Bill..
again.. i cant thank you enough for taking the time to really help me.. i cant tell you how grateful I am ...
I wish i could eat the money and let surfers love my ass.... but well... i just dont have that kinda cash to throw around for a hobby... I want to make something of this... loved your comment on that one.
which pic are you talking about? I just looked at lots of my pics in the directory and lots are over 25k.. I use photoshop mostly... make the images big.. and then save them as png's.. and then open the png's and size them down. Should I be using gif for transparent backgrounds instead of png? I'm not a photoshop wizard by any means but i can use it... to do basic stuff anyways. I'm definitely not good at graphics but i think i can honestly say that the ones on the site "get by" for what i have the ability to do. Sure.. if i had a graphic artist at my disposal they could go in and make the site look REALLY sweet. but i dont.. so i deal.. But which one's look fuzzy? i can see them alright...
I've been wondering how to rearrange the things so that I could use the left and right on either side of the voting area for ads. But i have the streak count in there, and a couple other modules.. "who's voting" for instance which hardly ever shows anyone cause it's not all that popular.. but it's still there. Umm.. and the display of the last two images you voted on and whether you voted right or not. That kind of makes the game.
I could, however, try to build all of that into the voting area itself, and graphically redesign it. bxy mentioned making it look like a voting booth... I like that idea... and i definitely think the pics need to get bigger.
I'm going to do some more experimenting with that... cant this weekend cause i'm going to a family reunion for my wife... but I will definitely work on it next week. Next week my wife takes off for 3 nights away. Just me home... with my thoughts and a computer. Next week is going to be VERY productive for the site. So i have to lay out exactly what I want to work on on those three nights and BANG it out. that's my plan.
Quick update: I have a guy who has done some optimization work for me in the past.. optimized my mysqld on my server ... tuned it just right and did some other things on the server and in the code to make the site run fast. He just came in and found the two queries in all of the code that were causing the resource exhaustion... (HE'S FUCKING AMAZING).. and my site is boatloads faster now. It's all about being smart enough to know where to look.. and this guy is SICK. Anyways... that's good.. now i can downgrade to a lower level server if i want to.
But then this same guy recommended this BEAST over in germany. It's 50 EURO/mo and if you want Cpanel it's another 30 EU/mo ... this thing is friggin SICK! i might have to do it. It would equate to 100/mo and i'd get boatloads more power than what i have now for less money. Or i could downgrade to a lower level VPS on my current hosting platform... do some plan for like 30/mo.. and get by for now.. "stop the bleeding" like you said..
her's the link to the BEAST as i call it.
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/pro...rootserver/ex4
Also... if you want a server optimization expert that is absolutely AMAZING at what he does and super trustworthy... only does good... cant do bad (i've asked and he said no).. then let me know and i'll give you the connect..