Tag: Internet equivalent

Not A Good Day On The Internet

Today it is running so slowly I suspect my host has substituted a Commodore64 as the server!

It’s not a good techno day. I woke up to six emails. That’s too few–by far. What’s up with that? I’m sure in a few days, or weeks, I’ll hear from those whose emails aren’t getting here.

Maybe the mail problem is related to my website. Today it is running so slowly I suspect my host has substituted a Commodore64 as the server!

putty-cap.jpgThe attached image shows three numbers in the upper right corner. These show the server load. Anything greater than one means processes are queued. It sets up the Internet equivalent of twiddling your thumbs. Numbers is the mid-20s are scarily bad.

For most simple operations this slowdown isn’t obvious. However, when you use my database, like to leave a comment or search for an older entry, the website goes into suspended animation&#185!

It’s very frustrating because I know people abandon comments when the website isn’t responsive.

I’m not alone with grief today. Twitter seems to be down for the count. The latest tweets I can view are now three hours old.

Actually, a very few tweets must be getting through which is allowing the trending topics page to be dominated by the word, “frozen,” as is “Twitter is frozen.”

The Twitter status blog states:

Timeline delays this morning 1 hour ago

We are currently investigating a problem causing many users’ timelines to be delayed. We will update with status here shortly.

Twitter is amazing. I can’t remember any other web based service that’s had as many issues and are still widely used. How long can they dodge the bullet?

&#185 – This just in from my hosting company:

Greetings

There was another user overloading mysql on the server. I have created an abuse report and suspended this user.

The load on the server has since dropped. This should resolve the issue.

Thanks,

Nate.S

Level 2 Tech Support

Website Gets Thrown Out And Rewritten

The commands are short and powerful. You can accidentally do a lot of damage with Putty!

striped-bkgnd.pngI have learned the pleasure and pain involved in website creation. This is pregnancy and childbirth combined. If nothing else it feels so good when you stop!

I woke up early this afternoon and discussed my design progress with Helaine. The site was just not looking right and I was considering throwing it all away–three full days of work. Unfortunately, it was becoming obvious more work wouldn’t fix my problems.

“I know that’s what you want to do,” she said. She didn’t encourage me to restart, but she didn’t discourage me either.

I bit the bullet and opened Putty, my SSH client. Putty resembles an old school terminal screen–black and white with no graphics. It’s powerful because Putty allows me to control the remote server. The commands are short and powerful. You can accidentally do a lot of damage with Putty!

mv site old_site

With that cryptic command three days of work was moved to the Internet equivalent of a railroad siding. Everything was intact but now out-of-the-way. I then created a new site directory, a new database and reinstalled a fresh copy of WordPress. It didn’t take more than ten minutes to have a fresh website.

Fresh and empty.

Last night I found Mimbo, a WordPress theme. I download a copy and activated it. These website condiments are small and download in a few seconds. Now I had the makings of a website.

Mimbo is touted as a ‘magazine’ theme. It isn’t made for blogging even though WordPress is primarily blogging software. It ‘ages’ entries in various categories independently of each other. It has room for an unbloglike ‘sticky’ entry which will remain prominently displayed even as new content slips beneath it.

Designing a website is conceptual. You need to think about how each piece will relate and interact with all the others. That is the part I was most confident about. It’s good to be naive!

By late afternoon the site was coming together nicely. Mimbo took care of most of my presentation worries. I customized its look. The polka dots at the top of this entry are part of the site’s background. Amazingly the pages look good! My main concern from the previous iteration was gone.

Now I was ready to install the key component of this site–the ability for users to create the content destined for the home page. The plugin didn’t work. It literally did nothing. I poured over forums and the sparse documentation that came with it.

The real shortcoming of free software isn’t how it works but how you learn to use it. Those who write software are seldom adept at telling others how to use it. I suspect a huge percentage of the best stuff in software is never used because no one knows it’s there.

I opened Putty again and made some changes to the inner workings of my web server. It was only a few lines of code–really someone else’s work cut and pasted. Immediately the plugin worked! My submission form was live.

I started to add dummy content to the site. These are entries that contain nonsense text. It looks like English but actually has no real words which might distract you. Online “Lorem generators” provide this stuff!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis vulputate elit vel dolor. Vivamus sollicitudin est nec eros vehicula dapibus. Vivamus in lorem. Curabitur at sapien tempor odio hendrerit lacinia. Suspendisse congue risus non justo. Nullam odio turpis, dapibus quis, sollicitudin quis, rutrum sit amet, orci.

It only looks like Latin! It’s gibberish.

