Blogging about blogging
So I heard there were some updates for my web server OS, so I updated the updates so I could update. Yikes what a pleasure- but this would probably be easier if I did it more than once a year or so. Or not.
I decided to document a bit about what I needed to do to go from Fedora 25 to Fedora 34, with a few side trips into Apache (HTTP) issues around Fedora 33.
Continue reading Server updates- A Good Thing™
Irene and I have been in the process of relocating from Cloverdale to Castlegar for a while. The final move took place in March, and along with seven cats, many boxes, and the two of us came the server that runs this website.
Continue reading Back from the dead..
I upgraded this site from PHPNuke to WordPress in 2005. The cut over was rather abrupt and poorly thought out by yours truly. At the time, I believed I had successfully migrated all of my old content to the new environment. But several years later (!!), I realized the migration had left any article from my old site with a ‘read more’ tag without more to read in my WordPress configuration. This bothered me, and today I decided to see what I could do to ‘fix’ it.
Continue reading Recovering ‘lost’ pre-WordPress blog content from PHPNuke
I am going to start posting more on my blog, and a little less on Facebook: or at least that’s my intent. Why? Because Facebook owns a bit too much of my time, and I want to revitalize my blog a bit. Also, Facebook is not really good for ‘long form’ posts… and the never-ending-scroll of the newsfeed seems designed to make everything “Yesterday’s news”. And I find that I ‘stretch’ myself a bit more on my blog: in terms of what I post, and in terms of the effort it takes to make my blog run.
Use the ‘subscribe to blog via email’ link in the upper right side of any post on kgadams.net if you are interested in what I post on my blog. You’ll start receiving an email notification when I add a new post. The subscription is managed via WordPress.com, so you can even set it up to only notify you once a week or what have you.
I’m not ‘leaving’ Facebook: I’ll still be checking my news feed, probably more often than I should. But I’ll be turning down the tap a bit, hopefully successfully.
I recently upgraded my web server hardware and so, in that spirit, it seemed like a good time to refresh the configuration of my blog software. I had previously made several attempts to ‘make it fast’, but with only limited improvement. This time, however, I seem to have made some good progress… read below the fold for some details of my effort.
Continue reading Improving the performance of WordPress: my experiences
You will have undoubtedly noticed that my blog here has been down over the past several days if you’ve been trying to visit. Have no fear!
I completed a hardware upgrade of the server behind kgadams.net. While I was at it, I upgraded the OS (Fedora) to the latest version, and did some initial ‘tweaking’ to improve WordPress performance. Details follow below if you are interested….
I registered a new domain name yesterday: geekonaharley.org. My current vague plan is to move my motorcycle-related posts from here to the new blog in an effort to make the ‘eclectic’ nature of my posts slightly less so. I.e.: people interested in my motorbike related posts won’t get any cat or politics related posts mixed in.
But that isn’t what this post is about. Instead it is about the scam email that arrived in my email inbox today, the day after registering my new domain.
I have been running a personal blog for many years- arguably since about 1997. I think I switched to WordPress in 2005 after previously managing with a static HTML page and then a PHPNuke website. I started getting comment ‘spam’ shortly after I started using WordPress: like email spam, spam comments are irritating messages that aren’t really created by actual people who have something meaningful to say.
Thankfully, the folks at Automattic who make WordPress provided something called Akismet to ‘block’ or filter spam comments. I activated Akismet, and managing spam became more or less a memory… but the numbers, goodness… the numbers are huge.
My vast audience has no doubt noticed that the site has been sporadically unavailable, slow, or outright broken periodically for the past few days. I won’t go into all the details at this time, although I expect such details will be coming.
For now, be aware that I have made/am making a number of updates/upgrades to improve performance, mobile device compatibility, and functionality of the site. I also intend to start posting a little bit more regularly.
In the interim, please accept m apologies for the disruptions!
The power supply in my web server failed last week. The old chassis was a “compact” Antec case with a specialized power supply that I couldn’t find a replacement for.
I’ve put everything into a new chassis, this time with a standard-size power supply. The server seems to be back up and running normally again. My apologies to anyone who noticed the outage 😉
