Server Outage

Usually when I get around 30,000 users per day with more than 100,000 page views, its usually because I've been Dugg or Boinged. My end of year goal was initially set to 20,000 which I revised to a stretch goal of 30,000 last month.
Looks like I will need to revise the goal again as I hit 30,000 this week without the aid of a Boing or a Digg. While I am happy, this has come a bit too soon than I anticipated thus the server outages you are experiencing.

A quick thanks to the regular readers for making this possible and a big herro to the new readers - I hope the outages don't put you off ^^;

I have done a ton of caching and image optimization on the server but looks like I need better hardware and have just ordered another server to handle capacity. Will need to do more optimization which will delay development of figure.fm orz.
If the site fails to load, it should be back up within a few hours until the new server is up n running.

Above: Todays outages ToT;

The remainder of this post will only interest blog owners or developers- the rest may fall asleep ^^;
Some of you asked about my dev environment so I thought I would talk about about it here.
dannychoo.com has been up since 2000 and was initially a place for me to experiment with web technologies and let my friends know that I was alive by posting something every six months. Archive.org has been keeping archives of the site and you can see what this site looked like years ago. You can also use that tool to get archives of your site too - useful when you have a hard disk crash ^^;

Wanted to have a guestbook feature back then but couldn't program. I downloaded other peoples Perl scripts and spent hours modifying them so that they partially did what I wanted. I got fed up of that and decided to learn Perl where everything was CGI back then.

After learning Perl for a while, I came across PHP and liked the look of it as one could embed code within the HTML code. PHP is pretty easy to pick up and is still my preferred language even though people go on about Ruby.

dannychoo.com back then was still in Korean, Chinese(traditional), Japanese and English. I didnt want to create a page for each language so decided to start using a database to store data. MYSQL was my choice of DB where the basics can be picked up in an evening. I dropped Korean and Chinese from the site due to time constraints.

Previously, I developed on Windows using tools like Dreamweaver and Editplus for editing. Was running Apache as the webserver with PHP and MYSQL. I used Windows IIS for a while which was a good start but not recommended for anything else other than learning.

At the moment I have the same dev environment on OS X.

I previously used the Table tag for positioning back in the Web1.0 world but now use CSS for positioning just about everything - this is the reason why I dont use Dreamweaver anymore. The text editor I use is Smultron which is the best text editor for the Mac - *All others* for some reason have crap support for double byte languages.

For those who are interested in learning, a site I most recommend is W3 Schools - a lot of PHP, MYSQL, CSS, JavaScript to be picked up there with examples.

Dreamweaver is also a great tool to learn HTML and build sites - used it for years and thank the makers.

Nearly forgot to talk about graphics. I use Fireworks for everything web related from doing mockups to banner graphics. I only use Photoshop when working with Photos and Mirai-chans PSD files.