Back in november I mentioned a new site that a co-worker and I started FI-Talk.com.  Towards the end of December, we finallized a few things and announced it publicly on SU-Talk.com.  Sense then, traffic has started to trickle in.  We are up to 10 unique users so far.  No one except the site mods have posted any content yet, however the traffic is increasing.  I am sure as time goes on and content continues to be added that we will start to see some more activity. 

 It is really exciting watching a forum start to grow.  Although it is easy to just throw it up, confure a few things and call it done, it takes a lot of time and effort to come up with a good idea or content, build around that and to attract the visitors.  It is sort of like a catch 22, how do you get visitors to come to your forum and help add content if there is no content for them to come and read already.  This is what makes it a challange and actually kind of fun.  This is now the third forum I have tried to start.  I feel I learned a lot of lessons from the first two and here’s hopping that third time is truly a charm. 

Lessons for starting a forum:

1. Have content.  No one wants to come and read nothing, nore do they want to contribute.  The life blood of a forum is the members and the knowledge and questions that they bring.  In our case, we are finding questions on other sites that we can answer, forumlating the answers in very concise and easy to read answers as threads on fi-talk.com, and then linking the answer on other sites.  This is where most of our traffic is coming from and seems to be working very well.

2.  Dont go at it alone.  The last two I put up by myself and failed miserably.  I wouldn’t call this an error or lack of knowledge on my part.  By having people to help me though, we have much more experience to pull knowledge from to help the site.  Also, everyone that is helping on the site brings their own unique history, and also knows a few different places to try to stir up some traffic.  Also, it helps to have someone else to bounce ideas off of.

3.  Try to make everything as simple as possible.  The less garbage that the end user has to crawl threw the better.  When creating your forums and trees, make sure they are very simple to navigate.  If it takes your user more then 3 clicks to find something, it is to many.  This can also go another way.  Dont try to throw all the info right on the front page.  Your user may not want to read 20 lines of different subjects to find where to post.  Take a look at these two sites to see what I mean.

www.thezcr.com/forums/ Very simple and to the point.  It all fits on one screen and you can see where you need to post easily

http://www.solsociety.com/ The exact opposite.  Lots of stuff to look at.  You have to scroll and scroll to see all of the pages.

4.  Brand your site.  No one wants to look at a site that looks like everyone elses site.  Go find a theme, change it up and make it your own.  You do have to use a little tact here also.  I am currently moderating on a young forum that isn’t doing so well.  The moderator made the site black with gold and red text.  It is very painfull to look at to the point I dont even want to go there.  Try to use colors that go together well and are not to loud.  Not to say that a black background is bad, but make sure the color you use with it goes well.  Maybe instead of having black, try a very dark grey.  The sutble difference can do a lot to the final presentation of the colors to the user.

 Hopefully these simple rules will help someone in the future to start their own succesfull forum.  I mean they were writen from someone who hasn’t started a succesful one themselves, but if they do work, then I too will have a succesfull forum.  Thanks for reading!!!

Tags: fi-talk, phpbb, server

After waiting for 5 days, we opened up the fermenter yesterday and pulled a quick sample.  Specific Gravity 1.020.  Our enitial SG was 1.078.  We are currently waiting for SG of 1.010 which means that the primary fermentation is done. Currently our Alchohol content is at 7.4% ABV.  To calculate specific gravity we use the following formula.

Origianl gravity OG
Specific Gravity SG

(OG-SG) 
  .0075

Once the giant bucket of “grape juice”reaches 1.010 it will be time to rake it into the carboy, add some stabalizers and wait for another 10 days.  This is deffinatly not a hobby for those with no patientce.  I can’t wait for it to be done.  I did attempt to take a taste yesterday after pulling our test sample.  Probably wasn’t such a good idea.  Sort of tasted like grape juice that was left open in the back of the pantry for a month. 

Another side note.  At around day 4, the bedroom started to wreak of rotten grapes.  Proably not the best place to be brewing up your booze.  We have now relocated the concotion to the laundry room until a suitable cabnet can be built for storing future batches of wine. 

Tags: alchohol, carboy, grape, merlot, specific gravity, Wine

About a month ago the weather started turning bad around here.  Winds were blowing, Lots of snowing and inevitably power issues.  During one of these brownouts, my  primary machine died on me.  With the weather turning ever colder and christmas on the horizon, I was in no hurry to start troubleshooting.  Well, now that all the holidays are over, I broke into it and finally traced it down to a burnt USB connector that was causing it to short and not boot.  (I actually can’t take credit for the finding of it, Glen at work came in and finally noticed the small burn mark that my eyes had been missing) 

 During the outage Rebecca and I started a new hobby.  I have been wanting to make home made wine for a long time so I went out and picked everything up, and we are currently in the first stages of making our first batch of merlot.  It has been perculating in the bedroom now for 3 days and is starting to smell phinomial.  We will get our first real look at it on Monday after it has sat in the primary fermenter for 5 days. 

 Another change that has happened was I have now pointed my other domain at the blog.  It was temporarly being used for another perpose but now I am going to be switching the name of the blog to something a little shorter and more fitting to the blog.  www.canidrinkbeertonight will still work, but it will now officially be www.tpsreport.org

 Another thing I have configured is some mirroring of the sites running on this box to another machine on my network.  This should help prevent any more long term outages in the future.  Not that I have any strict SLAs that I have to conform to myself, but non the less, uptime is always nice to be able to brag about.  Check back soon for more updates and thanks for reading!!!

Tags: server, tpsreport, Wine

Today I would like to announce that www.fi-talk.com is officially up and running.  This is the first public announcment but it is still in its very early stages.  The site is up and functionall but still has a very addolecent look and feel.  FI-Talk was an idea the a co worker and I had after realizing that there was no good outlet for IT Proffesionals in the Finacial industry to come together and talk about solutions ofr co-processing issues.  The first step of FI-Talk will be to attempt to get adoption from su-talk which is currently a yahoo group.  We all know that anything Yahoo is sub par.  A huge issue was realized a few days ago when someone sent a message out as the group that required read reciepts.  Once everyone started opening the messages, you can imagine the mess it caused.  Everyone who was in the group was suddenly inendated with useless “This message has been read” garbage. 

FI-Talk is currently set up on phpBB, an open source bulliten board software that runs on PHP.  The install was very straight forward.  It can use one of many types of SQL database back ends.  This setup is currently running on mySQL on a linux box.  The initial installation was cake.  Create the DB, copy the bits to the web server, set the permissions on the appropriate folder and browse to the isntallation directory via a web browser.  From this point it is almost a next next next to complete.  Now I just need to figure out how to make my own style sheet and give it it’s own look and feel. 

Anyways, enough of my rambelings on this.  Swing by, give the site a look and let me know what you think.  If you ahve any ideas for improvment, feel free to let me know.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: fi-talk, phpbb, server

Today we had some interesting issues.  All of a sudden a bunch of our machines started receiving delayed write errors.  Take a look and our FS share is only 99% full and 99% fragmented.  Ye ha!!!  Looks like I will be doing some cleanup tonight once everyone leaves.  Definatlly call for a beer.  Observe!

Tags: defrag, maintnence, server

I have officially added a DNS entry for my blog.  You can now get to it at www.canidrinkbeertonight.com.  Stay tuned as I will be updating this frequently with many new shinnanigans. 

I have officially added a DNS entry for my blog.  You can now get to it at www.canidrinkbeertonight.com.  Stay tuned as I will be updating this frequently with many new shinnanigans.

Tags: alchohol, beer