Friday, February 13, 2004 - Today Maniac's Maniac's Pick Up Girls Guide and Seduction Web Site and Fast Seduction 101 are integrated with each
other again with design, branding, and templates.
- Personal note: I lost my job in
October 2002 (not missed) and in November 2003 finally finished selling my house after
deciding to do that in August and moved into the city and will now be focused on FS101 as
my primary full-time effort. It's been a long time since first starting the site but
I feel there is enough value and importance to it that it's something I want to put my
full efforts into. That, and I absolutely hate cubicles and corporate environments
and don't want to ever go back to that sort of work.
Thursday, February 12, 2004 - Updated the PDF PUA file archives to support direct-linking to original articles on the
web site, for select & copy support.
Sunday, February 8, 2004 - I haven't been updating this news page
for a bit. FastSeduction.com & Maniac's web site are now served on a business
class T-1 line in my home office. I can now attend to some overdue updates, fixes,
and feature enhancements.
- FastSeduction.com now ranks in the top
12,000 web sites on the planet as tracked by Alexa (it dipped below 10,000 for a short time, and it's getting there again).
Monday, June 9, 2003 - Hm, I probably forgot some news to
mention for the past couple months. Anyway, cracked the 20,000 barrier on Alexa. The site now
ranks 19,148 on the entire web (3-month average). The latest 1-week average rank is
11,463.
- Recently added acronym pop-up feature to
the mASF forum.
- Added a Posting Guidelines doc to the
forum.
- Forgot to mention a while back that I
added a Cities forum to the site (same login as mASF). The
Cities forum is for the dicussion of location info, places to go, venues, etc., for cities
worldwide.
Friday, April 18, 2003 Thursday, April 17, 2003 Wednesday, March 12, 2003 Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - FastSeduction.com jumped ahead in Alexa.com rankings to
25,509.
Monday, February 24, 2003 - FastSeduction.com is now in the top 1% of
domain-based web sites as tracked by Alexa.com, ranking 28,792
in a pool of almost 4,000,000 domains tracked for a 3-month average. The 1-week
average rank is at 18,030. Now you know why I need donations :-)
Friday, February 21, 2003 - Monday,
February 24, 2003 - Massive code improvements throughout site
to compensate for removal of mod_perl setup. More HTML compaction throughout site,
GZIP content encoding for supporting clients, and better expiration headers (although I
still need to make the site more cache-friendly). Misc mASF forum errors
fixed. Overall, most pages on the site for most visitors should now download about
2-3 times faster than before.
Saturday, February 22, 2003 Friday, February 21, 2003 - Site moved off of mod_perl temprarily due
to instability at current traffic levels.
Friday, February 14, 2003 - The site traffic is pretty huge now and
various fixes done to account for load errors -- in the form of 500 ("Internal Server
Error"), 502 ("Bad Gateway"), and 503 ("Server Busy") responses.
Friday, February 14, 2003 - mASF/uASF PUA file archives switched over
from clunky TEXT/GZIP format to PDF/ZIP format for easier extraction and browsing.
Friday, December 6, 2002 - Software-based performance improvements
across site.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002 - New & improved site design.
Monday, November 25, 2002 - Server hardware upgraded to improve
performance. More details on server setup is available on the about
fastseduction.com page. ASF archive database
now contains 1GB+ of article data, comprising roughly 140,000 articles from ASF. The
mASF forum up to 45,000 articles. It's been over a year
now since mASF was introduced as a replacement to ASF and the results are extremely
positive -- not only is the daily article count higher than that of ther original ASF, but
the signal-to-noise ratio is significantly better with almost all posts being on-topic and
100% spam-free.
Thursday, October 31, 2002 - In September, Maniac's web site had to be
reverted to the the old format while he caught up on updates. Need some time to set
the site up so that Maniac can do updates and make use of the HTML templates and site
design, integrated with FS101, at the same time.
- I'll have much more time now to devote to
web site development and updates, first addressing and improving performance, then making
sure all site features are fully useful. New features will begin to be seen by the
beginning of 2003, possible a site revamp to improve and speed up access to content.
Sunday, February 24, 2002 - Maniac's Pick Up Girls Guide and Seduction Web Site and Fast Seduction 101 are now tightly integrated
with each other. Maniac's site has been set to make use of all features introduced
in the Boot Camp section, which has now been deprecated in favor of Maniac's site.
All links and references updated.
Saturday, January 12, 2002 - Fixed an issue with the ASF archive search regarding body searches. Results
for body searches are accessible once again but the searches will require search
parameters to additionally be entered into the subject and/or author fields. The
date range of searches will also be required to be set to a maximum of 4 months. The
purpose of these requirements is to minimize the load on the server until I get a chance
to set up a full text search index for the now 850+ MB of article data.
