Blogging about blogging
I will be away from home for the next week and a bit. I’m flying to Las Vegas in a few hours to attend a work-related technical conference. That ends next Friday, at which point Irene is flying down to join me and we’ll spend a long weekend seeing the sights in Vegas.
You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I've had to tidy up and "rethink" the…
I discovered a problem with my blog when I posted my rant about my Cisco RV016 earlier today. After all my network shuffling around, the website was loading very, very slowly. The WordPress blog was taking several minutes to render, whereas the other blogs on the server were behaving normally.
I tried a great many things, including running database recovery diagnostics and upgrading my WordPress version, before finally figuring out the cause. My network changes resulting in my server no longer having correct DNS settings: you could find it, but it couldn’t find the rest of the internet. I suspect the page generation delay was happening because of the Google Adsense stuff on the site, which wants to talk to Google… but I’m just speculating.
In any case, the problem appears to be solved now… five hours after I discovered it. I’m going to add this to the list of things I will blame on my Cisco RV016 router/switch…
UPDATE: I have uncovered and repaired more problems, but these ones I can’t blame on my much maligned Cisco RV016
Back in December of 2005 I added Google Adsense features to my site. As I said back then, I have no illusions of actually making money off of Adsense. Starting year three, my “a buck or two a month” estimate is holding remarkably true. I’m up to about $45 sitting in the Google coffers, waiting to reach $100 so I can claim my riches.
I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.
One of the objectives of my web server upgrade was to end up with a Linux/PHP/mySQL configuration that would work with Gallery 2. All of the photos on my site have been managed via Gallery for years now… unfortunately, so long in fact that the version of Gallery I’ve been using is three years out of date.
I still haven’t completely restored the Gallery here on my ol’ website. The Gallery itself is still here, and still works fine, but the code that puts a little random picture here on the blog isn’t working quite right so I’ve left it turned off for now. My intent is to upgrade the gallery software itself before I re-activate that plugin. It is only a couple of hours of work, but I’ve been distracted this week. I’ve also been researching a few nice new features of the updated Gallery that I want to incorporate into this blog- we’ll see how that works out.
I seem to have reversed the forces of entropy! The new server is basically operational, and this blog is now being served by fresh, clean hardware. I’ll post something detailing the innards of the new box this upcoming weekend.
I broke the website earlier today. I think I’ve established the Computing Law of Quantum Superposition. Specifically: a computing system is in all possible states until it is observed, at which point it collapses into a single state. Unfortunately, the single state is always “non-functional”.
Running a public website of any kind means having to deal with various unwanted guests. This blog, for example, receives around 300 spam comment posts a day, and any number of attempts to break in.