Asymptomatic

Today’s CookieCast uses one of my submitted cookies. Yay!

In two sites that I regularly read, I found links to this awful thing, once again reinforcing the idea of the inverse of the Long Tail - The Short Fat Head.

Isn’t anyone else tired of seeing the Technorati Top Ten in every top list on the planet? Yes, I know Boing Boing exists; you’d have to be living under a virtual rock not to know. Seriously, if you had any interest at all in rooting out the most popular blogs/sites on the web, then you probably already know that Boing Boing is among them without the help of Dave Winer’s new OPML-sharing project.

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

Is that so much to ask for? Apparently so.

I shop at Wawa, our local convenience store, much more often than any person should shop at a convenience store. Today, for example, I stopped at Wawa three times. Yes, that’s pretty obsessive.

There are a few observations I have made about Wawa in my high-frequency visits, some of which I have probably shared before, but I would like to record again because it’s on my mind at the moment, having just returned from a trip to the store.

First stop: Coffee people. Are you a coffee person? I don’t mean the kind of person that simply enjoys coffee. And I don’t mean the kind of person that says, “I simply can’t get motivated in the morning if I don’t have my coffee.” The people I’m talking about are the OCD folks who would scream “must have coffee” in the morning if they didn’t require coffee to unzombify themselves. Even then, the act of getting and consuming the coffee is no longer what arouses them from this stupor so deep they forget to put on actual shoes with their suit-pants and instead wear their battered old pink bunny slippers with the missing button eyes.

No, the coffee itself isn’t enough. Whatever rejuvination they gain from drinking coffee in the morning happens after I encounter them at Wawa. Dang it.

A thread on the support forum recently crossed my radar, wherein help is sought for a sick WordPress. It seems that the popularity of some blogs, especially those with high number of commenters, is causing issues on those servers.

Having recently gone through some operations to optimize the user experience on my blog, I have some personal involvement in trying to optimize my own site. I have a lot of control over my own server (I run this site on a VPS) so many of these changes were easy to implement. Some of them would still work if I was using shared hosting, and it still may be worthwhile to know these things when talking to a shared host if you can make any performance suggestions.

You can use these tips to keep your site running ultra-smooth, because keeping your server online is one of the more important aspects of running a web site.