Saturday, December 22, 2001 Saturday, November 24, 2001 - The crawl-enabled mirror has been shut
down because the core site is now being managed by a central connection throttling
process, a sophisticated version of what I had previously set up for the mirror.
What does that mean? Well, it means that I will no longer be needing to ban
individual IP addresses or networks for crawling the site too fast because it's now
impossible to crawl the site too fast. The current settings allow for 8 requests per
minute averaged over 3 minute blocks which means if any single host hits the site more
than 24 time within a 3 minute window (graphics and other files not included), the server
begins responding to them (and only them) with 503 "Server Busy" messages,
relieving the server load while simultaneously informing the crawling agent software to
slow down. I will still be banning by agent name, but only because anyone who
doesn't know how to properly configure their crawling agent to be "stealth"
(seen as a Netscape or IE browser) probably also doesn't know how to configure it's
connection settings so that it doesn't hit a site too fast. This is yet another
improvement for the site which increases reliability and availability for the vast
majority of visitors, allowing me to optimize resources to the max.
Tuesday, November 6, 2001 - New section added: David
DeAngelo's Mailbag, an archive of the weekly newsletter Double Your Dating Monday
Mailbag, written by David DeAngelo, the author of Double Your Dating.
- Site-wide performance enhancements now
complete. The only time the system is scheduled to be down is daily a few minutes
around midnight (EST) to facilitate web server log rotation. Sometime soon, I will
implement in-place log rotation to keep the server up non-stop. Otherwise, the
system is also set to auto-restart if the CPU load is greater than 40% due to a runaway
process (generally caused by the NNTP service doing something funky). From
observation, this tends to happen about only once every 3-4 days. Full reboots take
less than 3 minutes. If you encounter any access problems, try again after a few
minutes.
- Front page redesigned slightly for better
legebility and clearer section grouping.
Sunday, November 4, 2001 - The PUSHboard has been officially
de-commissioned and the moderated ASF discussion groups will
now take its place. All the features of PUSHboard are there, as well as a bunch more
features such as synchronized NNTP (news) and mailing list access. If you had an
account on the PUSHboard, you will need to create a new account to gain posting access to
the new discussion system. A mailing has gone out to all the current PUSHboard users
to let them know about the change.
Sunday, October 28, 2001 - Started promoting the moderated ASF discussion groups on the newsgroup. Will start
promoting it on this site once I get a chance to e-mail all the currrent PUSHboard users
to let them know that board will get de-commissioned and replaced with the new discussion
system. The new system supports a hybrid posting mechanism which synchronizes
associated private newsgroups with the web-based conferences. The system also
supports mailing lists associated with each conference. With moderation support and
a bunch of other adminstrative features, it brings a whole new level of usefulness to
USENet-style discussions of pick-up and seduction, solving the issues inherent with the
public ASF newsgroup.
Monday, October 22, 2001 - Had to bring the server down for a while
today/tonight in order to reconfigure the setup without mod_perl. The Win32
port of mod_perl has just been too unstable. Now with the new CPU horsepower
available, I'd much rather burden the CPU to reload the Perl interpreter for each CGI
execution rather than experience unreliability of the previous setup (which kept causing
the Apache web server to throw exception errors and freeze up at least once every 2-3
days). Mod_perl was mostly used in the translate and crawl features of the site, so
the affect to performace isn't a big deal... at least not until we're past a million
hits/month :-)
Sunday, October 21, 2001 - Finally moved the site over to the new
server (thanks for the donations!). In case you're
wondering, it's a P-III/1GHz/256KBL2 (133MHz FSB) system with 1GB of 133MHz ECC SDRAM and
an ATA/100 RAID-1 setup using (2) 30GB ATA/100 EIDE drives, automated backups/archiving,
and a CD-RW drive for sectioned off-site backups. Also, the ASF archive (now at well over 125,000 articles) and PAIR databases have been switched over to MS SQL 7.0. That
has sped up database response times about 15-20x. Seems to be a quirk searching on
the body field in the ASF archive... will fix that as soon as I find a decent block of
time. The only thing still running off the old server is the PUSHboard. With
the new setup, the only bottleneck remaining is the Internet connection, a 384 Kbps SDSL
line. Can maximize the efficiency of the line by implementing more throttling
options but eventually will have to find a new solution since the current line is getting
near the saturation point. The new solution, however, is a lot more expensive than a
new server so please keep the donations coming in...
