Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…
Tag Archives: Site news
Gone fishin’
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.
Site restructuring underway
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 structure of the site.
The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:
- Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
- Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
- Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
- Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
- Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
- Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
- Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
- Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog
Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.
Website outage
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
Boring site updates
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.
Gallery updated… still not fully integrated, but getting there
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.
Continue reading Gallery updated… still not fully integrated, but getting there
Still a few things to do on the website…
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.
New server mostly up and running
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.
Broken Website…
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”.
The Internet is a weird place…
I run several websites off of my one Linux server sitting here in my house. I try to keep it reasonably secure: it’s behind a firewall with a limited number of open ports, I try to keep my software somewhat up to date, and I install code to intercept blatant attempts to spam or attack my site.