Announcements – Behind the Scenes

Tripawds 3.0 Coming Soon!

For quite some time now—a few years, in fact—we’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes here at Tripawds on the third major overhaul to the News Blog and discussion forums since Jerry first inspired us to start this site. If all goes as planned, things will soon look a lot different, be more stable, and work much better on all devices.

Nothing is required on your part, other than your patience during this long awaited transition. We have a select team of Tripawds members helping to ensure the new site is ready for prime time. Consider this ~~fair warning~~ a heads up that one day in the coming weeks the site may be unavailable for a while. We will do our absolute best to keep downtime to a minimum.

NOTE: All Featured Blogs and Member Blogs will remain accessible during the makeover! Only the main site and forums will be affected.

The Shape Of Things to Come

For the first time ever, Tripawds is being re-branded. We are retiring the original logo inspired by Jerry, and replacing it with a badge of honor that represents the power of three paws—for both dogs, and cats!

tripawds three paw logo

A Sneak Preview

Clarity, performance, and functionality on all devices are the primary purposes for this overhaul. The new design is faster, cleaner and mobile friendly.

new tripawds discussion forums

We will still feature random Tripawd Angels on certain pages. The home page is being trimmed down to quickly and more easily direct new members to the most helpful resources. And site menus are being restructured to help users easily navigate the vast resources available.

Most content will remain the same, but we do have a few surprises in store. The major difference will be how information is presented, but we promise the change will not be too drastic. Familiar forum layout and functionality shall remain—just look and work better!

Any Questions?

Please post in this Tech Support topic with any questions or concerns. Thank you for your patience and support!

If you appreciate all the efforts that go into the incredible undertaking that this overhaul entails, please consider making a charitable contribution to the Tripawds Foundation 501c3 public charity, created to ensure this community remains online and free to use.

Please stand by…

Big News for Tripawds Bloggers!

Basic Tripawds Blogs will always be free. Jerry wouldn’t have it any other way.

In order to do this, however, we have updated our Supporter framework to offer three levels of support with even more enhanced features to those who wish to help keep this community online with an ongoing PayPal subscription. Please review the updated Tripawds Supporter account feature comparison for complete details or consider upgrading your blog now.

Act Now to Save on Supporter Upgrades

We are offering a discount to the first five lucky Tripawds Bloggers who upgrade their account! Use coupon code TRISUPP25OFF to receive 25% off your first payment of any Tripawds Supporter level! This coupon code can only be used five times so upgrade your blog now and save!

A Few Things All Tripawd Bloggers Should Know

If you have not yet upgraded your blog, you may notice some new content being inserted into your posts and pages. (See links at the top and bottom of this post.) Consider upgrading your blog to immediately remove these ads and Support links.

Supporters can remove ads from other favorite Tripawds blogs from their Dashboard -> Supporter Status -> Disable Ads.

There are now three Supporter levels to choose from for showing your appreciation of this community and enabling enhanced features on your blog.

Certain plugins are now only available for Supporter II blogs. If you are a current Supporter, do not deactivate these plugins or you may need to upgrade to get them back.

Premium Themes are now only activated for Supporter III blogs. If you had previously activated a premium theme, do not change it or you will need to upgrade to switch back.

If you are a subscriber and had the Supporter Badge displaying in your blog, you will need to replace it with your current level badge by dragging the Supporter Widget back to your sidebar from the Appearance -> Widgets tab in your dashboard.

You can upgrade, modify or view the current status of your Tripawds subscription anytime from the Supporter tab in your dashboard.

What do you get for your money?

Most importantly, Tripawds Supporters gain the satisfaction of knowing that they help us maintain the largest online community for three legged dogs and their people. Below is a comparison of all account features. Please visit the Supporter Upgrade page and select your site to see additional monthly or quarterly payment options and pricing.

