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Preparing for a new master DonationCoder server

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mouser:
Specs:
Intel Xeon Quad Core Dual Processor (Xeon-Harpertown 5430-Quadcore 2.66GHz) [same as before]
8gb ram [used to have 4gb]
dual sata 500gb drives in raid configuration [used to have dual 250gb not in raid]
1000mbs uplink [same as before]
3000gb bandwidth [i think our previous plan was 2000gb]
Vmware ESX Operating System [used to be CentOs]

Note that while we used to have separate main server and much smaller member server, now we are moving everything to one server and using virtual machines.

40hz:
This is more under site design than graphic design:

I would very much like to see some sort of revival of the weekly (Dr. Ehtyar/Stephen) "Tech Newz" feature - except I think it would be better if it were implemented as a blog rather than a forum post this time around.

A rolling format would be more practical since it's difficult for readers to comment on stories under the "single topic per" paradigm forum threads use. Note: I'm only talking about the tech news section here. The forum itself is fine. It's the weekly newspost  that doesn't work well inside the forum.

Any individual story/discussion that really took off could always be moved over to a forum thread to keep major discussions all in one place and avoid creating a split betwen the forum and the newsdesk areas. You could always do a link to the news blog from within the forum to help provide a more unified user experience.

A blog engine would also make it easier for the news editor to post stories as they break - or as the news editor's time permits - rather than on some arbitrary weekly deadline. We don't "go to print" so there's really no need to have press deadlines or "editions" anymore.

Just thinking out loud.

Actually, a blog format would make a lot of sense for the annual NANY as well as the software author's pages. Once you load up something like Wordpress, you can easily create as many blog spaces as you'd need and still have the regular forum and static pages for what they work better for. But this is a topic for a whole 'nuther discussion...and... uh...I'm gonna shut up now.

mouser:
My great fear with using a separate blog system (as we did early on in DC existence when we had regular "columnists") is that the different sources of content (forum posts, blogs) are pretty walled-off from one another and it creates a very weird schizophrenic situation where it's hard to know what should go where and who is seeing what.

Don't forget that we already have a homebrew "blog" system in place for Tech News and other "featured" items.. it's basically a simple system i created to let me elevate forum posts to blog entries in different categories.

It doesn't have many of the bells and whistle's of a proper blog software, but it has one *huge* advantage for us, in that it avoids duplicate content and helps to unify the blog and forum content.  This is really one of the great unresolved issues of internet content management in my view (and we have discussed this before), namely the issue of exposing content in different ways for different purposes and users.

As an example of the homebrew blog interface to featured forum posts here see:


* Main DC Blog: http://blog.donationcoder.com
* TechNews: https://www.donationcoder.com/technews/
* Coding Snacks: https://www.donationcoder.com/CodingSnacks

superboyac:
I agree with 40hz. I also think some of the people here can have their own blogs here that would be useful.  I think the idea to go from featured blog to discussion forum in some kind of unified manner would be really cool.

Anyway, this is very interesting to me.  So it costs roughly $400/month to run the dc servers.  Interesting.  Nothing good ever comes free, eh?

superboyac:
well...mouser is right also.  I don't know...I shouldn't really participate in this, this is not my bag ;D.

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