This is the third of several articles concerning our system architecture. It’s primarily aimed at technically minded ladies and dudes. But don’t feel left out if you didn’t read the first or second articles! They’re right here: Site Architecture: Servers and Site Architecture: Software.

Read ‘em and come back, because today we’re talking about Apache httpd!

Just to recap: We have a couple of servers hosted in a cloud-like environment. We’re running Apache httpd, MySql, PHP, memcached and a couple of other daemons.

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This is the second of several articles concerning our system architecture. It’s primarily aimed at technically minded ladies and dudes. But don’t feel left out if you didn’t read this first one! It’s right here: Site Architecture: Servers

Read it and come back, because today we’re talking about software!

Just to recap: We’re hosted in the cloud with Xen virtualization. We have a couple of servers at the moment running Ubuntu 8.10. We can start, stop, copy and delete instances of our servers at any time. So how does it all work and what did we do to get it there?
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Hey everyone! Come see how late to the game we are!

Anyway, just letting you know that after ten or maybe fifteen minutes of real hard work, we finally have forums. The link is over there, on the left. Or right here: see?

So please, have fun

This is the first of several articles concerning our system architecture. It’s primarily aimed at technically minded ladies and dudes. But don’t feel left out if computers frighten you! It’s okay to learn, sometimes.

And today, we’re talking about servers!

First, a little back story: We were originally hosted on GoDaddy servers running Asp.Net. This was fine, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Performance was fine and GoDaddy treated us okay. But I felt that the software solution wasn’t exactly what we needed: We needed better administration and templating features, and - more importantly - something that would let us scale. So I researched, found WordPress and ComicPress (and half a dozen other bits of software that I’ll discuss later) and moved us over to a Linux hosting environment at GoDaddy.

Performance with the Linux plan was abysmal. My suspicion is that there were simply too many sites hosted on our one tiny shared server. We had to move. But where?
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We recently relocated Stoopad to a new host! This is not earth shattering news, it happens all the time… but I thought the process might be interesting to one or three of our more technically-minded readers and I have planned a series of non-comic related posts outlining the deployment.

First, we now use Wordpress. Wordpress is incredible. If you don’t use it, you should. On top of Wordpress we use Comicpress. Comicpress (and Comicpress Manager) are pretty great. Wrapping up our Wordpress plugins, we use the wonderful WP Super Cache with compression and about a dozen other useful plugins for managing spam and links and such. Seriously, everyone: Wordpress wails hardcore on the stage of rock n roll.

Under Wordpress we use, of course, MySql. Between MySql and Wordpress, however, we have several memcached servers. This isn’t important right now, but we foresee its neccessity in the near future.

Static content is served using a combination of our servers and Amazon S3. We’ve been sending as much static content over to S3 as we can, and will eventually serve all static content through S3 (including comics). This makes our servers happy.

I’ll go over each of these items in more detail soon, and I hope you find them as interesting as I have.

Have a fawesome weekend!

We just released v.0.1 of our new site design! See this page for details (and downloads!)… Needless to say, the site will be going under quite a few revisions in the upcoming weeks while we update the template, add buttons and such. Comments appreciated.

Hello everyone!  This is the first step (a big one), in the re-launch/re-birth of Stoopad.com.  We have been saying for a good year now that we wanted to implement a different blog engine and use a more standardized comic control for our comics - and we feel this was definitely the way to go!

We’ll be customizing our new site over the next couple of weeks/months, so keep an eye out for changes at the site level - as well as NEW COMICS!

Hopefully the “new” Stoopad.com will be a better user experience for everyone.  We are also excited about the prospects of bringing new comics to the internet.

Until our next encounter!