Cream O’ the Crop: People’s Choice

megaphone2Photo by altemark

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve gone through the usual chaos of voting for our summer update to the Cream O’ the Crop. We’re nearly ready to roll out our latest choices for Motion Design Studios—but this time, we thought it’d be fun to cut you all in on the action.

Introducing the first ever Cream O’ the Crop People’s Choice Poll. The three studios with the most votes will be listed alongside our picks on the Cream O’ the Crop page.

Everyone gets to vote for three studios, but you only get to vote once. Choose wisely.

Voting ends on Friday, September 11th.

Posted on Motionographer

Going Nitro

dpv

Last week, you may have noticed some downtime here at Motionographer. I’m glad to say that those times are behind us, and we are now running on Media Temple’s drool-worthy Nitro server.

Yes, I’m giddy. Giddy like a schoolgirl.

So what happened?

Ever since we killed Tween and launched Motionographer back in early 2006, our traffic has been steadily climbing. Last week, we hit 75,000 pageviews in a single day. That’s pretty incredible.

Unfortunately, it pushed our server to its limits. In addition to running waaaaay too many WordPress plugins (I lost count after 20), I’d made some earlier customizations to the server’s configuration that finally caught up with us.

(mt) to the rescue

Given this scenario, most hosts would simply shrug their shoulders and say, “Hey, it’s your problem. Deal with it.” But once again, Media Temple swooped in to save the day. Over the phone and via email, they worked through every detail with me to make sure everything was running smoothly.

And they’re still on the case, monitoring the server, watching for rogue scripts to rear their ugly heads and keeping in touch with me at every turn. My sincerest props to Ryan Afdahl and his crew for their help. They’ve been amazing.

Posted on Motionographer

Motionographer Jobs 2.0

escalator2
Photo by Marius Kallhardt

Last week, the Motionographer Jobs database went kaput, and we lost all of the job listings. After pulling out my hair, I decided this was as good a time as any to try out a new system. It’s still in beta, but it’s a big improvement over the old system, I think.

My apologies to everyone for the downtime. Hopefully, the new job board will be a happy, stable framework upon which we can build. If you hit any bugs along the way, please use the Contact page to let me know.

Oh, and for the coders out there, the new system is based on the JobberBase script, which is pretty damn delicious.

Posted on Motionographer