Tough Day for BCN, We had the slows ... | Eastern North Carolina Now

    I would like to begin by apologizing to all of our many readers for our creeping speed today. We fixed the problem, but not without great diligence of effort and thinking outside the box, which is quite common around here.

    As soon as David Winstead, SNI's IP (Intellectual Property) Director, came in, I tasked him with the duty of fixing the problem. When our site creeps, this is a big problem for multiple reasons: We have other county NOWs, some getting some respectable traffic totals, and we have our prototype, Beaufort County NOW (BCN), which has an average of about 4,000 readers per day, and yesterday, we had well over 15,000 unique page views, so we are quite serious about our informational platform's performance.

    Today was a whole other experience. We creeped ... creeped so bad ... I put up few articles. I can only imagine how much less readership we experienced today.

    The upside is that it appears we fixed the problem. In our efforts to cover all our bases, we also upgraded our server storage, memory and bandwidth to the ultimate levels offered. Before that Dave tinkered with our Symbiotic Publisher Content Management System (CMS), and then loaded a new header rotator that Dave had built early on, and just "had it laying around."

    We even discussed ending our monthly Webalizer statistical service, which is a web based analytical service embedded within our proprietary CMS. If we do uninstall Webalizer on a monthly basis, we will re-install it on a quarterly basis so we can gauge our traffic and traffic patterns so we will know what to charge. I hope this will not be necessary because I like knowing our daily traffic, and we are the only only local information purveyors, who publishes our traffic statistics on a regular basis.

    In the end, we are up and running and faster than ever. We intend to it that way, but we do apologize for today.


    Publisher's and president's note: Just like the good dentist with bad teeth, we, especially me, Stan Deatherage, have allowed our corporate website, Symbiotic Networks, Inc. (SNI) to languish, while we, especially me, have taken our fledgling prototype, Beaufort County NOW (BCN), to new heights, building it into one of the most important, and most visited and most Searched news and information sites in northeastern North Carolina ... and all of this without initializing a serious marketing plan for BCN yet.

    Well no more, at least on the SNI part. Just as we have done wonders with BCN, we, and especially I, shall endeavor to build SNI's site, at least at a corporate level, to the steely heights of BCN. This is my promise.

    What you will witness at the SNI site today, will be markedly less than what you will see there tomorrow, for I intend to build it up - using our propriety Symbiotic Publisher content management system (the same CMS that powers BCN). As I work to complete this task, I, and my sales associate, coding associate and publishing associate, Chris Downey, will work to that same end with me as well, and we will be even more emboldened to assist the corporate / company leader, who is wise enough to know how important it is to reach out on the internet.