Upgraded Server and Site Statistics

This is a post for the technical minded people in the audience.

This site is actually hosted on a cloud service called Amazon EC2. EC2 changes now and again. As they buy new and faster hardware (computers) they tend to decommission the older ones and makes the top tier the new middle tier, and in effect marking down the prices. In addition to this regular upgrade cycle, competitors like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure lower prices to stay competitive and EC2 has to follow suit.

It's because of these upgrade and competition cycles that prices and server specs tend to fluctuate. Since this site has been using the same configuration for about a year now, I decided to check if there's newer, faster, cheaper hardware.

It turns out there is. I was basically able to double the power of the site's hardware. EC2 is great because all it takes is 3 clicks to make the change. The site was down for about 2 minutes all together. So if you noticed an outage, that's probably why.

The upshot of this upgrade is that the site should run noticeably faster and handle noticeably more users. As a matter of fact, usage tends to increase about 30% percent year-over-year. In fact, this has been a great year because the gain has been 34% overall. Check out the image below.

34% year-over-year usage increase

Notice the blip on May 13th and 14th. That's when I accidentally bombed the server. Ooops. Despite that, there was still a 34% gain in usage.

Overall, this is good news. The site is getting more and more popular and hopefully more and more useful. Also, it's getting faster. Thanks for reading and using it. If you have friends who are taking Latin or are interested in Latin, make sure to tell them about Numen. 

Weird errors on Numen? This is how to fix them.

Today I modified the code that Google Analytics uses to keep track of traffic on this site.

That was a major change. Because of the way the internet works, some of Numen's old data might be cached in your browser -- causing weird errors like "AJAX could not be loaded" and other such nonsense.

Fear not -- the fix is easy.

Here are several steps you can take to fix the problem in your web browser:

1. Log out of Numen and log back in. 
2. Close your web browser and reopen it.
3. Reload the Numen page you're on by holding the SHIFT key on your keyboard while clicking the refresh button on your browser's address bar.
4. Reload the Numen page you're on by holding the CTRL key on your keyboard while clicking the refresh button on your browser's address bar.
5. Reload the Numen page you're on by holding BOTH the SHIFT and CTRL keys on your keyboard (at the same time) while clicking the refresh button on your browser's address bar.
6. Clear your web browser's cache and then restart it.
7. Try another web browser (just to see if it's happening there, too).
8. Contact me at admin@latinlexicon.org.

Hopefully this won't affect too many people but if does, I apologize in advance!

Updates to the Word Study Tool and the Latinitas Recens

I was recently browsing through Google Analytics (a tool that measures traffic to this site) and noticed that the most popular page by far is the Word Study Tool. In light of that, I spent 30 minutes sprucing it up to make it look better. I hope you enjoy it. I would eventually like to add more keyboard shortcuts. Presently, the only keyboard shortcuts are the left arrow and the right arrow.

In other news, I also updated the template for the Latinitas Recens page. I'm working on incorporating that dictionary (as well as Whitaker's Words) as a new source. In the meantime, please enjoy the updated look.