Sidepodcast

Daily: 15th March 2010

Monday, and the day after the day before. F1 is back in business and we've ticked one event off of the 19 race calendar already. It will be a further 11 days before cars take to the track again. It looks like we have some time to kill.

Christine has entrusted me with daily duties, which I interpret to mean "discussing in-depth technical aspects of the site at great length". Something I shall gladly do.

This weekend, marked for Sidepodcast, the culmination of 4-6 months worth of work. During the off-season many hours were spent shoring up weaknesses of the old live commenting system, to enable the smooth experience of the past four days. I'm quite relieved it all worked as expected.

The debut of the Factbyte Factbox marks the new technical direction Sidepodcast.com is heading in. We bought a brand new server from Rackspace to host the system, and after a solid weekend's work, we'll be migrating the rest of the site there shortly. I don't remember the last time we had so few technical issues during a race weekend, and in fact the only downtime experienced was a 60 second server outage caused by the two of us attempting to publish F1 Big Picture and F1 Minute articles simultaneously. In over three years, we've never crossed the blogging streams before, and we should probably avoid it in future.

Back to the subject of F1, what's new for Monday?

• I've just been reading the latest edition of GrandPrix+, which might explain the delay in posting the daily. Joe and David are far more optimistic about what they saw in Bahrain than we have been. I understand races in days of yore used to be slow burners, building to a climax, but does the Playstation generation really have such patience nowadays?
• Lukeh debuted a new report card rating system on his blog, and he's given race number one a resounding 'D', although he is looking positively towards Australia.
• F1Photos offers a unique look at yesterday's first lap incident between Kubica and Sutil. I approve of the frame-by-frame sequence, and hope to see more as the season progresses.
• Finally, Gavin published his comprehensive analysis of the opening Fantasy Racers round. I faired better than I was expecting, so haven't started sulking about my position just yet.

That'll do for me. Don't forget to listen to Christine's F1 Digest roundup today, I don't remember the GP episode appearing as early as Sunday for a very long time. The girl worked incredibly hard throughout the whole of the race weekend, and I stand in awe of her work.

Sunday Afternoon Giggles

Since Christmas, we have stepped back from live streaming the podcast recordings on a Sunday night. Most of the issues are down to server and technical bits and pieces, but it also takes the pressure off us on a weekend. We want to make the live streaming as good as it can be, and putting a halt to proceedings is the easiest way to evaluate what we're doing.

To keep you all in the loop, we're not planning to bring back live streaming over the next few weeks, but it is our aim to return to the world of live before the season gets underway. Either way, we'll definitely be back for the first race.

You're not missing anything, as when we do off-line shows, it isn't half as much fun as it is when we're watching the comments. I do promise to keep finding the outtakes for you, though, because it's only fair you get to see us mess up, even if we're not streaming the process.

But wait! It's not all bad news. We do have some live streaming to bring to you. Parade Lap host Alex Andronov managed to acquire a PRS licence and began a weekend radio show, bringing a couple of hours of music, live streamed into your ears. Proper music as well! It's brilliant.

As our first ever guest broadcast, one in which we are not involved at all, we are opening up a thread for the Giggles Radio phenomenon, allowing listeners to watch and comment right here on Sidepodcast. The show isn't really F1 related, other than the fact that, erm, Giggles is an F1 fan, and sometimes he plays songs that mention cars. I think that is tenuous enough for us.

Giggles Radio takes a different letter of the alphabet each episode, and plays songs surrounding that letter. We've already seen A, B and C, and in case you missed them, we have posted the replays in a dedicated category. You can find them here:

• Giggles Radio - A
• Giggles Radio - B
• Giggles Radio - C

I've also entered the latest Giggles Radio show into the Calendar, and it just so happens it will take place today, starting at 4pm UK time. Alex is much better at sticking to a schedule than we are here at Sidepodcast, so make sure you checkout the Giggles Radio thread later this afternoon.

All Systems Go

To follow up on yesterday's post regarding an impending server relocation... if you're reading this then all went well.

Born Again

Actually it was probably the easiest migration we've ever done (this being only the second), despite the fact that smack in the middle of the process WordPress decided to release a new version of their publishing platform. If you followed the comments and tweets yesterday, there seemed to be a 50 / 50 split whether or not we should upgrade at the same time as moving, but seeing as it basically meant less work for us, we opted to dive straight into version 2.5.

Ideally you shouldn't notice any changes, everything should work as before, only a bit faster. We know that a couple of the audio podcasts from last year have broken links meaning you can't listen to them right now, but that should be sorted within the next few hours.

The Other Bits

One thing that is worth mentioning (if not a little geeky) is the Sidepodcast TV Facebook application.

The move entailed a switch from using PHP4 to PHP5 and a couple of lines of code had to be re-written. With any luck there should be no issues relating to this, but if you spot anything please let us know.

Finally, you are free to comment once more. Cheers!

Bigger, Better, Faster, More

This weekend we're planning on moving sidepodcast.com to a new collection of web and database servers. It's been on our to do list for a while, but the recent popularity of live commenting during race weekends has forced us to get on with it.

Falling Down

Following on from the Malaysian GP this site struggled to cope with the 400+ comments posted in the space of a few hours, and rather indignantly fell over. After much analysis it seems the weight of comments wasn't so much of a problem, rather the large amount of spam that seems to arrive in waves, coupled with some search engine spiders doing their thing.

Given that the last two things are pretty much out of our control, we thought we ought to do something about it (although I suspect a total of 400 comments will take some beating), so we're moving Sidepodcast onto the same Media Temple servers that currently host F1 Minute. MT have had a slightly ropey time of it lately, but their support and response times have been second to none throughout. Their databases are also scalable, so in theory as soon as the site gets busier we can add more and more, and we get guranteed uptime.

Keeping Up

All of this means that things might go a bit wonky around these parts during the next 24 hours. Hopefully the transition will be a smooth one, but I can imagine a few images will probably go missing (and then some).

If you're still using the original F1 Minute embed codes (e.g the really old information from last year), you may find the player on your site doesn't work during the rest of the weekend, but it'll come back soon enough. If you wish to ensure zero downtime, we recommend updating to code detailed on the F1 Minute web site.

Losing Touch

For a brief period we're going to switch off commenting here. This is too ensure nothing gets out of sync, as some people will point to the new servers before others (depending on your ISP). Incoming email will also be temporarily queued, but not lost.

The best way to keep in touch during the next two days is probably via the Facebook group, but we'll also be updating Twitter regularly.

Appreciating your patience.