Over the last few days, I’ve noticed the site become somewhat sluggish and unresponsive at times. Tracing through problems, it turns out that my http configuration file had an “error” that was limiting the number of active users.

We’ve corrected the settings as of this morning. Hopefully everything will be faster for everyone. If anyone still receives any site errors, sluggishness, or general problems, please use the Contact page to alert me to the situation.

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For those of you who haven’t noticed, the top menu navigation bar now includes a new entry titled “Forums“.

In order to expand communication around here at maxrof dot com, I’ve decided to setup a small message forum for people to communicate in. The forums are for both general and paintball use, and allow for easier communication as compared to comments.

As things grow (hopefully), I’ll scale the forums to meet the needs of the users. For now though we have a General chat, and a Paintball chat. The web address (just click the Forums link if you can’t remember) is:

http://forum.maxrof.com

Enjoy, and get posting.

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In order to keep up with the latest web 2.0 trends, I’ve done a little bit of work and implemented Gravatars into the site’s comment section.

For those who are out of the loop, Gravatars are global user avatars. Just like an avatar on a webforum or instant messaging, a Gravatar is a user’s picture icon for a website. The neat thing about Gravatars however, is wherever you go…the Gravatar follows. For websites that implement this technology, you don’t have to worry about uploading your favorite icon to every site you use. Just use the email address registered at Gravatar and BAM, your avatar will appear.

Currently, I’m smoothing out the CSS in order to make the Gravatar appearence correctly positioned in all major browsers. Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 work perfectly…whereas Safari is somewhat broken (surprise surprise).

Firefox and Internet Explorer 7:

Safari:

To get started using Gravatars:

1. Head to the Gravatar website.
2. Register for an account
3. Upload and crop an avatar
4. …
5. Profit

After you get finished, when you comment on maxrof (and other sites using said technology), use the eMail address you registered and your new avatar will show up.

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Just to keep everyone updated, I’ve begun changing the site around a little bit. It has been a couple of months since our launch, and the response that we’ve received here has been extremely positive. With that in mind, I’m digging into both the front and back ends of the site in order to improve things.

One of the more noticeable things you can see right away is the new re-designed logo. Our original logo was the product of about ten minutes in Adobe Illustrator, as I was under pressure to get the site moving. However, the new logo is a great improvement I think, and will serve well for the line of soft goods that we are currently working on. For comparison purposes…

Old Logo:

New logo:

Some of the other new things we’ve added around here is the Upcoming Reviews scroll underneath our search bar. The scroll will update every couple of seconds with upcoming reviews that will be featured on our site.

In terms of usability and site cleanliness, I’ve removed the “Content Link” advertisements from the entire site. These were small advertisements that take the form of links in the site’s text. In the time period of my trial, I didn’t see a positive response from them and I wasn’t pleased with the way they were implemented. For now the only advertisements on the site will be the header banner above the site, and the text ads at the beginning of each article.

With all that said, please be patient with the site the next few days while we continue to streamline everything. Don’t be surprised if you visit and some things are mis-aligned, or random text is placed in odd locations. That’s just us working to provide you with the best paintball coverage online.

And as always, for the best possible experience in browsing our site…please download and use the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

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Sorry for the site being down half of Sunday and all of yesterday.

I received an email from my host this morning saying that they had restored my database to the latest version and that I should be good to go. For all of you techies out there, apparently mySQL decided to downgrade itself to version 3.

This is bad as my blogging software runs on version 4. Other than that, the site is back to normal and content should be continually updated these next few days. If anyone notices any bugs, please contact me regarding them as my hosts are keeping an eye on things for now to make sure there isn’t any more trouble.

- bill

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