My New Server’s First Test

Yesterday was a pretty big day here at Prose of a Pol. I woke up rather early yesterday, at 4:30 AM to be exact, and felt energized and ready to be productive after only four hours of sleep. I immediately began pumping out posts. First I published a trailer of a Battlestar Galactica remake that never made it to the airwaves at We Demand Videos!

Then, the power went out due to the snowstorm here in Boston. NSTAR, our electrical utility, was quick to act and the power was back on about twenty minutes later. Once my router rebooted, I posted Car-free for nearly a year! to my blog. After it was live, I tweeted out a link to the post and updated my linkedin status with the url too (tip of the hat to Rachel Levy for the linkedin idea).

Then, the power went out, again. Fifteen minutes later, all the appliances in my house began whirring up again. It’s amazing how silent the house becomes when there’s no electricity to power all our various gadgetry. Luckily, my laptop’s battery was fully charged so I could continue working, but the lack of internet certainly limited me.

I spent the next two hours tweaking a few things with The 42nd Estate’s slick new design, writing up a review of Saints & Soldiers for OTIBR, and working on a few tax related matters. Then…I know you can feel what’s coming by now…the power went out!

When my internet re-appeared, I noticed some hits coming into my car-free living post from reddit and Universal Hub. I figured it’s time to go for broke and did something I never did before, submitted my post myself to StumbleUpon. Afterwards, I sent off an e-mail to a good friend with a few ideas for a site re-design he’s working on for one of the local newspapers here (more to come on this soon). Went downstairs, checked the mail, saw my business cards were here (pictures coming soon), and then…

I won’t even write it but for those keeping track, that’s number four of the day.

At this point, my motivation and productivity were rapidly depleting. To take advantage of the little energy I had left, I packed up my laptop, put on my jacket and walked out the door to head down to the Sugar Bowl Cafe down the street for coffee and free Wi-Fi. Literally as my hand was closing the door, I heard that familiar whirring noise running through the house. I sighed and walked back inside, turned on the coffee maker and flipped on my Xbox 360. At this point, I needed some stress relief and there’s really nothing quite like Call of Duty 4 to take the edge off.

After a few rounds, I heard my iPhone buzzing a few times with new e-mails. I reached over, touched into my inbox and saw a new message on my facebook wall from Linda:

just saw a link to your blog on boston.com… anyway i think we are long overdue for one of our dinners, so if it ever stops snowing put one on your schedule

For my non-Bostonian readers, boston.com is the web-site of The Boston Globe, the preeminent newspaper in Boston. I clicked over and sure enough on their home page under New England Blogs, there it was, Prose of a Pol’s latest post on the year of carlessness.

My jaw, iPhone and pants immediately dropped to the floor.

OK, I lied about the pants bit.

And the iPhone…but my jaw did drop, that part was true!

So I sent out a few texts and tweets to my friends with about seven hundred exclamation marks, checked my server status, and then just sat there in a state of mild shock. The newspaper that I grew up reading, the real one, not that tabloid on Herald Street, just linked to my blog, on their front page. Wow.

At the end of the day, Prose of a Pol had its biggest traffic day since moving over to the new server and it help up perfectly. Reports from my friends stated that the site continued to load instantly during the whole day. I confirmed this fact periodically throughout the night on my iPhone while I worked on a few other tasks. For anyone whose curious, the final stats showed 1481 visitors and five power outages, compared to an average of 400 visitors. It certainly wasn’t my biggest day, that honor belongs to the day fark.com listed my Battlestar Politica post, but being on the front page of boston.com is something I’m proud of. So to whoever is responsible for updating the New England blogs section at the Globe, thank you!