When Teaching Crowds appeared in its free PDF format a few weeks ago we were taken a bit by surprise as we thought we had at least a couple of weeks before this site needed to be ready. At the time, we only had a placeholder site ready on a rather slow server. By the time the paper and e-book versions were available at the end of September, the site looked and behaved much as it does now, but it was still on a relatively slow shared-hosting server. As of today, the site lives on a new virtual server so we are hopeful that we should be able to cope with most anticipated traffic and that the site can continue to evolve without crashing or becoming unavailable at inopportune times.
There may yet be the odd quirk that needs to be ironed out on this new server – mail notifications may not get through as they should yet, and we don’t know for sure how it will react under stress – but, so far, the site feels more sprightly than it did, and appears to be working as intended. We might still hit the odd problem if we get a mention on the front page of Reddit (takers, anyone?) but that would not be a bad problem to have!
We welcome comments, suggestions and feedback. Most of the pages on the site allow comments from anyone (all moderated and spam-filtered, options to comment using various social media identities, or not if you prefer) and, for each of the online versions of the chapters, we have now enabled per-section comments so that anyone can be part of the crowd that teaches on this site.
We look forward to learning with you!
