The Metablog

New Themes

Matt — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:39:39 +0000

I just signed up at Elegant Themes and installed some of their themes here. They’re all, well, elegant, though quite a few of them rely on various elements that none of us use, such as photos to go with each article. Nothing impossible to fix, I’m sure. Just wanted to point out that there were some really, really nice (paid-for!) themes available.

New Design

Matt — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:13:42 +0000

It’s probably self-evident, but I updated the design on the main page. The old one was…well, old.

Use this thread to tell me what you think. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down comments are welcome, but if you have anything specific you think should be fixed (I have several things!), use the comments for that, too.

Spam Fighting

Matt — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:39:49 +0000

It’s now possible to set the Akismet plugin up to work “globally,” which means that, if you’re not already using it, you can simply enable it and sit back. It seems to be about 95% (guess) effective in catching spam. Combined with other things that also catch the majority of spam, you’ll get very little.

So if you’re a blogger here, and you’re not using Akismet… Log in and enable it under Plugins. (Which currently has an orange “6″ hovering above it because I need to upgrade 6 of the plugins.) In addition to leaving you having to moderate fewer spam comments, it’ll be a net gain for other bloggers, because of some code I have that will block comments from people marked as having spammed any of the blogs here.

Minor Tweaks

Matt — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:45:11 +0000

I just removed the image from Electoral-Vote.com, since it’s kind of pointless to indicate the ‘current’ electoral vote count, since it shouldn’t change. (Unless Alaska finds more missing ballots.)

Perhaps more usefully, I added a count of the number of comments on the Recent Posts blurb for the main page. I think I need to play with formatting, since it looks out of place, as if it’s some sort of error. I’d like to brush up the main page a bit, too, though I’m split between a wholly new template and just tweaking the top part, which I’m starting to find ugly.

While I’m feeling inspired, any other “pony requests?”

We’re Back

Matt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:14:02 +0000

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but the physical server we’re on went offline today, and we just had it rebooted and brought everything back up recently. (Actually, it came back up for about 60 seconds then went down again… But now it’s been up for 30 minutes or so.)

Everything should be running smoothly, but let me know if I missed anything.

Now with APC!

Matt — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:50:36 +0000

I enabled APC this afternoon. In my haste to set the webserver up when moving, I never bothered to do a “good” configuration. (I used this handy guide to APC on Debian Etch.) Some super-quick benchmarks (using ab with 1000 connections, 5 concurrent) are below.

Before APC:

blogs.n1zyy.com/ (main page custom code): 187.03 requests/sec., 5.347 ms. average response time.
blogs.n1zyy.com/n1zyy (generated by WordPress): 137.23 requests/sec., 7.287 ms. average response time.

After APC:

blogs.n1zyy.com/ (main page custom code): 416.26 requests/sec., 2.402 ms. average response time
blogs.n1zyy.com/n1zyy (generated by WordPress): 373.47 requests/sec., 2.678 ms. average response time.

The performance has more than doubled with such a simple fix. It hasn’t been very carefully tuned yet, so there’s probably still more room for improvement… My Someday/Maybe list now includes looking into using APC instead of memcached to cache generated versions of the main page, as performance is apparently even better, as well as seeing that WordPress itself is tweaked to take advantage of APC, which I think is an option somewhere…

There may be problems with APC and the blog’s internal caching (via WP Super Cache) not playing nicely together, but I haven’t seen any reports of that in a while, and all looks well here… Let me know if you see problems.

Themes

Matt — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:47:23 +0000

Okay, it’s officially an addiction. I added some more themes. Bloggers, the “Design” tab in your directory now has 229 themes. The upgrade to WPMU 2.6 seems to have split them over multiple pages (versus having 229 in a row), though I do miss my old quick-nav link to the letter you were looking for. It also adds a live-preview with AJAX-y goodness, so trying themes out is slightly less laborious.

I’m still looking for a good one for my blog. It needs to work with lots of (nested) pages, but most themes weren’t built for this type of thing and tend to look awful. (The main page is due for an update, too, but that’s a task for another day.)

WPMU 2.6

Matt — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:10:15 +0000

I just upgraded to WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) 2.6, the latest tree.

I’m hoping this will fix the problems with blogging via external applications. As always, let me know if you come across bugs.

All Quiet on the Spam Front

Matt — Sat, 31 May 2008 04:06:43 +0000

Per the overview page I wrote, there have been a whopping 2 spam comments in the past 3 days. (And they were on my blog; I haven’t moderated anything in a while, which means they got caught automatically.)

I’ve very enthusiastic about eliminating spam, even working on other peoples’ sites to keep spam at bay. But c’mon, this is no fun. A few hacked-together bits of code are all it takes?

And… We’re back!

Matt — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:38:45 +0000

For reasons I still don’t fully understand, the server locked up hard. Compounding things, it wouldn’t boot.

LayeredTech generously gave me a couple free hours on their spiffy KVM-over-IP system and burned me a LiveCD allowing me to go in and fix the problem… An fsck of everything didn’t turn up anything too big, but I ended up re-installing grub, and all was well. (I did take advantage of the time to run some nice thorough filesystem scans while the filesystems were unmounted, but everything was in order.)

Now I just have to come back up from my score of -99 in the pool!