivery to your readers.
If your website is new, you’re all set. But if like me you have years of blogging behind you and megabytes (or gigabytes) of images and other files in the /wp-uploads directory alone the fix above only slows the bleeding of server resources. I’m still researching the best ways to modify existing links. I found a plugin that is doing it for me, but I’m not very comfortable with how it’s doing it, leaving me open to some security risks.
Do you know of a fix? let me know in the comments!
