Moving some of my posting activity from Facebook back to blog
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…
Blogging about blogging
Improving the performance of WordPress: my experiences
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.
Upgrading the ‘kgadams.net’ web server
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….
Domain name search registration scam
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.
My, that is a lot of spam…
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.
Site upgrades
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…
Multi-day site outage: back on line again
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.…
It’s full of post_content…
My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time. The most common is the seemingly random appearance of  characters in the midst of some of my posts.
I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch. I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted. Until today… I hope
Stupid spam robots…
You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
Server OS Upgrade
I shut down the site over the weekend and upgraded / migrated to a new server operating system. Kelly’s World was running on Mandriva 2008.1 prior to today. As of now, the site is live on a Fedora 16 server. My main reason for performing the migration was to get an OS in place that could be updated more consistently.