My writing queue is a mile long, and a year overdue. I've got ideas aplenty, a paradox of choice, and an imagined readership (not in its quantity, but its consistency) that demands perfection.

I've just noticed, moments ago, that the blogs I most enjoy reading these days are short. Three paragraphs convey their entire message. Most of the time, the message is a simple impression. You read it and you feel... a certain way. It's like sense memory -- a whiff of a stranger's prose puts you in a familiar place.

Clearly, I need to write more like that, but leave room for the bigger questions that often fill this space. Some new rules for authoring, which I'll feel free to break soon after I write them: No writing without music. Less thinking, more feeling. Fiction works, with warning. Short and sweet.

For anyone who's notices some misbehavior on this site, I'm working on getting Asymptomatic moved to a different host.

The host it's currently on, unixshell, is fine, except for the fact that they're inconsistent with their ability to provide new hosting, and they're not all that keep on backups. I lost a lot of data over the summer that I'm not happy about, but is probably more my fault than theirs. Still, that they don't offer automated snapshot backups or a separate backup location as an add-on service is a potential problem.

I've set up additional hosting on SliceHost. It's another VPS, so I have to manage my server myself. They don't offer control panels for the server, like CPanel or Plesk. I've recently decided that I can live without them, although I'm going to need to learn the ins and outs of email server maintenance sooner than I might like. I don't currently host email from either of these servers (I pay someone else to host that for me), so it's not a big deal, but I may eventually want to set that up.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's going on with my unixshell box. For some reason, it will run an old version of Habari in a redalt.com subdomain, but will not run a new checkout from anyplace. This has made it difficult to convert Asymptomatic over. I've had my Slice for a while and it's been doing nothing, so I thought I would finally employ it.

Suffice to say, I love Debian Etch. It's got PDO built-in and everything. I should probably write up some instructions for setting up a slice from scratch to run Habari (based entirely on sucking knowledge out of skippy's brain). That would be useful.

Look for Aysmptomatic on a new server, soon.

Sorry, gang. Some doofuses are sending spam comments into my server (and a few other things, it seems) at a rate that's too fast for Apache to keep up. As a result, Apache just seems to hang and become unresponsive.

Unable to detect when an incoming request is a valid commenter before passing the request on to WordPress' comment processing system, leaving this unchecked takes down the whole server within a minute or two. There's nothing to do about it but research the incoming requests and, in the meantime, disable the comment form. Rather, the thing that processes the comments for WordPress.

One of the giant frustrating sore spots in WordPress' architecture is the way it processes comments. It requires (if you have no other special code in place) that all of your comments funnel through a single file URL. Spam scripts simply feed that URL whatever spam they want and they don't have to throttle. It doesn't matter what they send, and they don't care whether it's successful or not. WordPress will attempt to process all of the spam that comes into that file.

It doesn't matter what I run behind that URL. It could be nothing, it could be the lauded "Akismet" plugin, it doesn't matter. In fact, the more processing - the more delay - the worse it gets. Waiting for an external server is the worst. Making that additional outgoing connection in an environment where incoming connections are much of the cause of the problem seems like a bad idea.

The only way out of this predicament that I see is to write a new plugin that lets me put the form processing somewhere other than what will trigger processing and cause a bottleneck. How annoying.

Anyway, enough complaining over something that I have no influence to change.

The bottom line is, no commenting for a while. I'll figure things out and turn commenting back on. Yes, I know you're getting a 403 - thanks to everyone who emailed to let me know. I did exactly that on purpose. Sorry.

I think the solution may be something more drastic than a simple plugin in the end. .htaccess changes? New Apache modules? Something else entirely? I'd ask for suggestions, but the comments aren't running...

I have no notes from my meetup in New York with the friendly WordPress bloggers there, but I will get to writing about it eventually. There's a topic I need to dance lightly around first.

This site has always been my own ramblings and unfocused entries. This isn't likely to change. What I do need to adjust is what I care about and how it affects what I write.

