the official MLIA blog

Over the past 48 hours, we’ve been experiencing a number of outages as we tried (at first, unsuccessfully) to move MLIA onto a more stable setup. We’ve just tried moving again and it seems to be working properly.

We think we’ve ironed out most of the wrinkles, but please bear with us if more bugs crop up. For instance, let us know if you see ‘banned remoteip’ when trying to submit a story. We know that might be a potential issue.

Thank you for all your great charity suggestions.

NZChicky said it best

You have suggested so many good charities. IT’S HARD TO PICK JUST ONE!

Obviously there are many deserving charities and even more deserving causes and I wish we could give loads of money to all of them! But, to achieve the greatest impact I would like to pick one.

The Humane Society, ASPCA, In Defense of Animals, and Big Cat Rescue are all wonderful charities, but would prefer to choose a charity that benefits humans. As much as I love our furry feline and canine friends, I am speciesist and think humans should come first.

Among the suggestions were two seasonal charities, Toys for Tots and Family Giving Tree. Last year, we donated $3500 to Toys for Tots and in the interest of “spreading the love” I’d like to pick a different charity this year.

There was a common theme among the charities you suggested. Kisses for Kyle, Prepare To Live (aka CanTeen), Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the Jimmy Fund, and CaringBridge all offer support for children with cancer or other serious illnesses, which got me thinking…

Family House is a charity that provides temporary housing to families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. As most of us can only imagine, cancer treatment is a grueling experience. Family House provides families with the opportunity to stay close together, during a time when they need each other more than ever.

This year’s December proceeds will go to Family House.

On a side note, if you are considering donating to a charity, now or in the future, I would highly recommend using Charity Navigator to learn how charities use their donations before donating.

As promised, I’ve added a new design to the store – the fittingly titled Together We Are Average shirt.

I almost forgot! There will be a coupon available later this week. I’ll post it as soon as it’s available.

UPDATE: The coupon is here. Free shipping on orders to the US and Canada. Enter MLIASHIP2 during checkout, valid until 12/15/10.

It’s December again! Time flies when you are having fun.

This time last year, after countless requests, we started selling MLIA shirts. It being the holidays and all, we decided to donate all the proceeds for that month to charity. We raised $3500 for Toys for Tots in less than two weeks and another $1500 for the construction of a well by the end of the December. We continued to donate the proceeds from the MLIA store for another 5 months, until we had raised enough for the construction of an entire well.

I am happy to announce that all of this year’s December proceeds will also go to charity. I need your help deciding which charity. It would be nice to fund the construction of another well, but there are also many other well deserving charities out there. If you have a preference, please let me know in the comments.

On a related note, I’ll be adding new items to the MLIA store soon – before Sunday.

Average Pie – an ‘original’ song by MLIA commenter extraordinaire KitSnicket. Uhh, I mean, regular everyday normal commenter, KitSnicket.

Props to the person who brought this to my attention ( you know who you are )

It’s been a while since my last post. (I should probably copy that and put it at the top of all my posts)

Girl Talk’s latest album, All Day, is here. If you haven’t heard of Girl Talk before, he is a DJ/musician who samples hundreds of songs to create full-length albums in which all the “songs” are connected. For example, All Day, samples over 350 different songs by various artists.

Best of all, Girl Talk releases his albums for FREE! That’s right, even if you don’t like music, you have to love the price.

Disclaimer: All Day contains explicit lyrics. If you are under 17 please check with a parent or guardian before downloading.

Download All Day by Girl Talk

If you only read the first sentence of my posts, you probably didn’t know that I made a few changes last week before quickly pulling the plug because they broke the site, but I’ve just re-released those changes and go Giants!

If you actually read my posts, the entire post: Thank you.  By now you’ve already heard (from me; in the first sentence) that I’ve re-released the latest changes. They include slicker login/registration pages and the ability to collapse threads of comments.

