More interestingly, is whether I think The Trendz deserves a third chance  at citizenship in Google land. To be honest, I don’t think so. This isn’t some sort of reverse psychology or Sartre-ian “bad faith” where I want X but really want Y. I really think we’ve had our shot at glory.

We’ve had two chances to convert our tremendous Google traffic into loyal users. Out of the 250,000 people that came to us in July, pretty much 0% decided to become loyal users of the the product. You can’t build a site with no loyalty.

Secondly, there’s definitely something gimmicky to the way this product works. It was never intended to be SEO Gimmicky but it just turned out to be so. That’s why I don’t really blame Google for taking the sledge hammer to us. There were several times with NewsTrendz was actually the #1 source of information for trending news. That’s not good. That means we’ve gone from being a reporter of news to a maker of news. That’s not right.

You simply need to see the circularity of reporting hot trends, having Google recognize that you’re a “hot” source for these trends, and then the firehose of traffic that results with everyone looking for answers to these trends. You jump into this circle and it’s not hard to see that it is a quick scheme to get instant traffic.

We thank everyone for helping us get this far and we remain proud of our accomplishments. If we’re now about to fall like the Roman Empire, let’s at least enjoy our height:

This really sucks. We had an incredible July and we were on track to have an even better August.

This has happened to us before and we kept rolling. We roll because we like working on this thing and because it actually helps us find news. So we’ll keep going again from here, rebuild, pick ourselves up like last time.

I just hope Google gives us some sort of feedback, because it would be great to know what’s going on.

Time to see if their are opportunities with the youth Coast Guard auxiliary.

UPDATE: If anyone wants to know what getting the Google Nuke is like, check this out. Blue is today, green is yesterday. Yesterday……all my problems seemed so faaaar away…..

So just a bit of context, The Trendz is trying to maintain ramen profitability, by doing things as cheap as possible. One of our acts of cheapness is to use the worst ISP possible, basically AOL (Albania Onine) to keep our costs down. We originally were going to use Amazon EC2 but even the $4 a day costs of maintaining 1 small instance + bandwidth was too expensive.

We’ve been having multiple network issues with some of our traffic spikes. I like calling these spikes “Too Beaucoup” because I love the movie Full Metal Jacket. The pimp reminds me of this guy I used to know who would wail everytime his application crashed under load.

We recently just tried to use Amazon S3 as a poor man’s CDN to prevent “Too Beaucoup” crashes. Rails has a nifty asset_host configuration that allows you to move your static content quickly to a CDN. Our biggest bottleneck is first the network and then the hardware. If we can just help our little AOL pipes, then we’d be in much better shape.

Moving to S3 helped alot, but it was still too expensive. There’s no easy way to get S3 to offer up plain text content via gzip compression. We were chewing through $2 a day in bandwidth and HTTP GET costs.

Thankfully we were introduced to an even poorer man’s CDN, Coral CDN. It’s basically a project by a bunch of NYU students to offer free CDN abilities over a peer-to-peer system. People around the world run their software on their spare computers and by simply referencing your site through nyud.net, you get instant CDN capability.

We moved our static content to Coral and it has worked out great. The network performance is equal to S3 but the costs are $0. I’ve read the documentation further and apparently there are bandwidth limits to what we can use on Coral. If we hit this limit, then all we lose is our images, css, and scripts but the site will keep chugging since it’s still hosted on AOL. People have already commented on how ugly The Trendz is, so we can’t get much uglier if we lose our images and css. If it happens, we’ll move back to S3.

So thanks Coral and Ray for the help. It was just the right time because we’re experiencing another top-less photo induced traffic surge. (For the record, if you are Ashley Greene’s attorneys, we do not host or possess any of her nude pictures here). While we won’t be able to have the pleasure of sexy looking Akamai sales girls taking us out to dinner for our business, with the money we save, we’ll be able to take them out to dinner on our dime. Perhaps we’ll go here.

In the meantime, we’re going to research how to place the entire site on Coral, assuming we can reference www.X to Coral, and then have Coral seamlessly contact us on origin.X. As much as went to handle “Too Beaucoup”, we don’t want to lose our brand identity by having our entire site hosted from the .nyud.net domain.

UPDATE: We must’ve hit some sort of limit on Coral CDN because they are now the slowest part of our site render. In fact, they are no longer serving our images and style sheets. We’ve moved back to Amazon S3 for tonight. Like Wade Boggs and his bucket of chicken, this blog post totally jinxed the situation. We should’ve waited 48 hours before we posted :).

But overall, it’s a great little comment system and it allows us to focus on other features instead of building one ourselves. Even more importantly, it allows us to continue to not require a user account for our site. We’ve updated the Privacy Policy to reflect our use of Disqus.

On one last note, we had one problem where too many Disqus forums would spawn because of our URL strategy on NewsTrendz; Disqus would create separate forums for  our “snapshot”, “news”, “twitter”, etc. views even if they were all the same article.