I started this site to dump my writing onto. A few days ago, I wrote something about the potato people living under my front porch - a short work of fiction - and got many messages from people wondering if I had gone crazy. Well that's really what the site is supposed to be, you know? Writing. Of whatever quality and substance.

I also stopped using my own home-grown blog/CMS software because I was spending more time maintaining it than I was writing. Ironically, I became very involved in WordPress development after switching. While I see it necessary to write about things that matter to me - blogging being one of those things - I really should concentrate on what I love about what I write, even if I'm writing about something that I hate. Perhaps I should focus on those things on my own, rather than worry about what other people are writing.

It does bother me sometimes that I'll take on a topic, write about it, but don't follow-through with it. Then I'll come to find that a bunch of other people (who I know read this site) take that idea and expand on it but never bother to mention that I might have been a seed for their own work.

Sure, I wouldn't mind credit, but that's not even it. I marvel at what a large body of work I've influenced. Individually, it's nothing. Amassed, it's disturbing. I think that focusing what I'm doing here will be helpful with preventing that. That is to say, if I follow-through, then why would anyone else bother?

In addition to all of that, I've got a project that I'm dying to talk about, but it's not nearly ready enough yet. The problem isn't so much that I want to reveal pre-release details, just that if I'm not working on it, I'm probably sleeping. It's all-consuming, and it's difficult to talk about much else. Finding conspirators in daily life is difficult, and I think Berta is probably sick of hearing about it already. But since it's conuming most of my thoughts, it's difficult to concoct a post about much else.

Aubrey writes about not caring what other people think about your writing. I agree. I shouldn't care. I should write what I enjoy.

Spelling it out now, I wonder why it was ever not this obvious.

Ok, I'm writing this again, hopefully for the last time.

Last Thursday, a RAID controller on the server that hosts this site went bad and took out the entire server's data. As far as I've been able to determine, the site data is completely unrecoverable.

I temporarily put my most recent backup (from March) onto a Dreamhost server and, as expected, I'm consuming 20% of their CPU time. I hear things about paying for overages there, so it seems like a good idea to get out while the gettin's good.

Unixshell (the original host) provided a new VPS for me to use, and within a day I had a brand new Debian server online. It took the weekend to get things how I wanted, but many things are back online.

As far as lost posts go, here's the report. I recovered the 176 published posts that were lost over the last 6 months by visiting my completely neglected Bloglines account. I saved off their feed output for my site and used a complicated Regex + WordPress import plugin to move all of the posts back into the database. Unfortunately, all comments on those posts were lost in the crash, and the one post ("Building A Shelf In WordPress") that had more than one page now only contains the first page.

Asymptomatic wasn't the only casualty of the crash. This server also hosted RedAlt and MicroWiki.net. MicroWiki was most affected by data loss, since the software is about 10 files in total and is hosted in Google's Code repository. All of Berta's data was lost, and all of my MicroWiki rhetoric was lost. Nothing that can't be rebuilt over time though, and the site itself is already back with new data pouring in as I write this.

On the other hand, RedAlt is a big mess. There was a lot of custom code running on that server, especially that which implemented the specialized WordPress function reference. A lot of that was in a nearly-finished state in the backup that I have, but I have made little tweaks over the last six months that will be harder to recall.

Many plugin zip files are lost. I have backups, but if there were changes since then to plugins that were not in my Subversion repository (hosted on a separate server), then they're not in those backups. It's probably time to retire those plugins anyway.

Nonetheless, there are many things on RedAlt that are already back online. Kubrickr is back and better than before. You can now enter your Flickr username and see only your own CC-licensed photos for use as a header. The cropper is much improved as well.

It may take a little time, but I do intend on returning these services to at least their normal state, if not better.

As far as doing something to prevent this from happening in the future, I have taken steps to backup both the files and the MySQL data to a remote location every day. I'm using rsync to transfer the backup data to my lifetime StrongSpace account, which is big enough to hold the whole server. I have already made a snapshot of the server using the VPS tools provided by Unixshell, and so it should be a three-step process to restore the whole system, if need be. Restore the snapshot, rsync the files back to the server, execute the backup queries - done!

Hopefully, I won't have to worry about that ever again.