Reinvigorate’s Hourly Stats
About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about how the Reinvigorate web stats service was entering a private beta, and I hoped to get a chance to try it out. I applied to the private beta program and waited. And waited. [...]
Okay, I think things are finally (more-or-less) back in shape around here. Sorry about the problems you might encountered here over the past few days. I finally upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1, but I encountered some problems along the way. The problems were really indirectly related to the upgrade, and turned out to be my own dumb fault.
On Friday, I decided to use my lunch hour to perform the upgrade. I backed up my database and my wp-content directory, deleted all the old WP files (I traditionally haven’t bothered with that step, but I knew that several files were renamed/outdated, and I wanted to do some general housecleaning anyhow), installed the new ones, and upgraded the database schema via wp-admin/upgrade.php. [...]
I’ve spent some time converting my Rockem Sockem theme to a Sandbox skin, and getting my Now Playing hack converted into a sidebar widget. I’m more-or-less happy with the results, so I’ll be throwing the switch sometime soon. Be on the lookout for changes around here, and let me know if you spot anything broken.
Over the last few days, it’s possible that you might have tried to visit this site and gotten a blank page. It’s not you, it’s me. Or more precisely, it’s my server, and my attempts to eek a little more performance out of it.
The problem seems to come from APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I’m not absolutely sure why it decides to crap out on me like that, but I suspect that the real root of the problem might be some old supporting libraries on this server that need to be updated. [...]
A few years ago, I made a post that mentioned in passing that I have webbed toes. About a month later, my logs started showing up a fair number of referals from search engines from people looking for info about webbed toes. So I promised that I’d try to put up a picture. A couple of days later, I posted said picture.
Since that time, those three posts have collected over 900 comments between them. [...]
I know, I know… I haven’t been very active on the blogging front lately. Once again I’ve been sucked into a swirling vortex of job and home projects, with little-to-no time for participating in blogdom. I’ve managed to keep up with most of the latest memes, and I’ve added a few new del.icio.us bookmarks, but there’s been no opportunity to develop any nifty code or write about the subject of the day.
I’ve got eight draft posts in my queue, and three of those are no longer timely, and so I’ll probably end up deleting them. [...]
And now that I’ve helped out the rest of you who want to automatically generate posts from your del.icio.us bookmarks (with my daily post fixer plugin), I’m turning that feature off here. It was an interesting experiment, but I’ve decided that this isn’t how I want to present that information. Let’s examine the good and bad of the automatic link posts:
As a personal example, my wife has told me that she has been looking at my blog less since I started the automated posts. [...]
The previous post was the first on this site that was auto-generated by the del.icio.us “daily blog posting” feature. Geof has been doing this for a while, and I was already planning to do something like this on my own eventually, anyhow. But I hadn’t gotten a round tuit yet, and since I ran across a couple of links reminding me about this del.icio.us service yesterday, I decided to try it out. [...]
My Favorite WordPress Plugins
One of the coolest things about WordPress is the powerful Plugin API which allows us to create add-ons which can radically extend the basic functions of our sites. Most plugins can be used simply by dropping them into your plugins folder and activating them. I don’t use a ton of plugins compared to some people — I can be a bit picky about what I add. And I’m not going to list every plugin that I’ve got active here, but I thought I’d point out a few of my favorites: