Category: Web

I moonlight as a web developer and I continue dabble with one project that I’ve been working on for over 6 years. The Clyde Fitch Report (CFR) is just an awesome blog dedicated to the arts and politics. It’s currently in its fourth iteration. The site has been moving in a direction beyond me (bigger team, new developers, I’ve been busy) but I’ve never been far away from it. Right now, I’ve stepped back in, dealing with some popularity issues impacting the site. Two great blog posts, by our standards, blew up online. Is Your Theater A Community or a Clique? and Knowing When to Fold’em are two of our biggest posts yet. I’m really proud of the CFR team.

There are several different ways to measure popularity online. The most typical way is by how many times the link is shared, how many people view your website, or how many times someone talks about you on twitter. However, as a developer, I measure popularity by how many people or programs are trying to mess up what we’re doing. In the last day, over 550 attempts were made to access the back-end of the CFR. That’s slowing down the site, eating up resources, and making me annoyed. But it also is making me proud. The fact that we’re being targeted means we’ve got a good thing going here.