Saturday, October 6, 2001 - Added a real-time language translation to
the site (currently beta testing). Almost the entire site can now be translated in
real-time to: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Norwegian thanks to the
free service from freetranslation.com and a
bit of ingenuity in the way I structured the site's backend code. Only issues seem
to be lack of control over cached translations (not sure how "stale" pages
remain after being initially translated) and minor HTML formatting issues. I even
found a way to support the search results in the ASF archive :-)
Thursday, September 27, 2001 - Another big section has been added to the
site: The Pickup Boot Camp. Modeled after Maniac High's Pick
Up Girl's Guide, it's a no-frills compilation of pickup and seduction knowledge,
bringing together a mass of information from varied resources, enhanced (and will continue
to be enhanced) to make use of as many resources available through this site as possible.
Proving once again that this site is your Pickup Bible. To help me
to keep this site going and adding resources, please consider donating a bit of money - it will go towards the excellent cause of upgrading this
server and the Internet connection it's on!
Wednesday, September 19, 2001 - Added article-fetching caching mechanism
to ASF archive search. This should help alleviate
some of the load on the database, speed up requests. Working on a caching mechanism
for the query system itself as well as testing a beta MS SQL backend.
Friday, September 7, 2001 - Fixed a search indexing bug in the Clifford's Seduction Newsletter Archive section. Now all
newsletters can be indexed and the search results will be more consitently up-to-date as
new newsletters get added.
Wednesday, September 5, 2001 - I've set up an account with PayPal for
site users that wish to help support this site through a donation. If you are
interested in helping to support this site, please use the Fast Seduction 101 PayPal account account and donate generously.
- Added a new section, David
Shade's Journal, where David Shade, the author of David Shade's Manual, will
contribute articles about giving women incredible sexual pleasure.
Friday, August 31, 2001 - Finally starting to look into
transferring the ASF archive database to Microsoft SQL
Server v7, hoping to speed things up. The archive recently surpassed 100,000 articles and
is really too bulky for the current setup.
Monday, August 20, 2001 - Reorganized the main menu navigation
across the whole site.
Sunday, August 19, 2001 - Added a Reviews section to the web site where PU and seduction related products will be reviewed.
Monday, July 23, 2001 - A major power spike hit my area and the
servers were down most of the afternoon. Luckily, the UPS devices saved the equipment.
Unluckily, none of the UPS devices on my network survived - batteries fried on all 5 of
them. Almost $400 down the tubes... arg.
Monday, June 29, 2001 - I've registered a Deleware corporation, Learn The Skills Corp., and established the
FastSeduction.com web site and associated intellectual properties as fully owned
properties of Learn The Skills Corp. This will allow the site flexibility to grow in
case it requires donations or another non-intrusive means of financial support.
Sunday, May 7, 2001 - Cleaned up the ASF archive database of useless tables and overlooked spam.
Repaired minor database errors and compacted the records and indexes, reducing the
database size by about 35% and increasing response time by about 15%. A better
(external) indexing system will be made available soon to improve the response time even
more. The database currently has almost 100,000 archived articles.
Saturday, May 5, 2001 - Updated Clifford's
Seduction Newsletter Archive with fills from the past few months, provided by readers
of this site. More fills will be included as they are collected (there are currently
about 150-200 collected which need to be cleaned up and re-formatted to work properly
within the automated integration system).
- Temporarily disabled a tool on the
backend database server which would occasionally hog resources for an extended time
(sometimes more than 12 hours). The tool will not be turned back on until the
resource issue is corrected.
Thursday, March 29, 2001 - New Java chat option added - now chat live on the site. New chat channel created to support the Java
based chat. People who prefer using a normal IRC client can also connect to the same
chat channel using their favorite IRC client like mIRC. It's
the best of both worlds. :-)
Tuesday, March 27, 2001 - Added Clifford's
Seduction Newsletter Archive to the site. Will be posting a link to it from the
main site soon. Organized, searchable, visual enhancements, acronym pop-ups, live
links, etc. Thanks for letting me repurpose the e-mail archives, Cliff!
- Webaster comments: Criminy, this site is
getting huge! Between the base templates, HTML, scripts, graphics,
databases, indexes, cache files, and data backups, it's about 1.3 GB (that's GIGABytes)
on the back-end server, another 155 MB of compressed log files between the front-end and
back-end servers, and another 30-40 MB of external support programs (mailers, scedulers,
etc.). It's a damn good thing most of it is automated! LOL! That's a
heck of a lot of seduction knowledge... I've got to start pruning things and be more
efficient or I'll hit a resource/CPU/bandwidth wall soon.
Sunday, March 25, 2001 Friday, March 23, 2001 - Crawler-safe site mirror [2003-02-24,
now deprecated] now running under Apache mod_perl for improved performance.
