Rolling Out The Cyber Red Carpet

I like to think that there might be one person out there that noticed that I didn’t post last week. If you are that person, then let me tell you why. Last Monday was a big one for us at SitePoint. We migrated our forums (and several other systems) from our old legacy servers to Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Service. The move went incredibly smoothly, with only a couple of hours of downtime and no huge glitches. It did mean that it was a busy day for me though, hence no blog post. With any luck, you might be noticing a speed increase if you are a forum user. I certainly am.Now that the migration is out of the way, I am focusing my attention on our up and coming awards season. Yup, that’s right, we’re rolling out the cyber-red-carpet and putting on our e-frocks because it’s time for the 2010 SitePoint Community Awards. There are two weeks to nominate your favorite forum members for any of the 25 awards. You can nominate in as many or few of the categories as you like and nominations close on November 15th. This is your chance to thank someone that might have helped you out at some point, or to recognise someone that makes your time at SitePoint more enjoyable. These awards are all about you guys, so get nominating now!It’s an exciting week for our Facebook fans, with our October ‘Get To Know Us‘ campaign culminating in a quiz. The campaign has had a marketing focus and you were introduced to our Marketing Guy, Shayne Tilley, as well as co-founder Mark Harbottle and SEO guru Kristen Holden. The quiz is a bit harder than the last couple because the prize is huge. If you get all the questions right you will go into the draw to win a copy of our latest kit, co-authored by Kristen. The kit is entitled “The SEO Business Guide” and it is full of more valuable tips and info than you can shake a stick at. So head over and check out our Facebook people tab later today to enter. Next week we’ll kick off a new campaign – this time I’ll be focussing on Social Media and how we utilise it at SitePoint.Still on the subject of Facebook, a few of you have asked if we have archives of the previous Get To Know Us biographies and the answer has been no. I have decided to archive that info into tabs that will be available either through the tabs drop-down list or by clicking links on the current people tab. I’ll get onto that this week.Hot Topics This WeekIn the General Application Design and Theory forum there is a geeky discussion going on. If you have any experience developing OOP applications in PHP, then drop by and join in.Dez poses an interesting question in the HTML and XHTML forum. If you have spent a lot of time researching and compiling content, what is the best way to make your text hard to copy, while having it remain available to search engine spiders?Paul O’B is running another of his famous CSS quizzes in the CSS forum this week. If you want to test your skills, check out Test Your CSS Skills Number 35 – inline-block.Last up for this week is a lighter one. Hop over to General Chat and tell us what plans you have (or what you did) for Halloween, if it’s something that you celebrate in your part of the world.That’s it from me for the week. See you same time, same place, next week.Feature image from Chris Roberts from Digital Precision