East of the Sun, West of the Moon

…don’t you think?

A week ago I contacted DreamHost support to ask them about the unusually high number of reboots (crashes) that the shared host I’m on, Bundy, had seen recently. Around 20 in April alone. In return they offered to move me to a different home and I accepted that offer.

The move went smoothly, aside from the two Jabber accounts that refused to let me connect. I gave it a few days to see if things would sort themselves out (it happens sometimes) but no such luck. So I contacted them again and after some back and forth it was sorted this weekend, so I was completely moved across to my new home.

Then on Sunday I see this item on their status website:

The server bundy has been having some hardware issues as of late and we’re going to move it over to new hardware. The process should take about 30 minutes. We will post an update here when the process is complete.

It’s a pity my crystal ball was out of order, or I could’ve saved myself and some support folks some trouble.

I couldn’t resist, of course, and changed the look of the sidebar tabs a bit and (suggested by Kalle) sped up the transition effect when clicking on a tab to expand it. After all, why wait?

Meanwhile, I’ve got a Custom Links Widget in the works to allow me to add several differently-titled sections in the sidebar for different categories, instead of the all-or-nothing approach of the default Links Widget. It’s quite possible someone already wrote this, but it’s an interesting exercise. Hopefully I won’t have to change my code too much (for this one or for the previously written Custom Pages Widget) for the brand new WordPress 2.1 version!

I’ve changed the sidebar to use a so-called accordion effect where you click on the header of a section to unfold it and fold away the previously visible section. This should allow me to put content there without cluttering up the page, visually, and will inspire me to put the links back on the front page that I’d relegated to the links page in the static content.

I’ve tested that it works with Firefox (2.0.0.1) and Safari (2.0.4), but let me know if it misbehaves with your particular browser choice.

That said, what do you think of this technique? Good or bad, helpful or annoying?

Hmm, finally got a Round Tuit ™ and reinstalled the two relevant plugins. Will be using this post for some testing, feel free to participate.

Running a website/server with mod_security turned on is all fine and dandy, but in the end it doesn’t seem to be much more than a few hardcoded pattern-checks, like fopen. (I realize that it’s really more than that, but that’s the part I tripped over.) And as it happens, I use fopen() in one of the static pages, to read a file (with statistics) that is updated regularly. Not a problem, as long as I don’t try to edit the page. Hrm.

Ok, so while I’m working on these pages (finally getting around to fixing some problems that I ran into after the upgrade to WP 2.0), that check is turned off, and when I hope I’m done, I’ll turn it back on.

Sheesh.

Just a point of reference.  It’s been a little over 3 months and Spam Karma has blocked just over 2000 spam comment and backtrack attempts… That’s over 20 per day on average.  Enough to kill an hour or so per week if I had to manually monitor, delete them, and pick out the valid ones!

And hello Default Theme!

I made one minor tweak in how I name and display the static pages and that’s it for now. The Spam Karma and Acronym plugins have been reinstalled (of course) and one or two others that are only used internally. The rest will follow later, as will things like a theme that’s more to my liking. No offense to the creator of the default theme, but it’s not what I had in mind for my homepage/blog.

Update: Fixed the year/month archive layout in the sidebar. Got the babbelstats and spam statistics to work again.

Update 2: Added Gravatars back in.

TODO:

• Add nested comments back in.
• Find a suitable theme to hack.
• Fix the klasgenoten-ssg pages.
• Make sure the .htaccess file contains all the backward compatible redirects that I had for 1.5
• Get used to the 2.0 post editor, or switch back to raw editing like I did for nl.is-here.com
• Check what other plugsin I might be missing still.

I’ll be upgrading this blog from WordPress 1.5.x to WordPress 2.0.x at some point in the next few days (I’d love to give a more accurate indication but as personal projects go, it’s not very easy to predict when I’ll get A Round Tuit ™). This may mean that, aside for Spam Karma, which I already know to work with 2.0.x, not all features will work correctly and I’ll probably go back to one of the default themes instead of this homebrew hodgepodge.

In other words: Be prepared to have this place look like a mess or even break completely occasionally!

Looking at the daily analysis of the HTTP logfiles, as I try to do on a regular basis to see if there is anything that looks broken or just unusual. The summary of the agent (browser version) field includes a few entries for the sites that fetch the RSS and/or Atom feeds and then present it to their users:

• LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://www.livejournal.com/users/ninoblog/; xx readers)
• NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; xx subscribers)
• AttensaOnline/1.0 (http://www.attensa.com; xx subscribers)
• Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

It would be nice (and not at all evil, I think, as it wouldn’t reveal any personal data) if Google would begin including an indication of how many subscribers there are on their side. Hey, I might even see if I can submit that suggestion somewhere!

It looks like installing Spam Karma is paying off, given that in two weeks it has blocked over 150 spam comments and back-track attempts and I didn’t have to do anything for it, while regular commenters were, as far as I’m aware, not scared off by it in any way.