Thank you to everyone who have made The 2008 Weblog Awards a smashing success! As of today there have been over 870,000 votes in 48 categories. Polls close tomorrow at 5PM (US - Eastern), so there could well be over 1 million votes cast when all is said and done. That's our biggest turnout ever by a substantial margin!
In other important news, we have shut down the poll embed code for all polls and are now redirecting it to a link to the poll page. We are doing this because today the load on our servers spiked to a degree that sites without embedded polls were having trouble sending voters to the polls. This would give sites with embedded polls an advantage
As much as we'd like to keep the embedded polls open, the only fair thing to do is close them and make access to the poll page equal for everyone. Our severs have kept up with the load all week, and the first two days of poll embedding when well. It was only today, when several sites failed to follow directions, that things noticeably slowed. With the change made expect load times to improve.
Next year we will move to a cloud computing platform to allow for additional scaling during our voting period. That's been on our roadmap for the last year, but to date we haven't been comfortable enough with the persistence and performance of the database to make the leap. In the standard server hosting model we have to provision our servers in advance which makes it difficult to adjust to changes in load once voting starts. If you're a provider of cloud computing and would like to get involved in hosting The 2009 Weblog Awards contact us at awards at weblogawards dot org.
In other important news, results should be certified by Wednesday night. Winners will be officially announced on Thursday morning. At this point nothing we've seen indicates that there will be any changes to the current vote totals, but of course that is always subject to change as events warrant.
