Another Software Update for Mizozo

Just to continue this trend of updating you on whats going on with the back-end of Mizozo, a bit more work was done last night which has great benefit if Mizozo is to ever see a 100k hit day.

After moving the servers the last time, Memcache was never setup properly. While this seems like something that is relatively trivial, there are some complications. Last night Memcache was once again turned on and everything seems to be working nicely.

I would like to point out, that when Memcache is enabled, sometimes things get a bit flaky. For example, we cache pages for 24 hours, which means it is possible that page changes will not appear properly. If an article is edited, cache is killed, but other things may also affect page content, such as Related Articles. I think that if two articles become related on the back end, the cache should be killed, but I could be wrong ... time will tell.

Unfortunately, ever since the Stumbleupon ban Mizozo hasn't seen any 100k+ days, but this will change. When it does, we will be ready. In the meantime, caching relieves a bit of stress from our server, but nothing that the server can't already handle.

The Magic Flight Launch Box has Arrived!

Over the past few months, much speculation has been made on whether or not these prizes were real. Some people tend to think that this is all just a gimmick and that I either am not purchasing anything or that I intend to keep all the prizes myself. Well, rest assured, neither is the case. While I am not sure how to prove the latter yet, the former is easy enough.

From now on I plan on posting pictures of the items I receive to at least prove that I am in fact purchasing them. Hopefully the winners will take to posting something on Mizozo about winning the prize, like the Ploom Review.

So, I received the Magic Flight Launch Box a while back, and only got around to opening the box last night. I took pictures of the entire opening process, so I will post them all below. I was a bit surprised of how 'open' everything was, with nothing really sealed. I could care less about that, don't get me wrong, but being in America where we seal things within other things, I was just surprised.

None the less, here is a quick pictorial run through of the box opening process. As I mentioned already, Mizozo's May prize is the Magic Flight Launch Box, and if you want to win it all you have to do is make a post. For more info and official rules, check out our contest page.

Some Quick Updates

I have been slacking on the blog front for the past few months, so I figure I would at least give some updates on some of the stuff that has been going on for the past few weeks.

In the last several weeks I have spent a little time rewriting and adding to some of the code base of Mizozo. Due to the fact that budgets don't allow a full time developer, I have been doing the majority of the work for the past few years.

This weekend I fixed a major bug in the system in how we handle images. Back in the day of Mizozo we had built it so that images would link to a gallery, rather than an AJAX solution like we have now. It took a while before we realized that this was a bad idea, so when we removed the gallery much of the code in the system already pointed to it. Our 'patch' solution at the time was to use AJAX to rewrite all links that point to the gallery page to instead use that lightbox-like popup we have now. The problem, if someone clicks an image quick enough (or if a crawler hits the links too fast), the person is redirected to a Page Not Found error, which is bad for a number of reason. Well, this is now fixed ... the user will now get the full sized image.

Also, some work was recently done to our pages so that Facebook Likes will show the right image within Facebook. There was some other work too, but it slipped my mind.

Also, we received our Magic Flight prize a few days back. I will make a separate post about this in a few minutes.

TLDR - We are still developing modules to the site and making fixes. Just because posts aren't being made to the blog doesn't mean that the site is completely stagnant in terms of architectural growth.

The April Numbers

April's numbers are in and they are looking pretty good. While we have seen a slight drop in visitors, our pages per visit has increased enough to offset that, giving us a slightly larger number of page views.

Here are the quick figures:

Visitors: 167,377
Page Views: 309,700
Pages per Visit: 1.85

Earnings: $225

As I did last month (and hopefully moving forward), here is the complete breakdown of our traffic via Google Analytics.

Top 5 Articles Published Ever:
#1 - Sila Sahin Nude Playboy Pictures (NSFW) [42,782]
#2 - Kelly Brook goes completely nude for Exhibition Magazine (NSFW) [12,963]
#3 - Olivia Munn Leaked Photos (NSFW) [11,483]
#4 - Hayley Williams, Lead Singer of Paramore, Naked [9,817]
#5 - 45 Year Old Helena Christensen Goes Topless in Elle Spain May Issue [6,731]

Top 5 Articles Published in April:
#1 - 45 Year Old Helena Christensen Goes Topless in Elle Spain May Issue [6,731]
#2 - Tamara Ecclestone's Playboy Photos (NSFW) [5,284]
#3 - Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Caught and the Autopsy Photo of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (NSFW, NSFL) [2,138]
#4 - Quality of sex affects your longevity [1,591]
#5 - Emma Watson Goes Out of Character in the latest GQ [1,494]

Given an earning of $225, and an operating expense of $140, our profit is a meager $85. 90% of that only amounts to about $75. So, this month's prize will be smaller than usual, unfortunately. Maybe I'll be able to find something interesting on one of those discount sites ... but, they usually don't sell anything that you can smoke out of.

The Winner of April's Glass Paraphernalia Prize is ...

The winner of our Glass Giveaway is none other than our celebrity correspondent, celebuzz.

This month's winning article is celebuzz's article - 45 Year Old Helena Christensen Goes Topless in Elle Spain May Issue.

Congratulations celebuzz, I hope you enjoy your new glass ... well, I know you will. Hopefully you'll invite me to a session or two.