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Read more about the article Duuuuummmbbb

Duuuuummmbbb

I posted earlier about my attempts to improve my site rendering speed by upgrading my blog server’s RAM. As I noted in that post, it didn’t seem like the changes made much if any difference to the rendering speed in the Safari browser.

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.

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Read more about the article Blog web server upgrade

Blog web server upgrade

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.

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Read more about the article Blaugust 2025 numbers

Blaugust 2025 numbers

I had few serious goals for my sophomore Blaugust participation in 2025. Essentially I just wanted to feel like I was involved despite having a low ‘blogging’ drive. And I achieved that limited goal: mostly by reading the work of other, more energetic participants.

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.

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Read more about the article Sadly disabling ActivityPub due to Discord weirdness

Sadly disabling ActivityPub due to Discord weirdness

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.

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Read more about the article Happy WordPress Anniversary?!

Happy WordPress Anniversary?!

I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.

Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.

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Read more about the article Planned outage: Saturday, February 15

Planned outage: Saturday, February 15

I will be bringing brought down my blog server on Saturday to re-organize my server rack in order to fit in a new rack-mounted UPS.

I am not setting a specific time, but hopefully no more than two or three hours sometime in the afternoon. I’ll update this post when the outage is complete. The outage started at 1:00 PM pacific time and completed at approximately 1:50 PM. More details can be found in the rest of this post.

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Read more about the article So much for 99% uptime…

So much for 99% uptime…

The little server in my basement that runs all my blogs has been down since February 8th. I finally got it back up and running today and, after correcting a few hiccups, the blogs are back up as of February 12th at 10:15 PM Pacific.

What went wrong? And why did it take so long to repair? Well… that’s a bit of an interesting story, but only if you are technically minded. The short, non-technical answer: there was a problem with the storage, and I fixed it by replacing the failing part.

Read on for the longer and more complicated answer…

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Read more about the article Making the OceanWP theme behave

Making the OceanWP theme behave

I recently updated this site with a new theme and a few other changes. I had a few struggles understanding how the basics work, and since then have been working on some fine-tuning. It has been somewhere between frustrating and fun, but I feel like I understand a bit better now how to get the OceanWP theme to do the things I want it to.

It is all done via magic… er, no, actually it is done via CSS. And a lot of help from the OceanWP support folks: being able to get prompt support makes paying for the theme seem a bit less painful at least.

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