Getting the bugs worked out took a little longer than expected, because I don’t know where to buy exercise equipment for ants! I was moving – at the same time! Buh-bye LA. Hello London!

In other news, go Giants!

This will be short.

Last night I rolled out a small update. The first change you might notice is the login and registration pages are slightly different. The login form is smaller and signing up is now like filling out a mad-libs. The other noticeable change is that you can now collapse comment threads on stories. Click the ‘[ - ]‘ to make an entire conversation disappear, this will make it easier to skip over threads that don’t pertain to the post… lol. Props to typer2131 for finding the first bug (now fixed) which made it impossible to submit stories. xoXdancerXox also discovered a bug which I’ll fix in the next update.

m.mlia.com also got a small update. You can now login to the mobile site – no commenting yet, but submitted stories are associated with your account.

Finally, unrelated to anything, here is a YouTube video for your enjoyment.

I’ve been talking about a “major” feature for the past couple weeks and during that time the anticipation has been steadily mounting. At this point, expectations are probably running feverishly high and the reality will never live up to the hype, so without further ado I present the MyLifeIsAverage mobile site. The site can be easily accessed on any mobile device by typing m.mlia.com into the address bar. It’s very rudimentary at the moment, but new features and updates will be released on a regular basis.

Speaking of regular. I am going to try to post to the blog on a more regular basis too. Allowing two or sometimes even three weeks to lapse between posts is no good. Going forward I hope to post at least once a week and while posts might not always be directly related to MLIA, I will do my best to make them entertaining.

Speaking of entertaining. DearGirlsAboveMe is being made into a TV show. At this rate, MyLifeIsAverage will be the only website without its own TV show. DGAM is headed to CBS, along with “Shh… Don’t Tell Steve” and “S#!T My Dad Says”. ABC is developing a series based on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com and NBC might start producing new episodes of  “Dateline: To Catch a Predator” – a show based on the popular website 4Chan.

Hey Everyone!

ActionMan asked a great question in the comments on the last post, so I thought I’d share my response with everybody. He asked…

Mek, baby. What’s up with all the old posts on the homepage?

Good question, ActionMan. You see, a few months ago, there was a massive backlog of stories and it took months for a story to make the front page. We were already working on an improved voting system, but we needed a quick fix. Our temporary solution was to make people sign in to submit stories and to filtered out orphans from the upcoming queue. (We call anonymously submitted stories orphans). Once the new system was in place, we opened up submissions again, but orphans were still filtered out of the upcoming section. Today we removed that filter.

As a result the queue is very long again, but you can still spam your story to the front of the queue. Even a handful of votes from your friends, family and other acquaintances – people who can’t not vote for your story; even if they don’t like it – will ensure your story is voted on within hours, rather than months.

Alright, I’ll go back to working on the major feature I’ve promised.

-Mek

Some of you may have already noticed a few of the minor updates we made yesterday, but in case you didn’t, here is a rundown.

The promoted page is back.

If you are one of the lucky few who had gotten a story promoted to the front page, you once again have quick access your literary genius. On your profile page, just click the promoted tab.

Spamming Sharing is caring

We made it easier to share a story you’ve just submitted. If your friends on facebook and twitter like it, it will appear on the front page sooner! If they don’t… it will not.

Also, now when you share a link to an MLIA on facebook, the story shows up too. Try it.

Attack of the CIones

Usernames are written in a different font, so it’s easier to spot the cIones.

Better stories

We are always looking for ways to improve the way in which good stories get promoted. We want good stories to get promoted quickly and great stories to get promoted even quicker. The old system was a simple queue. When you submitted a story, it was put at the back of the line and it has to wait its turn. The new system is still a queue, but your story can cut to the front if it’s good. This should improve the  time it takes for good stories to get promoted (no more 3 month delay) and improve the quality of the stories in the upcoming section (so stop hovering your mouse over the ‘no’ button).

Coming soon.

I mentioned I was working on a few minor updates and a major update in my last post, these were the minor updates, stay tuned.