It has been a coupole of days since the v3 project has been launched over at Pixel2Life.com. It has been a rough and bumpy ride since, but things are cooling down and all seems well. We were planning on a launch time at 10:00 PM ( -5 Eastern ) the night of August 1st which was all in the clearing. Within about 10 minutes of launch, the box died on us because of some configuration settings that could not handle the load of the awaiting multitude. Tech was called in – rebooted the server and we were back up in an hour with proper tweaks and optimization set. It was pretty frustrating for myself and the rest of the dev team but we pulled through!

Since then, we have been working on getting the server load to a very minimal to ensure that even if we got dugg – we would still be able to survive! Thankfully to some extent, we did not get dugg which is something that we were all worried about that would definately put us in some deap crap. Cache systems have been optimized and queries reduced on some heavy visited pages. Overall, it is probably one of the most minimal and low profile running sites I have developed, being able to display a page with about 1 query.

Ever since the downtime we experienced on the first night, I have been keeping steady watch over the load to ensure that we are getting consistant numbers throughout the day ( even during peak hours ).

Coming up after all this optimization are bug reports that have been submitted by users who visit the site. This is going to be the not so fun part about the project, fixing holes found, css errors, making sure that the site still loads fast, and supports all modern browsers.

Summer is definately coming to a close and I have a knew scope on the web development genre of the internet.  I have a great portfolio coming up and its time to produce some more successful projects of my own to rake in the cash! I have some nice and innovative ideas that I would like to take to your screens, so stay tuned.

If you have been keeping up with the headlines over at DanRichard.com and GreyCobra.com, you would of known that today, August 1st 2006 is the launch date of Pixel2Life.com‘s Hammer Time project. After months of planning, thousands of lines of code, and late night coffee trips, it is finally here!

Everyone is excited about today – even for myself as a main developer on the HT project. But when is the real time of launch you ask? I am afraid I can’t even answer that one for you fellas as much as I would like. We have to still do some tweaks, optimizations and little things to make sure everything runs smoothly before we allow it to the public. 😉

During the upgrade process, the site will be inaccessible from any direction. I recommend you to keep close watch over DanRichard.com for the latest updates that Dan posts about our progress toward the upgrade completion.
Well, I am off to work, where I can hopefully meet up with Dan and NG later to finish this project and send it packing to your screens! Today is the day, and remember that! So strap on your parachute pants and get ready for Pixel2Life v3 – Hammer Time!

This past week I was on a Mission Trip in Georgia with my church.  It was a work camp where kids from all different middle/highschool church youth groups from all over the country ( about 400 kids/adults ) and worked on homes in Valdosta, Georgia.  Experiencing such work through God’s eyes was amazing for the residents were the sweetest with pure hearts and good intentions.  It was some what hard to be away from the computer all week, luckily nothing bad happened while I was gone, server had 100% uptime all week which is good.  That 1GB RAM upgrade really came in handy that I requested a few weeks back so that is all good now.

Came back.  Put my cell to charge, dumped pictures from camera onto my PC and then signed on then IMs started pouring out like crazy.  It was hard to get back into the work desk mood but its a switch I do a lot when I come back from my “vacation”.  If you call waking up at 6:45 AM to annoying songs and painting homes from 8:30 to 2:30 fun, be my guest, but it was a very relaxing and things that I look forward to get outside and breathe the real fresh air once in a while 😉

I am also proud to say that I got a promotion over at Pixel2Life.com!  I am now an Administrator on their community forums!  Go me!  Things should be rolling out with Hammer Time ( P2L’s Secret Project ) any week now.  I am looking forward to the public release – same for the private beta release.

All in all, it is good to be back home.  The seven hour drive to and fro was a bit hecktic, but other churches had 18 hour drives so I am thankful for that.  Me and my girlfriend were both out of town ( she was at a canoe camp ) so we could not get intouch with each other.  She called me when she got the chance and I just realized that tomorow is our one month!  Go me again! So I am off to go order some flowers to go send to her door since she will be working tomorow all day.  Atleast when she gets home, she will have something pleasant to look at until I come see her!  Hope to blog again soon, I just realized its pretty long.  hehe.

Wow, It has been a while since I posted on my blog. I am such a bad boy… 🙁 Let me give you a summary of what I have been up to. This will surely answer most of the questions I get in emails asking about whats going on in my web development world.

Pixel-Designz.net
I have not touched my own homesite in a while. I am changing my server soon in anticipation of v4 when I am done with all my very very sketchy summer projects. When I release v4, I will definately be on more writing tutorials and giving it a facelift. I have seen some ideas that I liked this summer thus so far and I am loving it. I will be posting a feature suggestion form to get input from the visitors. I have even got several requests for the script to be bought? Nice try guys, custom job. 🙂

LiquidxHost.com
The hosting business is still going a little weak but LXH is definately picking up in business. I broke even for the server a couple weeks ago and I am planning on expanding onto a new server due to the high traffic load on the client’s sites to relieve server stress. But for right now, I just ordered some upgrades to stabalize the server a bit.

Pixel2life.com
Yes, the secret is out. I have been mainly working on Pixel2life.com. Dan, NG and I have been secretly working on a new feature to add onto the P2L website codenamed: Hammer Time. Even though I would love to post lovely screen shots and tell details of what it entails, you will have to wait until it launches, which should be within the next couple of weeks.

Clients
I still do the template coding, site transfer and fixing the script deal. It is enough to keep me alive with all my expenses, mainly because I have not been able to advertise LXH as much since I have been busy with some other works in the making.

Thats it for now, I will post some more things soon and try to keep you guys updated!

Finally, the last day of school was this past Thursday and guess what: FRESHMEN SUCK! Anyways, just checking in as usual. Now that I am free from school, I can code as much as I want which is definately a good thing since I havn’t been doing as much as I wanted to with my academics in the way. I hope you guys are in for some treats, cause I have a few tricks up my sleeves to release this summer 😉