When I decided to dedicate myself to writing on carpeaqua again two weeks ago, I did it mostly out of frustration with the state of things at Twitter. I’ve spent most of the past four years throwing all of my thoughts out in small increments on Twitter rather than taking the time to expand them into more coherent articles. More frustrating is the fact that many of those thoughts and ideas are now forever archived in Twitter’s datacenter and unable to be accessed given the 3000 tweet limit the API imposes.
The Dickbar coupled with Twitter telling the third-party developers who helped build their platform to drop dead were the two final offenses that made me make a concerted effort to stop wasting time writing about things I care about on a service that doesn’t care about me.
What I didn’t anticipate was that I would remember how much fun it is to write in long-form. While writing on carpeaqua has proven to be a perfect distraction when I need a break from thinking about code, it’s also been invigorating to go through my RSS feeds with a purpose more than the occasional snarky tweet.
New Design
As I previously mentioned, I took the opportunity to refresh the site’s layout and text stylings to match what I feel a modern version of the site should look like. Most of the kinks in the layout should have worked themselves out at this point, but should you run into any weird rendering issues in a modern browser1, please let me know.
New Server
I also came to the realization that the cold storage server I had left the site on over the past four years was completely incapable of handling the amount of traffic I am now bringing in.2 Though I kept the main page up during the two Fireballs it received in the span of 24 hours, not much else was accessible and there were the occasional 503 errors, which is completely unacceptable.
To remedy the situation, I’ve moved carpeaqua to a new home with the fine folks at WPEngine. Wordpress is a stubborn beast when it comes to high traffic situations, but the performance of the site is night and day compared to where it was just a week ago.
Thank You
carpeaqua’s daily traffic has quadrupled in the past two weeks. The number of RSS subscriptions has more than doubled and the new @carpeaqua Twitter account is off to a fine start. Everything I write on this site I write because I am interested in it first and foremost, but having a captive audience that is willing to read the words I write and (even better) take the time to send feedback via email or tweet makes it an even enjoyable experience.
My goal with this site is to use it as a landing space for every interesting thought, idea and workflow that has been tucked away in my brain these past four years. Whether that is sharing my thoughts on mobile computing, showing the desktops of interesting people or publishing an Automator workflow I use on a daily basis, I promise to continue improving the quality of the content and writing here as long as you promise to keep reading.