Well guys, our third server move has been completed and with it, hopefully you’re noticing faster load times. There were a few hiccups, but overall it went really well. Here’s a summary of some things that we encountered and what the status is for them:

• Private Messages: Because the new server is running PHP5, we discovered that the private messaging feature was adding 30+ seconds to the load times of the home and upcoming pages. As a result, we have disabled private messaging until we can rework it for PHP5.
• Blank Pages: This one was the most frustrating for me. Various pages throughout the site were blanking for no apparent reason. We traced down to an Apache configuration setting and after a simple single-line .htaccess change, the blanking pages were all working again.
• Search Pagination: We made some progress on an outstanding bug dealing with the pagination of search results. While the bug isn’t completely fixed, you can now view all the pages of results.

So what’s next for Design Float? Over a month ago you may remember that I promised some new features were on there way including the ability to submit videos and podcasts. These features are still finished, I just hadn’t had the time to implement them because I was head deep in finding a scalable server solution. My fantastic sys admin configured the new server for collaborative development so myself and a few of the contract developers now have a dedicated development site to work off of. This will help us deploy the features we already have built as well as make the development of future additions much quicker and easier.

This is truly a learning experience for me and continues to remain a side project to my main gig, so I’m doing the best that I can given the time and resources available. Thank you all for your continued support and patience.

You The Designer and U-Printing are sponsoring a great poster design contest of which I’m fortunate to be on the panel of judges for. You have until March 21st to get your submissions in and you’ll want to because the prize lineup is fantastic!

1st Place
16 GB Apple iPhone
$250 Printing Credit for UPriting.com
300 Credits for iStockPhoto.com

2nd Place
$150 Printing Credit for UPrinting.com
200 Credits for iStockPhoto.com

3rd Place
$100 Printing Credit for UPrinting.com
100 Credits for iStockPhoto.com

Top 10
18″x 24″ Poster Print from UP

View the full details here!

I know it’s been a while since any major updates around Design Float, but I’ve been working hard on getting some awesome new features developed to ensure that Design Float continues to be the best social media site for designers. I have big things planned for the future of Design Float and the first phase of several large feature additions is right around the corner. This first phase is going to include a groups feature and support for video and podcast submissions in addition to some other nice surprises. The features have already been developed so now it’s just a matter of integrating them seamlessly, tying up all the lose design ends, and completing tests. Stay tuned…

Well I might be a bit behind, but I’ve decided to see what all the hype behind Squidoo is about, so I went ahead and created a Design Float Lense. Setting up the lense was fast and easy. I was able to have it pull in the latest category specific Design Float content via our RSS feeds.

In the end, I hope this helps spread the word about Design Float and maybe make an impact in the Squidoo design community. If you use Squidoo, be sure to check it out, favorite it, and share any ideas, comments or recommendations with me!

Source: www.squidoo.com/designfloat

I wanted to give everyone a head’s up that I will be migrating Design Float to a more powerful server that will allow us to scale easier moving forward. The past couple of months, traffic and demand on the databases has continued to increase and we have outgrown the specs of the current solution. Despite all the updates from the recent redesign, things still aren’t fast enough, so this upgrade should also speed things up even more. My apologies for any downtime over the next couple of days.