Tonight I showed the incomplete site to a few friends. Most seemed suitably impressed.

It’s getting close. The next few dozen steps are cosmetic. Stylesheets will be tweaked. Some underlying HTML code will have to be reworked. In my dreams this doesn’t take long. In reality who knows?

Sometime in the next few days I’ll be asking for your help. In order for this site to go live it will need lots of user generated content. I’ll save the specifics for later.

This is a little one-man-band website. I take that back. It’s a one-woman-band website because it’s my wife’s and she will administer it.

It will not cure cancer. It will not compete with Yahoo! or Google. It has potential.

A Little Computing Advice

PCs aren’t as expensive as they once were, but for years they’ve been a whole lot faster than we need for most tasks. If you surf the web, read email and occasionally play with photos, a computer that’s a few years old is plenty fine.

If you’re thinking of buying a new computer and you don’t play games or use your machine for other really stressful things, save your money! Really.

This comes up, because I went to my friend Steve’s house last Sunday and, for an investment a little north of $100, refurbished his computer.

He says there’s a real difference. That makes me smile.

I increased the RAM from 512 mb to 2 gb. At the same time, we added a second hard drive. There he added 300 gb to his original 120 gb.

If the darned case wasn’t so anti-intuitive, the whole process would have taken five minutes. Unfortunately, it took closer to a half hour as I fiddled and fuddled, trying to get the hard drive in its bay.

I finally realized pulling the front panel off was the way to go. I’m an idiot.

Steve’s computer had slowed down. There are a few reasons for this. First, with most little utilities you install, programs like Real Play, Quicktime or Adobe Acrobat, small starter programs are also installed. They run every time you boot your PC.

These little programs sometimes check for updates and often pre-load helper files, making the programs start quicker. Each also ‘steals’ a little RAM. That makes the computer run slower!

None of these programs uses enough memory to be a problem on its own, but in the aggregate, they become leeches. Using MSCONFIG, I turned a bunch of these little applets off.

Most computers also run antivirus and spyware suites. These are real resource hogs. I personally choose not to run either. It’s the Internet equivalent of unsafe sex, but it works for me.

I’ve never cleaned a virus from a computer that didn’t have antivirus software! Most new viruses are designed to get around them anyway.

Steve’s computer was also running slower because he was doing more with it. He now loads larger image files from his digital camera and manipulates them with Photoshop. Those files are compressed on disk, but must be expanded to their real size when played with. There’s a lot of complex math involved with photos.

When the new drive formatted (a long and tedious process) and the machine rebooted, he looked at me as if I was a wizard. It was really pretty simple. I’ve yet to kill a machine while trying to upgrade it.

PCs aren’t as expensive as they once were, but for years they’ve been a whole lot faster than we need for most tasks. If you surf the web, read email and occasionally play with photos, a computer that’s a few years old is plenty fine.

Real hard core ‘big iron’ computing is the answer for video editors, heavy duty photo manipulators and gamers. For everyone else, save a few bucks and wait.

Oh – and if you really have your heart set on that quad core smoker with 4 gb of RAM and a terrabyte of hard drive space – I won’t rat you out.

The Nofollow Tag

Because you’re a human and not a computer, you’ve probably never seen a nofollow tag… and you probably wouldn’t care if you did see one. Nofollow tags are terrible for me as a blogger.

A little background. Search engines, like Google, are clever in how they decide which sites are important. You are judged by those who associate with you.

If popular sites link to you, you get some of their karma. More popular site links going your way means a higher Google page rank for you (and Google is the only search site that really counts).

It’s doubtful The New York Times or Drudge will link to me any time soon (and I probably couldn’t handle the traffic anyway). However, from time-to-time I make comments on other websites. Normally, these comments relate to my areas of expertise – like weather and media.

I don’t spam. I don’t comment for the sake of commenting.

It used to be, my comments (and my web address) were seen by the search engines. That helped elevate the importance of this blog, especially in my areas of expertise. I think that’s how Google and the others intended it.

Now, nearly all the comments I leave have a hidden tag appended to my website’s URL. I just left a comment on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine. He had posted an entry about TV news helicopters following car chases. That’s a subject I’ve commented on more than once.

Along with my name, I entered my website’s address. Unfortunately, just before www.geofffox.com, hidden within his website’s code, are the words “external nofollow.”

He’s telling Google not to follow the link to my site!

His site, along with many others, do this to every comment they receive. Maybe he’s right? Maybe self published links, like my URL, shouldn’t hold any weight at all.

On the other hand, the diminution of links through the “external nofollow” tag has moved my Google page rank from a 5 to 4, reducing my traffic by between 30% and 40% and cutting my AdSense income by at least 60%.

