Tag Archives: WordPress

Maintaining my Internet presence

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Yesterday I wrote about my plans to transition this site over to gonyea.com in the near future. Yet an event today reminded me about something I have been thinking off and on about for the past few months. Why should I run my site on my own server?

This afternoon I was doing my usual after work routine online, catching up on my e-mail, RSS feeds, and Twitter. I happen to go to my site ready to jot down a few ideas for a blog post. Eventually my web browser times out connecting to this site. I try my other sites on this server, nothing happens.

I groan, as I know immediately what the problem is. My server (running Ubuntu 9.04), despite several rebuilds and reconfigurations, will randomly spike to 100% CPU usage and become completely unresponsive. Cannot SSH into it, cannot even serial console into it. I have to do a hard shutdown of the server then power it back on, hoping that I did not corrupt the database in the process. Who knows how long the server was down, could have been hours.

This gets me thinking. Is there really a need for me to run the latest WordPress on my own server? Do I have the time and energy to keep this server secure, up-to-date, and with as close to 100% uptime as possible? Do I really want to troubleshoot obscure issues on an OS I know very little about?

My gut says I want the power of WordPress so I can eventually unveil my awesome web site that I keep promising for years, that this server is a great learning experience for not only hosting my own site, but making sure everything just plain works.

My head tells me that I have been promising that awesome web site since I registered chrisgonyea.com, which was 8 freaking years ago. Point the DNS records to Tumblr for chrisgonyea.com and begin fresh there, with a simple blogging platform that does the few things I have ever done with this site. Let Tumblr worry about uptime, security, and providing an awesome site for me. Maybe it will make me write more.

As I ponder this, I did some tweaks to my Apache installation since I did find some log entries that suggest the server ran out of memory. Let’s see if this fixes the problem. If not, I may press the kill switch on self hosting WordPress.

Updates to the blog

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A few updates to my blog:

  • I am now using WordPress 3.0 on this blog.
  • I have switched to using the new default theme in WordPress 3.0.
  • Given the lack of discussion on almost all of my posts and the amount of comment spam on old posts I see despite several comment spam plugins, I have decided to experiment with turning off all comments on posts older than 30 days. I am interested in seeing how this turns out.

Wish I had known this sooner

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I just found the instructions for automating a WordPress upgrade via Subversion.

This sounds really neat. I think I am going to try it. I know manage three different WordPress sites and finding even that low number is a pain to upgrade easily when new versions come out. This method sounds like it can take a lot of that pain out of the way. Especially as I add more WordPress sites to my maintain list.

What I would really like is figure out how to automate this with AppleScript & Shell Script so I can just double-click an icon, type in what version to upgrade to, and have the whole thing done with no intervention.

Sounds like a good little project to learn UNIX shell commands. For all of my computer knowledge, I know next to nothing about UNIX and shell commands. Might as well start now and expand my knowledge. I will share my experience with this on here in the near future.

Akismet Worst Offenders plugin

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Ever wanted an easy way to sort through all of that spam caught by Akismet (just now, I had to look at 175 spam comments since yesterday)?

Akismet Worst Offenders plugin is just for you. It groups your suspected spam comments by IP address or web site. Then a delete button allows you to easily delete those bulk spam comments right away.

The results are a lot less spam comments to filter through, which allows you to make sure no legiminate comments are captured by accident.

Fantastic plugin and I imagine it will become part of the regular Akismet plugin very soon.

The spam invasion

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Some asshole decided to start spamming my blog.

Over 6,000 spam comments have been sent to my blog the past three days. That is three times the amount I had since restarting this blog over a year ago.

Only two slipped through and those two were held for moderation. That is right, out of over 6,000 spam comments, not one actually made it onto the site.

That to me is a miracle. And I owe it all to a little WordPress Plugin that wrecks any chances of spam coming in. Thank you Akismet!

Bad Behavior 2.0 alpha 3

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I have installed Bad Behavior 2.0 Alpha 3 on my site. Akismet has been very effective (maybe 1 or 2 spam are missed per 300-400 comment spam with no false positives), but I had to go through the 400+ comment spam it catches every 2-3 days and I would love if the obvious stuff is just blocked before it reaches Akismet. The less work I have to do with comment spam, the better.

So Bad Behavior will be combined with Akismet to effectively shut any chance of a comment spammer getting a comment posted on this site. If Bad Behavior misses it, Akismet should catch it. Already this morning, 47 spam attempts were blocked by Bad Behavior. Fantastic!

Upgraded to WP 2.0 RC3

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Just upgraded the blog to Release Candidate 3 for WordPress 2.0.

Why did I do this on a live blog?

I have been playing along with it for a few days on my iMac. It is a stellar upgrade for WordPress, if only for the integrated WYSIWYG editor. Seems to be working extremely well.

So I decided to live dangerous and give it a go on a live blog.

While I wouldn’t recommend upgrading to RC3 until the final version of 2.0 is out, I do recommend at least doing a test install of it. That way, you can easily check out the new features and make sure you can do a safe upgrade.