Digital Becca

Category: Tech

  • Upscaling server capacity – part 2

    Last month I blogged about how Time to Change would manage the exponential increase in server load caused by our annual marking #timetotalk day. I talked about having six plausible options for managing the load and about the decision to choose a combination of Varnish and an additional overflow server to cope with the day’s traffic. Setting…

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  • Upscaling server capacity – part 1

    At Time to Change we generally get around 1000 visitors to the site a day. On peak days, like World Mental Health Day, this might double, but there’s enough flex in our server capacity to manage that without issue. Once a year though, the first Thursday in February, we run Time to Talk Day –…

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  • A record breaking post

    A couple of months ago I had a record breaking Facebook post. It was ridiculously successful, certainly the biggest post for Time to Change, but I was at a conference a little while ago and Oxfam were talking about their biggest ever post reaching 5 million people. Ours was 8.2 million, suggesting we might have beaten them too… I’m…

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  • Samaritans Radar is about more than privacy

    Today the Samaritans launched a Twitter app designed, essentially, to help stop people in mental health crisis from slipping through the digital net. As the charity relies almost entirely on volunteers, and as suicide remains one of the UK’s biggest killers, I can certainly see why they might commission a project which monitors people’s tweets…

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  • How Mind managed to publish breaking news, from 2011

    Today a totally ridiculous coincidence happened, which I want to document somehow since it was fun to fix and will probably never happen again. What happened When Mind launched their new website back in November 2012, we hired a keen team of digital volunteers to set about the tedious task of migrating content from one…

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