DTW Downtime

The upgrade didn’t happen Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. It should happen Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Thanks for your patience.

You know how when something really big happens, like Kevin Youkilis is a weenie and charges our prized rookie, or when the Tigers trade for a left handed bat with some positional versatility, or the Tigers announce some roster moves, and you come to the site and then it crashes? I’m not such a fan of that, and I’m sure you aren’t either. And with the team in a pennant race (and hopefully playing well into October) there will likely be increased attention which could lead to more crashes. To rememdy the situation (hopefully) I’m increasing my server capacity. This will take place tonight after 1 am and should take a couple of hours. It means new hardware which means some downtime. Here’s a heads up.

As an aside, this stuff ain’t cheap and ad revenues aren’t what they were. I’m not broke or hard up for money or anything, but if you could tell all your friends how great the site is and how much you enjoy coming here and how they should come here too, I’d appreciate it. Or if you were in the mood to buy something, anything really, you could head over to Amazon (using that link of course) and shop ’til the cows come home.

Maybe you’d want to preorder a book I’m quoted in. Or maybe you were thinking about getting a nice warm Tigers hat for those October games. Or maybe you want to watch all the action on a sexy new display and if you’re out of town and you don’t have access to MLB Extra Innings you could get MLB.tv and hook up your new laptop with an HDMI cable. Or maybe you’ve been thinking about getting the Roku Digital Video Player
which also can stream MLB games, or anything else from Amazon Video On Demand. Just some thoughts…

(Kind of a neat trick where I tell you the site is unavailable, and then ask for money huh…)

21 thoughts on “DTW Downtime”

  1. Bill,

    From the headline my mind jumped to the conclusion that you were leaving the blogging world behind. I almost had a nervous breakdown. How dare you! Anyways, good thinkin ahead. I look forward to the challenge of crashing your new and improved hardware!

  2. Is there anybody left who just blogs for the fun of it? It always ends up being a sad, pathetic moneygrab. Greed, greed, greed.

  3. I apologize if I offended anyone with my post. Believe me this isn’t a money grab, or if it is its the worst money grab ever. If I add up my time and subtract my web hosting costs and other expenses I probably net less than two bucks an hour. I do it for fun and to help fund my baseball habit (books and tix and the like).

  4. I’m going to preface my comment by stating I’m completely ignorant to the business/economics/hobby of blogging or running a website, so feel free to ignore it.

    It seems like there’s upwards of 20+ Tigers blogs, and that’s not even counting the ones we don’t know about. Why not merge? Most of them don’t seem to get a ton of traffic judging by the number of comments (with the exception of BYB and maybe DTW), but they seem well put together and have interesting content. A lot of them seem to be discussing mostly the same things on any given day (albeit with different perspectives), so it seems like a waste in some sense. By combining your efforts, you’d reduce time spent repeating similar posts. And I think the readership would exponentially increase because people want to go where there’s more activity – I think more visitors are drawn by the factor of having other like-minded people to comment/converse with than by the content of the posts. It just seems inefficient to have so many blogs that are largely the same and the fractured readership that results from this.

    1. Not to seem snobby (I drove a 10-year-old Dodge Dakota throughout HS), but I find the conversation here at DTW to be several orders of magnitude higher than on some of the other sites that cover the Tigers. So I’m fine with multiple sites.

      1. It’s darn solid too, my best efforts haven’t even come close to bringing it down one order of magnitude…

  5. I’m hoping Georgios was just kidding. Blogging is no money grab. If you go into blogging for money, you will almost surely be disappointed.

    Lee

    1. Perhaps he was just tired of seeing bloggers driving around in their fancy luxury blogmobiles and throwing their blog money around like they haven’t a care and never being invited to the blog parties with all the hot blog chicks.

      1. Ahh the life of a blogger sounds so luxurious, I wonder if Billfer will ever make it onto MTV Blogger’s Cribs or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Blog Edition?

  6. Got a question & you are certainly the one to ask: Where are the best seats in Comerica Park! And, what do you think of the searing experience in the Tiger Den or On-Deck Circle seats? Thanks!

    1. What’s your budget? What’s your style? Every single seat in the stadium offers good value. Even if you do nothing more than pick a seat based on your price tolerance, you’ll enjoy yourself. I enjoyed the Terrace for 20 games one season. I enjoyed the Upper Reserved for 30 games in another season. I’ve also had standing room for a fair number of games and lots of other locations along the way.

      – Short of suite, you won’t find a more comfortable experience than the Tiger Den and Terrace
      – The On-Deck circle and Infield Box get you closer, but with only a standard amount of elbow room
      – Every other seat is of lesser quality, but is priced accordingly

      Note: Homeplate is in the Northwest corner, so the third-base side is facing the sun during day games and the LF seats are looking straight into the sun for the first few innings of a night game. Only the Tiger Den and Terrace have even minimal protection from rain. Everybody else uses ponchos/umbrellas or heads for the concourse.

  7. billfer is too modest. If everyone could send him a few bucks via paypal @ bill@detroittigersweblog.com then we can help him out.

    This site is a valuable and vital tool for following the Tigers. Between billfer and the community, I get better info here than from the Freep, News, MLB.com or ESPN. I’ve got no doubt that media members tune in frequently. Keep up the good work billfer.

    1. I don’t know if you are trying to scam, or if that was an honest typo for billfer’s email address. I am thinking it was a typo. Either way, you can find his real email address at the top of the page.

      Then again, maybe he has an alias for the one you mentioned…

  8. Bilfer. This is my favorite source for Tiger talk. I too hope that Georgios was making fun of the situation. Georgios, it’s time to reply.
    As for my part, I’ll continue to spread the good word out about your site. I live in the Southeast, but I saw a car with an Old English “D” logo on the rear window. Next time I see him/her I’ll make sure to talk up your website. Hopefully we’ll be at a stoplight.
    The username will probably be like “impeach sanford” or something like that. Keep up the great work!

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