Happy Pi Day, everyone!  Eat some pie while watching "Pi".  Link.

Our BlogCadre community has surpassed 1000 users!  What started out as a community of less than 10 over a year ago, BlogCadre has become a community of over 1000 faithful contributors or readers. 

A special thanks goes out to rlarson, michelleyg, starnami, jessi and Danny for commenting, posting and/or keeping interesting material moving to the frontpage with your voting.  You guys help keep our readers coming back!  Thank you!

Be part of the next 1000 and create your personal BlogCadre account today!

A BlogCadre Review:
Welcome to BlogCadre
BlogCadre is stepping it up a notch!
BlogCadre - Elite Adless Edition and Other News
Yo BlogCadre Raps!
Happy Birthday BlogCadre!
DDR Induced Labor - first BlogCadre post ever

I was checking out the personal blog of Jessi, a fellow BlogCadre blogger, and found some interesting information...

Today is Jessi's birthday so be sure to send happy birthday vibes her way.

So...  How old are you, Jessi?

If you haven't been following the comments, Ryan made a good suggestion yesterday regarding voter participation on BlogCadre. His theory is that we are all really lazy and don't want to click on every post and then click again to vote.

I think he's right.

So now we have one-click voting on BlogCadre. On the home page, the new posts area, and on your blog pages, you should now see a vote button for each post in its preview form. If you haven't voted for a post, this area will display with a blue background, so it shouldn't be hard to miss.

I hope this improves the site experience and the speed to which your awesome posts hit the home page. Please let me know what you think!

- Jason

Michelleyg voted for 1 post. Thanks Michelle!

Is anyone else out there? :(

There are like 5 posts right now that I thought were pretty cool and would have normally promoted manually, but none have been voted for. Please, vote for any posts that you think are good enough to live on the front page, not only your favorites. Just click on the "recent posts" to the left and give 'em a thumbs up if you like 'em. It's a little effort, but it helps keep spam of the home page and it lets everyone decide on the kind of content they want to see on BlogCadre.

We can go back to having me promote them manually if that's what you all like (please comment, if so). I just figured you guys would rather have a say in things than me playing evil dictator. Though that does have a nice ring to it...

Remember to login or register in order to vote for your favorite new posts on BlogCadre.  If the post gets enough votes it will be bumped to the frontpage and deemed another cool thing to read about. 

I'm afraid if you don't vote for your favorite posts they will be hidden in the archives of BlogCadre goodness forever.

Know of any cool links or have suggestions on how we can improve our site?  Send us some feedback!

BlogCadre just made the upgrade from Media Temple's shared server platform to their new "Grid Server" system.

New GS Features
Instead of a shared server, the GS system places all your data on an NFS server. There are apparantly several load-balanced front end web servers that then access this data from the common data location. Ben over at cuddletech has some more details on the Grid Server set up.

Read on for more info about the transition, including migration notes and my skepticism as to whether or not this service is even a good move. If you want the 5 second version: the transition is frightening with no staging process or backout plan, and the "upgrade" leaves us with half the bandwidth and the real potential for expensive new mystery charges.

Here's the skinny

The BlogCadre crew has decided to step it up a notch.  We will begin posting 5 to 10 brand-spanking new posts per day and will only promote 3 of those posts to the frontpage. 

This is where YOU come in. 

If you think our other non-promoted posts are so awesome that they deserve to be on the frontpage do your part: create an account and vote for your favorite posts.  OR, if you think our posts just plain suck, write-up your own posts that you think the 'Cadre community will enjoy and let us decide if you're worthy enough to be on the frontpage.

Check out the blogs of our most active users:

jessi  |  a person  |  samccone  |  noogz  |  robogeek  |  tubajon  |  Stella   |  Jason Striegel  |  justin  |  Mel  |  Mike T  |  washtub_bass

All shapes and sizes are welcome at BlogCadre and we strongly encourage our users to participate in discussions, blogging and voting. 

Create your 'Cadre account and vote today!  You can view new posts (unmoderated) here.

Want to know more about BlogCadre?  Click here.

So much has happened and not happened around here at BlogCadre central in the last month or two, I wanted to take a moment to recognise the big stuff.

BlogCadre vacation - "thank you"
While I was busy ignoring my responsibilities and relaxing in the Philippines, heinsite really took the site under his wing and kept things moving.  rlarson also managed the thankless task of taking over editorial control and stomping spam for us.  To top it off, you guys all did your part and voted for worthy articles.  Thank you all for your help!

Server issues and overagressive spam filters
We had a bit of downtime at the start of the month when our router went down hard and needed replacing.  Sorry about that.  Also, as a few of you have noticed, we've been having problems with the spam detection system.  We get so much spam now that the filter went ballistic.  I think I've resolved the issue and registered users should no longer have any problems.  All anonymous comments will need to be manually approved, but I'm doing what I can to keep that feature and not force people to sign up if they don't wish to.

Elite Adless Edition
If you are logged in and reading this, then you probably already noticed the absolute awesomeness of an adless BlogCadre!  So that the anonymous folks don't feel left out, you guys are now getting fresh BC content with 25% less fat as well.  I completely pulled our least performing ad unit for everyone's enjoyment and since the majority of our traffic comes from organic search, I think removing ads for logged-in users will still allow us to pay for hosting and bandwidth, while offering all our members a much improved experience.

So to sum things up: thanks again everyone for making BlogCadre rock and for doing your part to push great things down the internet tubes!  ;)

You guys tried, but we have no winners.  Miss Lilly was just too much for you sissies to handle ;)  On the bright side, since this is our first stab at a contest like this, everyone who participated gets a prize.

Here are the summary numbers for the eligible bloggers:
noogz 746 reads - 1 comment
rlarson 465 reads - 3 comments
samccone 319 reads - 1 comment
tubajon 190 reads - 1 comment

4 bloggers, 11 posts and $100 on the line: 1720 reads
Single picture of Evangeline Lilly in her underpants: 3479 reads

Now I know for sure that Eva really is _that_ hot, but I'm left pondering a few tough questions... what happened with this contest?  how can i make it better?  would you participate again?  why do you suppose nobody new posted?  and where did robogeek go?