Although it has been around since 2006, Hive Minds Gaming has seen some changes in the last few years. The content on the website and its sources have changed. What started as a simple Digg relay web site, showing the lasted and most popular gaming related diggs, has evolved to a web site which is able to aggregate its own news articles.

We decided to announce the web site, because we are nearing the end of a new design of the web site. The over all content layout on the page is cleaner. Articles and article images are also presented in a more pleasing manner. View the Hive Minds Gaming beta site.

Hive Minds Gaming currently parses over 28 separate feeds. If you have a gaming web site, and you would like it syndicated by Hive Minds Gaming, please let us know so we can review it.

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Because the last server we leased was located in the FDC Servers data center, but not under their management, we wanted to keep all our data within 10 minutes of driving distance. But that was not the the reason for the switch. The issue was that renting a dedicated server from FDC Servers, with decent configuration, would have cost me beyond what I was willing to and more so able to spend every month. We had to settle with leasing a virtual dedicated server. This did not work out very well, because FDC is using VZ for their virtualization software. We use Webmin and Virtualmin, and those two in conjunction with MySQL just do not work very well with VZ. The server would hand ever couple of hours and become inaccessible from the outside, that resulted in a lot of down time and very poor performance from the hosted websites. Toped with countless hours of lost productivity, due to the slow performance of the system, something had to be done.

After some hunting we ended up leasing a server from ThePlanet. We did not want to lease from any other data center in Chicago, because of stories we were told negative customer experience. We are very happy with ThePlanet and the performance we are receiving from the dedicated server we are leasing from them.

Because the VPS servers, FDC Servers offers, are simply server shells, the last 5 days were spent looking through RPM repositories, installing and configuring software. Work often ended early in the morning, about 2:30 AM every morning. But service interruption went pretty much unnoticed, because the server setup and the data migration were completed on time. It is good to have a sufficient notice when vital changes are about to take place.

What is Morpheed.com?

Morpheed is a RSS aggregator. In addition to headlines aggregation, the site provides job opportunities for freelancers by aggregating listings from variety of job related feeds and sites, as well as CSS tutorials. Morphed’s backend is WordPress, which I was surprised to find out, because I never looked at WordPress as a RSS aggregator tool. But in the end, WordPress has come a long way in its development and now can qualify as almost an accomplished CMS (Content Management System), especially with its extendibility through plug-ins. Currently Morpheed runs on three separate installations of WordPress. In addition, the headline categories are somewhat concentrated on specific companies (Apple, Google and Microsoft), instead of general terms like travel or sports.

What is next for Morpheed.com?

The first thing I am going to do is bring the site from operating on three independent WordPress installations to one. This will make easier managing the various sections of the site (headlines, jobs and css), as well as adding other sections in the future without having to install WordPress once again. Following that, I will restructure the headlines’ categories. Articles need to be better calcified and thus easier to browse. A contact and “include my feed” forms will be added as well.

After the above are completed, I will look into adding more sections to the site and a possible redesign.

More to come for Morpheed.com in the future. In the mean time go on Morpheed and see what is happening in the world.