Apparently Disqus will use the window.location as the default forum identifier. It’s not intuitive in the documentation or by Google Searching on how to fix this but we finally found the solution. To have one forum for multiple pages, simply set the “disqus_url” in Javascript before you load their javascript file. The example is below:

<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_url = "http://newstrendz.com<%= @selected_trend.build_trend_url %>";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/newstrendz/embed.js"></script>
<noscript><a href="http://newstrendz.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript>
<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a>
<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_url = "http://newstrendz.com<%= @selected_trend.build_trend_url %>";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/newstrendz/embed.js"></script><noscript><a href="http://newstrendz.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a></noscript><a href="http://disqus.com">blog comments powered by <span>Disqus</span></a>

So let us know how it works. Thanks Disqus and thanks Ray for the suggestion.

This morning, Busty Cops and nude photos of Vanessa Hudgens were on the trends list. Fortunately, there was nothing too racy and they were legitimate trends from Google and Bing.

I’m just glad everyone had a great Friday Night. I spent mine watching the Yanks vs Sox on MLB.tv while checking out this new boxing game for the iPhone. I’m really happy that AJ Burnett is really helping the Yankees this year. Usually with talented injury prone pitchers, the Yankees end up getting the Pavano special where we pay $40 million for 20 games over 4 seasons. But this year, we’re really lucking out. I guess everything reverts to the mean.

UPDATE: The network problems resolved itself by around 10AM.

In one of my jobs, every time the site crashed the CTO would go around saying “Who sucks more than we do?”

He would then answer himself by saying, “Noooooobody, nobody sucks more than we do.”

I guess for my former colleagues, if you get asked this question again, you can respond “NeeeeewsTrendz”.

Hiring an attractive girl is like putting a ticking time bomb in your living room. It’s like pretty much deciding to raise your kids in a strip club. I’m sure there are tons of successful nanny-parent relationships that work with attractive nannies; it’s just the sensational ones that make the news and our trends.

But raising a new family, especially with multiple kids is just too stressful. You just can’t have the distraction in your home. Even if nothing happens, the wrong look, the wrong glance, or the wrong comment on Daddy’s part is like throwing a Molotov cocktail at Mommy. It’s like getting gooned out Costanza style in Seinfeld (I couldn’t find a better video :().

The best thing to do is keep the Swedish nanny fantasies to yourself.

On another note, welcome home to the freed reporters. South Korea is pretty nuts. I can’t imagine what the North is like. Yah, actually I can imagine. It’s gotta be like this, except the lollipops are replaced with “not nice” things.

Sunday was a case in point, another bit of discovery that I otherwise would have missed. At this point in the baseball season, I rarely read in depth game analysis other than Yankees vs Red Sox. It was a nice surprise to see Melky Cabrera on the hot trends for Twitter. He hit for the cycle which is a major accomplishment. As they call him at Yankee Stadium, he is the Melk Man and he delivered.

On a similar note, I read a great op-ed in the NY Times about how Red Sox feel about Ortiz on the steroids list. Apparently the author thinks it’s no big deal, especially since the Yanks have even more players on the list.

My only rebuttal would be that for all the New York Yankees that are on the steroids list, they have not had nearly the impact that Manny and Big Papi have had for the Red Sox. Without a doubt, and with the exception of Clemens, the Yanks on the list have not contributed anything. Most of these players are post-2000 and we all know the Yanks have been flops since then.

To draw a line in the sand and to deliver if it comes to fruition, I will say the championship Yankees began for me from 1996 to 2000. The players I worship are Jeter, Mo, Bernie Williams, Posada, and Paul O’Niell. If just one of those players shows up on the steroid list, then I will renounce my loyalty to the NY Yankees and start cheering for the Cubs (no way am I cheering for the Mets). That’s how important these class acts are to our championships and the spirit/essence of the Bronx Bombers.

It would be nice if Red Sox fans, rather than looking the other way or pointing to every other team, took a stand for the purity of baseball rather than some (now tainted) WS banners.

NewsTrendz Ruh Roh: Our network crashed for 2 hours in the morning. Usually I wouldn’t sweat it but we’re having a very nice July and I would love to hit the quarter million mark for monthly visitors. It’s going to be close.

Red Sox Ruh Roh: David Ortiz is apparently on the 2003 steroids list alongside former teammate Manny Ramirez. I’m especially looking forward to big-mouth Curt Schilling’s response and I’m looking forward to placing a nice big * on the 2004 and 2007 World Series banners.

UPDATE: Here is Schilling’s response. Nope, he won’t say their accomplishments are tainted. Of course not. You’re more than happy to testify in Congress about the threat of drugs when it’s everyone else, but not when it comes to the WS bling on your fingers.

Pierce Ruh Roh: I read with interest that there is a lot of trouble for stay-at-home-Dads returning to the work force. The article didn’t seem in depth nor did it provide any statistics. I’ll update this when I explore the startup opportunities available this Fall. My feeling is that this pertains to large companies but we’ll see.