TechHamlet Satus

We have just disabled track backs in the whole site (In both TechHamlet and CyberGnome). The old ones have also been deleted. We did this because in the last few months, we received a huge amount of spam through track backs! Bots sending track backs to get link juice!

First we stopped displaying them. Next we disabled them completely. I know that it will hurt some people who really link to us. But we have no other choice. Most of the track backs are spam and we can’t handle all of them! So, it got to go!

Several weeks ago we started to test a new VPS host IntoVPS. The main reason we wanted to move is that we wanted to get away from US. The country is going out of control and have become a big threat to the whole world and the Internet.

We wanted to take the site to Asia but we don’t have much good hosts in here. So, we picked IntoVPS which is a Romanian hosting company. So, now our server is located in Amsterdam (Netherlands).

All our Europe and Asian readers might feel an increase in the loading speed. The new server also comes with double the amount of memory as the older one. So, we managed to install more software to make things fast and give more RAM for the site!

IntoVPS is cheap but their servers are great. No problems for this few weeks and their service is top notch. If you make a support request through email, they will respond to it withing minutes! Really fast!

We have just created a new forum for our readers. Now you can use this forum to ask questions, answer questions, write reviews, share latest news, discuss about latest gadgets, share cool trick and hacks, share your knowledge with others, and do many more stuff…

If you use it well. If things work as planned… We’ll separate it from Tech Hamlet and make it a full professional Tech Forum! So, what do you say? Will you try the new forum? Will you use it?

We have just moved the Tech Hamlet Status site to Tumblr and have given a nice cool design to it.

Tumbler seems to be easier and more suited to our needs. So, we moved in from posterous! What do you think?

After trying the new design for several days we recognized that the social media buttons does a lot of work to slow down our site. In the home page, for each post, nearly 10 sets of facebook, twitter and google plus buttons have to load. This is a big problem. So, we have just removed them and now you can clearly see the difference in the speed!

Also we made some small tweaks to the front page design to make thing nice and clean!

Check the Ping Dome speed test results : http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/yIzfe84rd/http://techhamlet.com

Check the GT Metrix speed results : http://gtmetrix.com/reports/techhamlet.com/cuGn409n

Tech Hamlet is currently down. Its a DNS reolution error with CloudFlare. Our servers are working fine and there’s nothing wrong from our side. Hope CloudFlare will fix it soon!

Update : The issue is now fixed! Things should work fine now!

Right now, we are slowly rolling out the 13th version of our site. Its not a sudden release like the previous versions. It will take several days because this is a huge update!

We release one part, test it and then release the next part. Already, most of the site was tested on our local test machines. But, still, there are things to do!

So, please be patient! We will announce the final release very soon!

Did some small updates to the site!

Added Two more banners to the top of the site with the Google+ badge. Did this because many advertisers asks for it but I don’t like to fill the site with ads… What to do…

Now this might interest you… Changed the Comment system from Disqus to Livefyre! It’s a brand new comment system which have several great features. The things we liked :

- It pulls conversations done outside the site into the comment area. For example, Facebook page comments, Twitter mentions…

- Its a full do follow comment system. Search engines can see the comments and you can benefit from that!

- Its a real-time comment system!

Since problems started to crawl into my head, I didn’t even touched the internel part of the site. No fixes, no updates, no features…. Now, things are going to change…

According to the previous partner list, we used KnownHost as our host and Hostgator as our domain registrar. We ditched those two months ago.

Ditched Knownhost because I think they don’t have enough security on their servers! Got a lot of attack alerts… We moved to Servint several months ago and I think they are the perfect host for us. Have more security and also have more powerful hardware!

We also ditched Hostgator because they are not good when handling domains (still) and moved to NameCheap.

Today I have removed Knownhost and Hostgator from the list and have added VaultPress (Yep, we are using it!) and Servint! Might add Namecheap and the others in the next major update! :D

In July we made a major update to our servers. During that update, a small mistake in the server configurarions have prevented Feedburner from pulling latest topics from our RSS feed. Just now we fixed it and everything is back to normal! Now you’ll recive updates from us as usual!