Tripawds Blogs	Free	Supporter	Supporter II	Supporter III
Banner Ads on Blog
Disable Ads on Other Tripawds Blogs		(5)	(10)	(25)
Basic Comment Spam Protection
Subscriptions to Blog Comments
Enhanced Spam Protection
Simple Contact Form Creation
Enhanced Video Embedding
Search Engine Optimization
Blog Statistics & Shortlinks
Premium Blog Theme Selection
Personal Tech Support
Upload Space	25 MB	100 MB	250 MB	1 GB
Cost	FREE	$25 / year	$49 / year	$129 / year
–

Did we mention the coupon? Act now to save 25% off your first payment of any Tripawds Supporter level with code: TRISUPP25OFF (Only 5 coupons available!)

How did we do it?

The Tripawds Supporter framework is powered by the simple to use yet massively configurable Pro Sites plugin from WPMU Dev. After network-activating this multisite plugin, we were able to easily create the Supporter options and associated account features above by enabling different modules and assigning certain plugins and themes to each Pro Site level.

We created these Supporter levels to automatically remove ads and enable enhanced blogging features for sites with recurring PayPal subscription plans. Many other payment gateways are also available. A few options we chose not to apply include the ability to:

Prohibit or limit publishing of posts and/or pages for selected Pro Site levels.
Provide “unfiltered_html” permission to specific user types for selected levels.
Restrict XML-RPC and Atom Publishing to selected Pro Sites.
Only allow blog access for paid sites.
Limit BuddyPress group creation and messaging to users of a Pro Site.

Pro Sites includes far too many features for me to list here. The multiple Supporter levels, ease of use, coupon codes and robust statistics were reason enough for us to upgrade. Check out the Pro Sites plugin in action to see how you might use it for your multisite network!

Welcome to Aspen.

Monotone Rocky Mountain Colorado Aspen Grove by Rene That’s the name of our new server here at Tripawds. The name is really more appropriate for Jerry’s three legged dog blog community, along with our snowbird blog and other sites. And from the first feedback, performance kicks ass over Elm. That was the name of our first server we upgraded to a couple years ago.

“Holy cow…. it’s so fast I’m getting dizzy.”
— krun15

“SUPER FAST!!!!”
— cometdog

Remember? We had that 2010 fundraising campaign to help cover the expense of hosting our own web server to meet the demands of our growing membership. With more than 3379 members, 848 blogs, and 73280 forum posts, and counting, the Tripawds community continues to grow daily.

With increased traffic and use of a popular WordPress multisite network like Tripawds, comes the need to address server load capacity and bandwidth limitations. With that comes added expense. But first, the specs.

WordPress Multisite Server hardware requirements

WordPress network administrators and anyone considering building a niche blog network ~~might want~~ need to know what to expect regarding hardware if any sort of growth is expected. Our new box, in a nutshell:

Xeon 3450 with Hyper Threading
Server runs with 8 cores
4 GB of RAM
2 TB Bandwidth2 250 GB Hard Drives
Cent OS 5 x 64 Bit
cPanel Unlimited Domains
On Call Server Management

We bit the bullet to outfit this system, but we want only the best for our members. And we don’t want to do this again anytime soon. We chose this system over a Core 2 Duo 8400 with 8 GB of RAM since CPU speed/power is generally more important in processor heavy sites and RAM can be increased if needed. Elm was a Pentium 4 with 2 single core processors and 2 GB RAM. It served us well over the past couple years, but recent sporadic spiraling server loads necessitated this upgrade.

Having a server manager is highly recommended for this type of job. That, or some serious command line confidence. While DNS propagation took a bit longer than expected, the actual migration went pretty smooth thanks to the hard work of our guys at Morse Media. And thank you to those Tripawds members who helped us iron out a few kinks.

What does this mean for Tripawds?

If you’ve ever had a comment not save when posting in the forums, or visited the site only to find it wouldn’t load, this upgrade is for you. Say goodbye to database connection errors, and feel free to join us in the chat with all of your friends. This upgrade means you are part of the largest online community for three legged dogs, and it will always be here for you.

