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Welcome to Aspen.

Monotone Rocky Mountain Colorado Aspen Grove by ReneThat’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!

WPMU DEV - The WordPress Experts

Jim & Rene aka Admin and JerryPPS: 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.

Tripawds Joins SOPA Strike

On Wednesday, January 18th thousands of web sites will go dark to protest SOPA & PIPA, two US bills racing through Congress that threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.

Stop SOPA Widget Pop-up MessageTo join this effort to spread awareness about this vitally important news, two plugins have been activated across the Tripawds network:

Stop SOPA Ribbon
Help stop American Consorship by putting a ribbon that says Stop SOPA on your WordPress site or network.

Stop SOPA Widget
This plugin adds a widget that will show a modal window to increase awareness about SOPA/PIPA on Jan 18th.

Due to the sensitive nature of this community and the helpful resources all our blogs and discussion forums provide, we will not be shutting down the Tripawds network in protest. These plugins, however, shall remain activated to help us show our solidarity by doing the following.

  • As of now, all sites throughout the Tripawds network will display the Stop SOPA ribbon in the top right corner.
  • The Stop SOPA pop-up message shall display on all sites during the scheduled SOPA protest blackout time on January 18th from 8am-8pm EST (1300-0100 UTC). It is easily dismissed and will only be shown to each visitor once.

We shall keep these plugins network-activated through January 24, when congress votes on SOPA and PIPA. The pop-up message will only display during the scheduled strike but you can show it anytime until the 24th by adding #stopsopa to the end of any link to your blog like this:

Please help us put an end to these bills before they become law and end the internet as we know it.

Feel free to comment below, or chime in on this discussion about SOPA. But better yet, contact congress now!

 

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.

Smells Like Facebook Copyright InfringementI 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…

team agreda free wellness business marketing blogsMore 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.

wordpress multisite network login widgetI 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!

New Custom Admin Bar Menu Improves Navigation

Within minutes of announcing the new Tripawds admin bar menu in the tech support forum, one member replied…

Very nice…much easier to navigate!

wordpress multisite custom admin bar menuThanks Meghan! That was our goal with implementing this new custom admin bar menu – to help users navigate the site, whether they are searching the forums, watching videos, chatting or browsing blogs.

The WordPress Admin Bar is the grey stripe visible to logged in members which includes menus with links to various user account and blog administrative tools. Now users will notice a new menu to the far left of the bar, no matter which blog they’re viewing.

Hover your mouse over “tripawds” at far left to expand the menu for easy access to some of the most popular resources this community have to offer. Don’t see the Admin Bar? Register today to take full advantage of this network!

How To Add Custom WordPress Admin Bar Menu

For WordPress multisite network administrators interested in how we did this, it’s simple with the free Custom Admin Bar Menu plugin from WPMU Dev. Sure, you could hack functions to remove or add links to the admin bar, but why bother? If you’re looking to add a whole new menu, this plugin makes it easy.

As usual, the team at WPMU Dev has created a sleek interface which allows for easy set-up and configuration. The plugin works with single WordPress sites and any multisite network.

configure wordpress multisite custom admin bar menu

Adding and sorting links is easy sort with the drag and drop interface. And you can even use a small image for the menu title (no more than 28px high). Make it transparent for best results.

TIP: Select the “External Page” URL type and include the whole address if you want to link to a certain page on a specific blog within your multisite network.

Select “Administrative Page” if you want to direct users to one of their admin tabs. And select “Site Page” if you want to include the domain.tld of the site being viewed.

WPMU DEV - The WordPress ExpertsLooking for more awesome WordPress multisite plugins? Checkout our list of all the plugins we use to power the Tripawds community or check out everything WPMU Dev has to offer!

And don’t miss my recent guest posts on ProBlogger about building an online community:

Behind the Scenes is brought to you by Tripawds.
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