After much experimentation, I can hereby clarify/correct all of my previous observations and guesses. The rendering speed problem is not related to my server’s RAM nor is it the fault of the Safari web browser. Instead, my site renders slowly for me because I am logged in as the WordPress administrator for the site.
Boy, do I feel dumb now. Allow me to explain in order to hopefully prevent you from feeling dumb as well.
I have completed a simple upgrade to the little box that serves my blogs. I have increased its RAM from 16 gigabytes to 64 gigabytes.
I had observed some page loading slow-downs under some conditions recently. My quick review gave me the idea that some of the blogs processes might be a bit starved for memory. Too much of the system’s work seemed to be regularly swapped to virtual memory swap (SSD), a condition generally to be avoided.
The change in memory capacity and process configuration seems to have made the blogs a bit more responsive. However, it appears that most of the slow rendering I’ve noted relates more to Safari behaviour with the content of the site than with any shortcomings of my server hardware.
I’ve included some more detail below the ‘Read More’ fold for those who are interested.
Once again I’ve gathered some ‘end of August’ numbers illustrating the nuts and bolts of my blogging experience. I’ve definitely proven the adage that you get out of life what you put into it: my low-energy involvement with Blaugust 2025 is reflected in my rather weak statistics for the month. But I still feel I got more than I deserved in terms of ideas, support, and inspiration.
This morning’s “bird in our yard” seems to be the Golden Crowned Kinglet: at least that’s what our bird ID gadget helped me figure out. I have no pictures of my own- they move too fast, and are too far away for the zoom on my phone- so I grabbed the pictures for this post from eBird.
This is my greatly overdue response to the Blaugust ‘community builder’ “Low Stakes Hot Take” challenge.
I’m a man. Men generally grow more hair on their face than women. Sometimes they style or trim that facial hair in ways that please themselves or others.
Men who are not deeply interested in their appearance do not spend significant time every day making it *look* like they started growing a beard… and then stopped before it finished. Yet Hollywood wants us to believe that this ‘half-grown’ look is totally a thing that non-fussy men do. And that really frosts my cookies.
I retired on May 31, 2024. That means over a year has passed and I am still happy with the decision. Irene and I have had some tough times during the past year that I’ll touch on in this post. But the absence of the pressures of work has made it a lot easier to bounce back.
But my post-retirement lifestyle is not the active and adventurous, check-off-your-bucket-list thrill that most retirement advisors seem to recommend. And I guess I’m here to say that, for me at least, that is perfectly okay.
I read several articles today talking about the much improved ChatGPT 5 model. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has claimed that it is now like having a whole team of PhDs in your pocket.
The first week of Blaugust is over, but I’m still feeling like I’m just starting this event up. So I’ll fall back on the writing prompts for the first week and talk about myself in this post rather than coming up with something new.
I activated a number of plugins last year to help make my blog part of the IndieWeb and Fediverse ‘communities’. I definitely support their intentions, particularly relating to owning my own data. Unfortunately, something ‘broke’ with Discord some time back that I’ve been unable to fix.
