Overcoming challenges in RedBlueAmerica


There’s been a bit of buzz in the news (and in blogs) today about E.W. Scripps’ launch today of the RedBlueAmerica project, but the best post I’ve read is a sort of behind the scenes glimpse from Laura Scott at PingVision who said:

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec’d out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up. (We’ll be continuing to watch the site and make adjustments over the coming days and weeks.)

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled “thoughts” on the site) from the nodes (aka “posts” for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.)

There’s more. Best of luck to all involved in the project!