Wednesday, March 21, 2001 - Added a crawler-safe site mirror [2003-02-24,
now deprecated]. Now people who want to use spiders/crawlers for browsing the
site offline (due to high dial-up costs or access limits from office/school) have a means
to do so, working around the spider/crawler agent ban on the main site. However,
there are certain connection limitations in place to ensure that no single spider/crawler
can hog any more resources than is necessary.
Wednesday, March 14, 2001 - New site design launched. Entire
site now driven by a centralized template back-end (making updates easier and faster) and
a new "choose style" feature enabled (available on the home page). The
site should now be easier to navigate and be more visually pleasing and flexible.
Improvements include: - Site-wide navigation integration.
- PAIR contact
form bug fixes.
- Player Guide acronym pop-up feature added to the ASF archive.
- Multiple style selection feature - modify
how the web site looks to you.
- Compacted HTML (most pages download up to
30% faster).
- Server-side document caching. This
especially helps page load times for the Player Guide and other
semi-dynamic areas, improving the page response times by up to 50%.
- Player
Guide Board streamlined visually.
- Certain resource-hogging spider/crawler
agents banned from the site (helps performance for the majority of visitors tremendously).
- Dynamic meta-tags, meta-content,
summaries, titling, formatting.
- Misc. speed improvements in back-end
code.
Friday, March 9, 2001 - New chat channel, #ASF-mIRC, is up... replacing the old channel.
Tuesday, February 6, 2001 Thursday, February 1, 2001 - Fixed a long-standing issue with the mail
and DNS servers which were causing most of the PAIR mail
delivery issues. Also moved the DNS to a more reliable, faster system.
Authorization e-mail delivery for PAIR registrations should now be at least 99%
reliable. Yahoo and Hotmail users might still see delivery delays but that's out of
my hands - yell at Yahoo or Hotmail for that. :-)
December, 200 - January, 2000 Saturday, December 30, 2000 - New guidelines
for crawling/spidering my searchable archive:
I maintain the searchable archive of ASF as a benefit for all the guys
reading that group who want to research past posts. I DO NOT maintain it so that
some cheezballs could bog down my server with bots and crawlers trying to grab shitloads
of posts. If you want to do that, go to Deja.com. Crawling my server heavily
without prior permission bogs it down and makes it difficult for others to use it. Here are the new rules: overall site: PLEASE no
faster than 400 hits/hour
overall site: PLEASE no faster than 15 hits/minute (on average)
archive: PLEASE no faster than 300 hits/hour
archive: PLEASE no faster than 10 hits/minute (on average) I've now posted this disclaimer on the
main search page. Anyone going beyond the above guidelines
is most likely using a bot/crawler or has set up their browser to fetch every article from
a particular (or multiple) broad search results. Some forms of pre-fetching are OK
(for offline reading) but please don't abuse this server. Anyone with even low
intelligence can tell the difference between browsing/pre-fetching and overt/excessive
spidering. If you want to save yourself time and save me (and other site visitors)
from an aggravation, please just be more specific with your search queries. I don't want to hear any whining.
It's my server and I don't appreciate the rudeness of someone treating it
like their pissing ground, especially if it affects performance for other visitors.
Saturday, December 30, 2000 - Reverse DNS issue with PUSHboard solved.
Board server response times should be much better now.
- FAQ updated.
Sunday, December 17, 2000 Monday, Novenber 20, 2000 Saturday, Novenber 18, 2000 Sunday, September 17, 2000 - The ASF archive database has been
completely re-indexed/compacted, the data access drivers on the server have been updated,
and the file system completely defragmented. That should improve query performance
by a good amount but the database is getting quite huge (71,000+ articles, 310+ MB) and I
will have to look into a more optimized solution. Caching queries won't help much -
I need a faster database engine and better indexing options. Temporary fix is to
clean out some crud, place a lower tolerance on the spam/crud scrubbing, and generate an
optimized, standalone, external cache index file for each major field type (subject,
author, body). I've already been doing most of that the past few months so it's getting to
the point where a fundamentally better database architecture is needed...
Monday, March 20, 2000 - Link to the private PACTboard has been
removed. Too many people asking for access to that even though there is a perfectly
good public web board to post to. Anyway, the PACTboard was pretty much a stale idea
- not worth maintaining. I hope by removing it more people will sign up and post to
the public PUSHboard.
November, 1999 - February, 2000 Saturday, October 23, 1999 Friday, October 22, 1999 - PAIR registration opened.
Friday, October 1, 1999 - PUSHboard forum created for site.
Monday, September 20, 1999 - Site launched. ASF archive search tool made available with roughly 40,000
archived articles online. Class is now in session...
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