First, let me whine a minute. Last night a scheduled building electric upgrade at our server site in North Carolina didn't go well and a fuse blew in the "uninterruptible" power supply (UPS) and as a result our boards were down for quite awhile. If you received an IPS Driver Error, that is why. While mulling over my options on what to do about it (actually there were no options) this morning my power went out at my house for 2 hours. That is rather symbolic, I guess. Now I sit here sweating waiting for the AC to catch back up. OK, whining is over.

This event brought back to mind something we have been discussing around here for awhile. How do we speed up the site? The answer is actually simple but the doing it is financially risky. The servers it will take to get to the level of speed and reliability that fans want cost about $2,000 a month. The only monthly income we have coming in that we can count on is through CoachT Plus memberships. (Yes, we do have advertising income but it is up and down like the stock market. A $2,000 monthly commitment means there must be $2,000 a month coming in. After funding this site for the first 7 of our ten years in existence, that is how I now do business.) So, we need 450 more Plus Members than we have now. $24 a year gets you one. If you are waiting for football season to start to "Plus" I will give anyone who joins now all of July and August free. I want those faster servers.

Along with the pluses listed at CoachT Plus are many other "freedoms" given to Plus members on the site. We have to have a way to allow important data to be input by members but can't (and I learned this the hard way) except in a few cases allow members who just entered the site today, or last week, access to that ability. So while members can enter games and rosters only Plus members can edit games, and delete games, and submit prospects, and enter scores of Games in Progress. At playoff time only Plus members are able to enter final scores into our Scoreboard. I allow this for a very simple reason- if members don't help gather information then it won't get done. There are times, though, when erroneous information is very harmful to our credibility and only Plus members are allowed access at those times. I think this is the key in why this site is viewed by folks as being very "deep" while other sites are viewed as being a mile wide and an inch deep.

Alabama.coacht.com is up and running after taking a year to get articles into the archives, football schedules inputted, etc. This year should show a big improvement in traffic there. Not sure where we will expand next, if anywhere. A lot of national sites are not worth clicking on and some engage in stealing data and anything else they can to put up that national facade and I don't want to be one of those.

In a matter totally unrelated to the need for a faster server: Fans have asked about entering stats onsite and, I'll be honest, we have a stat form to use to collect the stats but I haven't figured out a way to verify the accuracy of the stats. To me it requires two elements before you can say that you have accurate stats: one is trusting the data input for each individual game entered and the other is that you must have all, or almost all, of the stats for games around the state. If you don't then you don't really have a good comparison. I don't think trying to get a person at each school to enter them will work. It has been tried before. The only method may be to get fans on this site to enter them which is how we get almost all of the other information we have.

Please email me your ideas.

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