Asymptomatic

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

The past two weeks have seen an upswing in posts around here, and the consequence is that more spiders stop by, and the consequence is that they find the search links on the right. When the spiders hit the search links in quick succession without loading anything else, it digs a big crater where the server used to be. Well, I'm tired of that.

There are a ton of nasty bots that aren't obeying the robots.txt, and really I think it can't be relied upon to prevent the most heinous bots from destroying a site's productive page serving. I've thrown some Apache modules at the issue, but they don't seem to help. I've specifically excluded sections of the site from certain user agents, and that seems to do well, but there's no avoiding getting trounced by these freaking ill-behaved spiders and comment spamming bots.

So I wrote a new Habari plugin that checks the server load and sends a 503 (Service Unavailable) when the load gets too high. A custom template is employed for the 503, so even though the site doesn't provide content, it still looks like it's trying. The settings are configurable, so I can turn certain taxing features of the site off temporarily while there's moderate load, and send the whole site into standby if the load hits the roof. When the load returns to normal, the walls automatically drop....

The last five days have seemed both like an eternity and an eye blink, all over a word - Habari - that many people are just recently becoming aware of.

Maybe you first noticed when Chris J. Davis switched his blogging software away from WordPress. After that, dominos started falling, with posts about it from interesting corners of meta-blogdom. It's really been hard to keep up with the influx of interested people and do development and have a life. Thanks so much to Berta for her support during this process, which is undoubtly greatly attributed to her being tired of hearing me complain about WordPress.

So what's the big deal, anyway? Maybe people have said they're interested, but without actually dipping into the small-but-growing community and asking around, it might be hard to get a sense of what any of this really means. Let me cover a few of the common questions and misunderstandings surrounding Habari....

You might have noticed that the service release of WordPress 2.0.3 is now available for download. I do recommend to users that they perform this upgrade if they are using the 2.0 branch, because it addresses at least one security issue.

One security-related issue that you might be interested in is the new nonce system. It started with this thread on the WordPress hackers mailing list and became one of the most involved and complex discussions we've ever had. I personally had all too much to say about it. So what is a nonce and how does it affect you?

First off, "nonce" is pronounced like the prefix "non", but with an "s" sound at the end. It is not "noun" with an "s" sound. The term "nonce" is used in a variety of ways, but for our purposes it is a unique code that is only used (more or less) once to identify a particular transaction. How is this useful? more

Where are the good photoblog packages? Here's the target that I'm trying to hit:

• Displays photos with title and description
• Displays thumbnails of photos when more than one photo is displayed
• Allows comments with moderation and filtration capabilities
• Allows tagging of photos by admin or visitor (moderated or threshhold-limited)
• Displays galleries by tag, date range, or pre-defined classification
• Optionally tracks user favorites, allows ratings, and records view counts
• Has no problem with FTP or HTTP uploads
• Can simulate internal galleries using external Flickr photos and galleries (wishful thinking)
• Uses a cropper to select a thumbnail
• Has no "back-end", just a front end with extra controls for the admin
• Integrates easily into existing site layouts
• Displays photo date information (from EXIF if possible)

Is that so much to ask for? Apparently so.