I’ll be the first to admit I want links for selfish reasons. I like the traffic. I like my thoughts being seen.

Just because it benefits me doesn’t make it wrong, does it?

I wrote Jeff Jarvis to tell him I was disappointed. He responded:

It is wordpress that sets that and it is purely spam. My host requires it.

That is how bad the spam problem is. Sorry.

Quite honestly, that’s the Internet equivalent of, “your call is important to us.”

After this was posted, Jeff Jarvis responded. Rather than leaving his comment a click away, I am moving it here within the entry:

Well, that’s rude. I sent you email immediately from a picnic on my Treo because I wanted to respond. I just got home and sent you another, lengthier response. And this is how you treat me? As I said in the email, I’m not the bad guy, spammers are. Blame them. To quote my second email, in full:

No disagreement. But the bad guys here are the spammers. Slime. Scum. Evildoers. I don’t blame my host; they have brought down my host more than once. Akismet, WordPress’ very good spam catcher, still misses many; I still have to kill them every hour or two. That’s how bad it is. Spam killed trackbacks. So far, it hasn’t killed comments, but it could. Spam blogs have also threatened the other means of tying together a conversation — Technorati and blog search revealing links to others’ blogs in a conversation — but so far, they’ve been able to keep only one step behind.

And by the way, it’s Jarvis, not Jervis.

-jeff

I had mistyped Jeff’s last name. I have corrected and apologized for that error.

100,000 Pages Served

Sometime on Monday the little counter on the bottom right of this website will spin past 99,999 and move into six digits. It’s my website, and I am impressed. I never thought there would be anywhere near this much traffic.

However, let’s keep this in perspective. Compared to a large commercial site like Google or Yahoo I’m not even a rounding error. This site has so little traffic that it easily shares a computer with dozens of other small sites (and my server is in Chicago).

For a one man operation with no promotion, and no draw other than a look at what I’m thinking on any given day (not much it often seems) 100k since July is livin’ large.

To define terms, each time a full page of this website is viewed the counter goes up one. This page counts as one. If you go back and look at a single archived entry, that’s another one. Looking at a full screen of thumbnails in my gallery is one more. And, if you click on any of them to get that single image in a larger view that is yet one more.

There are other counters at work on the site. Most of them operate behind the scenes on the management pages.

This is the 400th entry in my blog which started on July 4, 2003 (you can see the titles of each with links by clicking here). The combined text and images here take up 285 MB. This website has spit out a little less than 15 GB of data, enough to fill 20 or so CDROMs. There have been 56,000 separate visits to the site. If you count each individual file that’s called on, each image, style sheet, table and text files, you will be just short of 1.5 million hits!

This site is fully indexed on all the search engines, but gets the most traffic, by far, from Google. The largest number of referrals come from people entering the name, “Scotty Crowe,” John Mayer’s road manager who I had written about… and who doesn’t appear on other sites often enough to move me from a prominent showing on Google and Yahoo. In 2003, Scotty was only number 2, just behind “giblet gravy,” a term I had used in a context that probably wasn’t be searched for.

There are other Geoff Fox’s listed on the Internet – many others. But, I am the number one result when you Google my name. I’m also high on the list for ‘dissed’ and, of course, Scotty Crowe.

Each day, between 350-450 of you visit, looking at about 2 pages per visit on average.

There is a certain amount of exaggeration when you see all these numbers. Some do nothing more than reflect the Internet equivalent of a wrong number, as people come here by mistake. Others are reflecting robots and spiders and crawlers from search engines like Google, Yahoo and now Microsoft. Still more, less than 10% but significant, are from me… looking for errors and proofreading my work (I spend a lot of time spellchecking and proofreading my work and mistakes still get through all the time).

Actually, I often stay away from the public pages, lest I run up the counter.

If I told you how much this endeavor has cost, you’d probably be surprised. The main software is Movabletype, which is free. Same goes for Gallery, my photo gallery software and GrADS which produces the meteograms. All the software on this site is freeware.

Renting my little corner of cyberspace is also pretty cheap. I paid $100 for one year of webhosting, which provides the destination when you type https://www.geofffox.com. For that $100 I get 350 MB of space, more bandwidth than I can use, and the ability to control my mailboxes and truly be the master of my own domain! Owning geofffox.com is another $20 (I also own tv-cd.com).

Please accept my thanks for coming here and helping me stay motivated. I have become somewhat anal – posting virtually every day. I am surprised, gratified and a little scared when I think you’ve spent a time reading what I have to say.