FarmVilleChicken

Dear FarmVilleChicken.com member,

I have been busier than ever with life beyond FarmVille so I decided to transfer the site to another owner who will pick up where I left it.

as you know FarmVilleChicken.com is pretty unique:

- you can create you own profiles and share them showing off achievements, mastership and level
- you can create a free FarmVille blog
- you can start discussion groups and forums
- you can upload farmpics to your personal album
- you can follow FarmVille news 24 hrs/day on the frontpage where more than 40 of the hottest FarmVille sites are tracked

And ofcourse it has a pretty neat Almanac covering not only 1400+ pages of FarmVille objects but also dozens of reports with lots of ideas on how to improve it even further.

I really want this to grow larger and provide you with a real nice platform to have a better overview of your tasks, manage your own community, have handy tooling and have all the latest information.

This is why I put it “on sale” on http://flippa.com/auctions/99242/FarmVille-Weblog-Community

If you have any questions, or are interested in taking over the community “year 2 in FarmVille” please feel free to e-mail me. Hey… maybe the site should transfer each year to a new owner :)

Also make sure you provide the new owner the same kind of support and feedback as you have until now.

If you want me to help out searching as a giveback for the past year, then
go here:

http://flippa.com/auctions/99242/promote and click the facebook button or any other buttons, I would really appreciate that !

p.s. I will still be around in FarmVille the game, so we WILL probably have contact as long as you play the game.

Greetings from your FarmVille neighbor,

Edward de Leau
http://farmvillechicken.com/members/admin/
http://www.facebook.com/weblog
http://flippa.com/auctions/99242/FarmVille-Weblog-Community

We have installed the SEO Friendly Images plugin on all your FarmVille weblogs.

SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images in all your posts.

It will save you time adding alt tags and image tags to your images.

If you want you can adjust the settings in the backend of your FarmVille blog under "Settings > SEO Friendly Images"

I’ve also noticed that after the upgrade the server is a bit on the slow side. I will disable some plugins to see if they are the cause.

I’ve starting working on the idea of creating a wiki like environment on farmvillechicken.com But I wanted something cooler.

So I’m planning to give EACH FarmVille object a weblog. An example can be seen on http://goat.farmvillechicken.com (just go there to check it out).

Editors can just double-click a blogposting and start editing the content: change the texts and also add images, etc… (of course you also use the backend for this or even Windows Live Writer).

In the end there will be much more information in there then on a "wiki". Since in this weblog-wiki system you can also add personal blogpostings AND people can still comment on all those blogpostings.

So Editors can also ADD blog postings. Which means… if you have some super cool image of "a goat" on your farm and have that to share… simply add a blogpost to the goat.farmvillechicken.com blog! (or to whatever animal, tree, building, etc..)

So… of course I don’t want anyone to edit all blogs since that would enable spammers to really destroy all the content (once in a while they appear). So I’ve created a group "Editors".

This is a restricted group. If you have interest to be part of this NEW FarmVille knowledge building community / weblog network then just request membership of this group. I will post new updates on there.

As soon as you are a member of this group, the weblogs in this network that you visit and may edit will appear in your top menu, for instance for the goat:

FAQ:

1. For now I have only setup goat and saanens-goat for beta testing purposes to see how it works and gather feedback on stuff that SHOULD be on these blogs or uhm… should not be on these weblogs.

2. For now all users can edit the posts, pages, comments but not yet the sidebar. I’m planning to have 1 user per object "administrator / owner" who then may edit the sidebar content (which is more about the structure and e.g. "all goats list").

3.  For general topics such as "Mastership", "Co-op" some more specific weblogs will follow.

4. The very latest content is not yet automatically present in a blog format. I’m writing code to make that happen but that will be in a later phase.

5. If your top-menu contains way to much animals/buildings/etc… blogs then simply click the top "My Blogs" to go to an overview screen.

6. This knowledge base will contain some duplicate information that is now in the "almanac", which does not matter. There will simply be 2 Almanacs. One maintained by me only and one by the community. Nice to crosscheck.

So if you are interested to join in this pre-stage beta phase then request membership of the Editors group.

Now that the performance issues are hopefully over. I decided to place a "like" button on your profiles (as you can see). It may be the start of the idea to have even more Facebook integration on this website.

Unfortunately that idea already comes to a halt at the first step:  the Like button shows probably the same "likes" on all profiles :(

Adding the button is super simple and works for everyone… except of course not for me.

I posted for help here:

http://wpmu.org/how-to-add-the-global-facebook-like-button-to-buddypress-profiles-and-activity-stream-items/comment-page-1/#comment-13730

and here:

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/facebook-like-button-unique-href/?_wpnonce=34cefae8e3#post-53442

and here:

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?pid=224533#p224533

You can test the problem on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like :

if I fill in: http://farmvillechicken.com/members/admin/ I get :

If I fill in http://farmvillechicken.com/members/fluffymonsters/ I get:

So somehow Facebook does not recognize the different urls.

UPDATE: i changed to code to use fbml. I found out that the href in the code is good but something is being picked up as being a reference to a blogposting: http://farmvillechicken.com/blog  And maybe even the latest submitted blogposting ???

I have had a lot of downtime lately.

Let me give you a small roundup of the history of this website and possibly the next step.

