Asymptomatic

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....

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....

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. more

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....

Over the past couple months, and particularly over the last two days, it has become interesting to me what kinds of visitors I am getting to the site and where they're coming from. There are a few stats packages, and I've been working out their benefits and flaws.

I was able to jump on the Google Analytics train before they closed their doors. I installed the required script in the necessary places and waited for stats to roll in. And I waited. And I waited.

Eventually they had enough data to play with (do I not even register in the Google Analytics world as anything but a blip?) and they started showing me some statistics. But. How do you use this thing? Even being a former Urchin 5.0 user, I was still somewhat confused by the interface. Suffice to say, I never really figured it out, and I started to suspect that using Analytics was affecting my AdSense adversely (though I can offer no evidence that this is anything but paranoia), so I simply removed the tags.

Isn't there something that you can just push a button and get the stats you need? And exactly what stats do you need? more