The Scrabbled: Making Fun of Each Other since '99

Several sites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, are blacked out in protest of the SOPA bill, a bill that threatens the way the internet works. Wired has a great write up if you want more info, but essentially, the bill would make site owners responsible for anything posted or linked to on their website as well as giving content owners the ability to take down any infringing website without any sort of due process.

In other words, blogs and aggregator sites that post content from around the web would become a thing of the past as site owners would be incurring too much risk in hosting them.

I’m not blocking out the Scrabbled because, obviously, who gives a shit whether or not this site is available today, but I thought I’d at least leave this here in case anyone was curious why they couldn’t get to the sites they usually hit today.

In other news, I expect today to be super productive. I already finished the multi-image upload process for some gallery software I’m working on.

Uh…. whoops! So about a month ago, I tried to relaunch johnhutch.com with a rails 3.1.0 version of what can be seen on dev.johnhutch.com. In doing so, I change the server configuration and blew up The Scrabbled, which runs on rails 2.2.2.

Suffice to say, I blew it.

But we’re back, and with a very new, revamped, retooled version of the site waiting in the wings. Here’s hoping everyone hasn’t forgotten about this place.

Dave the n00b has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

Kate Soup has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

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Jeremy has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

Just wanted to show you guys something cool. The other day I wrote an article about some pancetta I cured at home and something interesting happened: site traffic almost doubled for two days and my ad revenues for August are now 5x what they were for all of July.

Brooke Panda has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

Tom Argasinski has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

Suzanne Smalley has just joined the site. Read more to find out more about them.

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Decided to publish a rather raw redesign cause fuck it. And I’m excited about having a platform for some new features and I needed this live first. If you see anything that seems off or wrong to you, please post the link to the page, a description of what you’re seeing, and the browser you’re using. Or better still, a screenshot.

for the past 6 months (7/27/08 – 1/27/09).

Jenelle is another awesome person that Justin Tim and I work with. She asked to get on the site so she could post in the LOST thread, but maybe if we make fun of her enough, she’ll post other awesome things.

I forgot to let everyone know! The post below is from Rachel, of Luke and Rachel fame, who just finally got to join the site after I spent some time fixing a bunch of bugs that was preventing her from signing up a while ago.

So everyone! Make her feel bad about herself!

Also, our previous Rachel (of The Ack Attack fame) is now known as “Rachum” because that’s what we call her anyway.

I had to hack up the scrabbled code quite a bit to upgrade it to get it running on the new server. This affects you in that:

1. No caching at the moment so the page will be a bit slower, despite the faster server
2. Tagging is a bit broken. It still saves your tags, I just can’t display them for some reason.

I hope to have these issues fixed sometime this weekend. Let me know if you encounter any others. Anyway, sorry about the downtime.

What is the first thing your eyes/mouse goes to when opening The Scrabbled? The second? The third? I need to confirm a suspicion, so I need as many of you to respond as possible — even if you rarely or never post or comment here.

I know Reggie does frequently, and I’ve seen about a tweet a month or so from Sammy and Bill. But anyone else? I ask because I’m considering integrating twitter into the Scrabbled, perhaps with a sidebar on the side of the page with everyone’s status. Would anyone be into that?

So the site’s up and running. Obviously it’s a bit incomplete, but the core functionality is there. The question is (to those of you interested in participating int he site at all): what does it still need?

Dreamhost offered me unlimited disk space and bandwidth for all my sites if I agree to have our sites upgraded to the new servers first. What this means for me is that I don’t have to worry about a lot of things I’d have to worry about if any of my sites ever blew up or got dugg or slashdotted or whatever. What this means for you is that this site may very well crash or be spotty for a period of time after they upgrade us. But hopefully things’ll go smoothly with limited interruption and we’ll be left with a much faster page that I can do more things with. Hurrah!

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For getting enfuckinggaged!

We got user pics, now. Also, be a dear and make it in some way related to your appearance. If only for a little while.

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Introducing Julie, an ex-coworker of mine, Justin’s, and Heidi’s and soon-to-be roommate of Heidi’s. Read on to see how she justifies her existence and for the first draft of the scrabbled survey. Also, make fun of her.

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I’m ditching Media Temple. The Scrab’s memory requirements are just too high for their basic (read: cheap) plan and it’s been causing all those Proxy Errors or Bad Gateway errors. Lucky for us, Dreamhost has just massively overhauled their Rails hosting system, so while you may notice the page is more than a bit slower (on average about 5x slower) than it was yesterday, it’s not unusably slow like it was originally.

If I get a few hours over the weekend, I have some changes to upload that should hopefully speed up the site a bit, so it shouldn’t be too painful for too long.