I started out as many of you with a spreadsheet with FarmVille data.

Then I thought: why not a blog? So I started a weblog. That weblog was nice and had many visitors. I then added the reports to it and some more advanced code to generate reports and pretty much any info on the hundreds of FarmVille objects. A project that has not yet finished since there is still a lot todo around the reports.

At the moment that I added the chat bar my shared hosting account blew out of proportion of the 30.000+ visitors a day around the site.

This was mainly due to the chat application itself who asked a lot of server resources. So since I had to pay many dollars in over usage anyway I decided to move to a virtual server.

When I had the virtual server I thought well.. let’s add blog capability and a community also. I was writing code for creating a community but with a larger server this was even better possible with less code.

I’m now halfway in that stage. When I read Karen’s post on the downtime I suddenly realized that I’ve become a hosting company with probably also some responsibilities that I had not thought of before.

So let’s see if I can take it again a step further now and move from a virtual server to a dedicated server or at least a server with enough resources. I will probably also have to add a status update on possible downtime. I never expected it to come this far.

In general the server at the moment has not much problem with cpu usage and memory usage:

the main problem is with the "othersockbuf" which has a soft limit of 1.433.738 and a hard limit of 2.662.538. Each time it hits that border the server dies.

The main problem is that I have not really found out what causes this but scanning through some forums it might be related to the limits imposed on this server.

Moving to another server is good. Most of all because it does not kill the server when there are more than XXX visitors which means the site can grow to it’s true potential.

So… I’m setting this in motion now.

UPDATE: I have upgraded the server to double the amount of storage, double the amount of RAM and 1.5 times the amount of network transfer.

For now the red line seems to be gone WOOHOO!

- I also change the mysql configuration settings for a more optimized setting.

Many of you have not seen it yet, but you can add the three new co-op achievements now also to your profile using the profile editor.

I have added a small line with some FarmVille FAQ items on the frontpage of FarmVilleChicken.com

The idea is to transform this into some kind of ticker. But of course then we need MUCH more useful information for new farmers, you could think of anything:

- what is the horse stable for?
- what are these perfect bunches?
- why do I get a sad cow?

The best entries will be added to the ticker, so if you are an experienced Farmer… help your friends who are starting in the game and blog your FAQ items.

If you are new to Blogging, check out the Blog Group for Questions and Answers.

	In the backend of your profile just click "Add New"
	Type your post and press "Publish", it cant be simpler than that!

(if you add your Google Ads ID in the settings you will of course gain revenue for posting it also).

One of the gaps in the FarmVille game system is that you don’t have a spot to show your profile: your achievements, your level and your masteries. It tells the story of your FarmVille identity to people you meet around the game.

Your profile page is an overview of you:: It includes your level, your achievements and your Facebook ID and we are expanding it with Masteries and a whole new gui to show off your profile to friends.

Furthermore it allows your friends to directly jump to your farm and directly send you gifts.

We think that will be of benefit of maintaining your part of the community AND it is handy for people who have thousands of friends… it enables them to more often visit people with whom they interact.

Furthermore the profile widget is already available in your Blog’s widgets section, so that you can just drag and drop it somewhere on your blog to be shown next to your blog posts (although we are improving it).

We really wanted to have this for a looong time and well… here it is.

So what is a nicer way to earn your Farm Cash? You buy a new item, then write about it and then earn the money back that the item costed you if you have enough readers.

Setting up a weblog, trying to gain readers and maintaining a current flow of readers can be hard. But not on FarmVilleChicken.com! The community makes sure that we together form a strong blogging front. We do not write one post about a new feature but 100 posts about that new feature! And the nicest posts will attract the most visitors.

You visit blogs, give them tips and information and they earn the money. Not here. Here we share equally. And with a community the chances that the amount of visitors is more than on a single blog on an island is zillions of times higher. Besides that, being part of a community has also the benefit of becoming more knowledgeable and make more friends around the game and well.. that is the real cool thing.

In the Blogging group we can share tips on what are nice postings, what attracts visitors, what do visitors want to read and so on.

In your Blog Backend Administration Panel you will find under Setting > Adsense Publisher a field where you can fill in your Google Adsense code. (get your code by signing up with Google Adsense). It looks like “pub-1234567890″. After you have filled in that code, 50% of the revenue goes to you.

Note that we are currently testing this feature, so we have setup just 1 ad in the just 1 theme: the facebook theme

• Blogs are created using WordPress the most used and most powerful blogging engine, you will find millions of tips on the Internet on using WordPress, if you have any special needs just let us know
• We do not allow other kinds of ads or affiliate links (to bots / books) currently. We want to grow this on a steady pace
• There is a blogging group where we will share some tips and where you can ask questions, please use the forum functionality for that
• We will add 2 more ad positions soon
• We will add a LOT of more theme very soon

Obviously we want to hear your suggestions on further improvements on this. But hopefully you recognize the opportunity. We are just starting this up so there is still a huge room for improvement :)

Don’t expect to become an instant millionaire, you will probably make only cents in the beginning. but the more postings you write and the bigger our community gets… the better for all of us :)

The FarmVille Chicken Bloggers group has just been setup to share our initial experiences so head to there to ask questions and share tips (we still need moderators and admins for that group).