Tripawds is a user-supported community.
Please do what you can to help keep it online.

It also means we did it without holding another fundraising campaign! With any luck, and a little support from members like you, we won’t need to raise funds this year either. Soon you will be hearing more about a certain Tripawds member who helped make this server migration possible. Others continue to give on a regular basis. Some of you quite generously. You know who you are, and we can’t thank you enough.

In the mean time, chat away and post in the forums to your hearts content. Publish blog posts, upload photos, search for answers, share your videos and do what you can to show your support for this site by shopping online and spreading the word about the Tripawds Featured Blogs. Together, we shall continue to show the world Tripawds Rule!

PS: We couldn’t do any of this without our WPMU Dev membership either, for the best WordPress multisite plugins, themes and support!

PPS: The quicker Rene and I can grow our team of home-based marketing executives, the sooner we will never have to ask for money to help keep Tripawds online, ever again. Please contact us directly for information about supplementing or replacing your income while working from anywhere.

No More Smelly Facebook Blogs

We just disabled the Smells Like Facebook premium theme we had activated for use on Tripawds Supporter blogs. In fact, we deleted the theme files altogether because we don’t intend to bring it back. Why? Because we don’t want to smell like Facebook around here anyway.

I just read over on the WPCandy WordPress News blog about how Facebook sued the theme developer over copyright infringement. As if a simple cease and desist letter from such a behemoth wouldn’t do the trick, the company filed three charges against the theme developer with a maximum penalty of more that $220,000. Cough.

As a small user supported community, we don’t care to go anywhere near there. Facebook has every right to protect their intellectual property, but to sue some guy who gave away a free blog theme for six figures!? I’m just sayin’ …

What I am sayin’ for any Tripawds bloggers who may have activated the Smells Like Facebook theme on their site is, don’t panic. If you see a blank white screen when trying to view your site, it is not broken. Simply visit the Appearnace tab in your dashboard by visiting yoursite.tripawds.com/wp-admin and selecting a new theme.

Who knows how Zuckerberg may unleash his legal dogs on all those sites out their unknowingly using a theme that infringes on his copyright. But I do now how Facebook came up with the huge penalty. That’s probably what they had to pay their lawyers to file the charges!

My Latest WordPress Multisite Community

Allow me to brag for just a moment…

More than four years since we sold our graphics business, I am happy to announce that I finally updated our company website. And in doing so, I have launched my latest WordPress multisite community. I’ll provide details about any hacks I make, and review multisite plugins I deploy in the future. For now I thought I would just share the content focus, for anyone not interested in the technical side of things.

Since we hit the road after Jerry lost his leg, there really hasn’t been any reason exciting enough to update our Agreda Communications site. I basically put up some links to Tripawds and our LiveWorkDream blog and left it alone. After traveling the country for three years in search of the next big thing, however, we found it.

The new and improved Team Agreda portal provides information about the new home-based wellness business we have launched, and how we help others do the same with:

No startup costs & no inventory to stock
No selling or sales quotas whatsoever
No shipping products or billing customers
Free lead generation websites
And absolutely no risk!

Interested? Contact us for complete details!

At first glance agreda.com doesn’t look like any sort of multi-user blogs community. That’s because I’ve made it private. We will be creating free lead generation sites for business partners and making certain value added content visible only to them using the Membership plugin from WPMU Dev. This will allow us to hide specific pages and other content we only want team members to see from the general public. Anyone who visits the site will still be able to read our biography, review the FAQs and contact us.

I would like to give one shout out to Josh Parker for his WPMS Sidebar Login Widget. After spending hours trying to hard-code a login/profile panel into the sidebar like we have on Tripawds, this plugin did the trick in minutes.

Now our partners can log into their dashboards from the main site to reveal members-only content. Thanks Josh!