Is this it?!

Not only does the Italian National Football team players that just won the World Cup cheat during the game (Diving, Faking, Acting)…they also got busted for it in a across all the best teams in Italy. I can’t say I am surprised to see it and I say, good. It is a huge stain on their World Cup win to have this happen considering all the player on the winning team play in this league and over 1/2 for the guilty teams.

Ever read the The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro? Well, it is a gr8 book about the passion of football in Italy but also that coruption that is part of it.

Come visit while I liveblog the above game.  I won’t be doing too many of these – but most folks are out and I have the family connection to Ukraine so what the hell.

Being at the World Cup and helping produce World Cup Blog has been awesome so far.  We currently have a Brazilian Fan Video that Nick took a few days ago. It is currently on the homepage of YouTube as a featured video. To this point, it has been viewed 76,000 times.

I would agree with MattH as the title of this posts suggests – it is a bit of a walled garden.  WCBlog has gotten about 51 visitors from this video out of 75,000+ views…very low.  The average blog that links to us sends more traffic.

The YouTube API is still awesome…it helps us store and share the videos bigtime.  The offshot is that we are sharing with the youtube community…which is also fine.  Check out the comments on the Brazil video – all spam and mostly nonsense.

We have a cluster for WorldCupBlog and are running a pretty hacked up version of WordPress to make it all go. The past few days our traffic skyrocketed as we expected, but our servers were not able to handle the load, hence, we installed the WP-Cache plugin.

At first, we were seeing random errors that we could not duplicate…the errors were certain pages would come up 404 – page not found. The random part about it was that the page was a legit page, but was coming up not found. Reloading a few times and it would come up. Duplicating the error was difficult and not consistent.

Solution: Some of our servers were not set on the exact same time as our DB server. We set all of them to equal time, and the error went away. Yahoo. So if you are ever using this plugin on a cluster, make sure everything is synced. We probably should have had it like that, but as things progress, it is easy to forget details.

It’s been a huge day.  Challenging, test of patience, awesome.  A lot of life smashed into 24 hours.  Sitting here listening to the Garden State Soundtrack and playing this World Cup game while the rest of the WCBoyz sleep.
Got off the phone about 1/2 hour ago with RadioIslam.  They interviewed me for about 40 minutes on my World Cup predictions, security here in Germany, and other random stuff.  Nick was sleeping on the couch and snooring and Peter and I got his arse to bed as the interview started. Kinda funny.  Sleep walking Nick.
WCBlog is growing like mad – I predicted that the growth curve would be steep, and it has been.  We had some almost meltdown’s the past 24 hours or so…but I hope and pray we make it through.  We are all doing out best to make things work smoothly.

About 36 hours or so till this WC starts.  Can’t wait – been a long time coming and preparing.  Hope all is well wherever you are.  One more game before bed. 🙂

• World Cup Photo Site
• World Cup Video Site
• My WCB post on the above 2 sites and how to submit to them
• Getting interviewed on SBLive

We have been working our little arses off the past few weeks and non-stop the past 7 days.  About 12 hours from now I am on my way to Europe and to participate in the World Cup.  I couldn’t be more excited.

Bob, Chris, Peter and I did an intense session on Saturday and Sunday, planning more of the details for World Cup.  Stuff like, who goes to what game, how/what content to generate, how will it be organized.  It’s gonna be awesome.  The 1st 19 days of World Cup have no breaks for us…non-stop blogging, podcasting, vlogging, and picture taking.  I am excited for the challenge.

To all my PDX friends, have a gr8 summer.  I’ll miss participating in it.  See you mid-july.

• Where do Football Fonts come from
• World Cup Tickets: Will they ID us?
• Daily Dose: Part Deux

I reckon it’s not that hard once you get into it. Of course, a talent like Bob is superior to what I do, but I can fill in the gaps for a few days and hopefully not turn the audience off.

WCBlog’s Brazil Football Team Blogger just posted 3 articles about the Brazil team that are interesting and fun to read.
Part 1: Inside scoop! Meet our managers!

Part 2: Inside scoop #2! Meet Zagallo!

Part 3: Inside scoop #3! Meet Parreira!

World Cup homepage.

We tried a new layout…to bring out the team blogs more as well as more of Bob’s posts.  He posts 8 to 12 times per day and on the old layout, his new posts quickly got lost.

We have another new design/layout for the actual tourney that I think is gonna kick some booty.  In less than 30 days, I will be Berlin.  Yahooooo.