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I’m looking for a Virtual Private Server host. The server I’m currently on is woefully underpowered for the handful of sites I running (on the plus side, it’s been free), and it’s high time that I moved my stuff to a box that’s up to the task.
Ideally, I’d like the following features:
Those are listed roughly in order of importance. I don’t think any of these requirements are out-of-line, as I’ve seen shared hosting accounts with much nicer stats going pretty cheaply. But I’d really rather be on a VPS than on a normal shared host.
I’m interested in any recommendations. But please don’t comment with “I heard that so-and-so is good.” I need to hear from those with actual direct experience with particular hosts (the good and the bad).
My Easy Gravatars plugin is now in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and I’ve released version 1.1.
Changes:
When time allows, I’m going to try to add support for favicons on pingbacks and trackbacks, and maybe as a fallback for people without Gravatars. I’ll also see about supporting MyBlogLog and possibly Pavatars.
Several people have reported problems using my Easy Gravatars plugin together with Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress. I spent some time looking over the code yesterday and found the conflict. I sent a patch to Joost, and he has released version 1.4 of his Google Analytics plugin. I hope to release a new version of Easy Gravatars with some new features sometime next week, as well.
Over on BlogSecurity, there’s a whitepaper on How to create a secure WordPress install. It covers several areas, including MySQL setup, WordPress user configuration, Apache protection of directories, and some useful plugins. I’ve glanced over it, and I have mixed feelings. Here’s a quick list of notes, off the top of my head:
.htaccess files, there is a good section on limiting access to wp-includes, wp-content, and wp-admin.https://...) for logins and admin functions. Despite being a little light, I think work like this is important and useful. I’m hoping that the authors will take the constructive criticisms to heart and use it to update their paper, making it better and more thorough.
Since so many people seemed to be interested, I went ahead and coded up my new Gravatars plugin: Easy Gravatars. It’s designed to be simple to use — just upload and activate. If you want it to be a little harder, you can visit the plugin’s options page to set the size and rating for the gravatars, and even set the location of a default image, and tweak the CSS a little bit.
Download: easygravatars.zip
I’m going to put it in the WordPress Plugin Repository when I get a chance. Once that’s done, I’ll update this post with the new location.
Update, 2007-11-16: The plugin is now in the repository, and you should now be able to see that version 1.1 is available: Easy Gravatars Plugin
Even before the recent announcement about Gravatar joining Automattic, I had been wanting to turn on comment avatars here. I nabbed Matt’s code, fooled with it a little, and now my comments are Gravatar enabled.
A couple of things that I discovered:
default‘ image until I added a ‘rating‘ parameter.size=40 and size=80, but not with size=60When I did a quick search for an existing WordPress plugin, the Gravatar plugins I found all required you to modify your comments.php template file. I made mine less intrusive. I think I’ll go ahead and code up a plugin with some config options.
I’ve done some minor maintenance around here. Can you spot the differences? Probably not. What I’ve done is upgraded my old Sandbox 0.6.1 theme to the new 1.0 version, and made a few minor adjustments to my CSS to account for the differences. Visually, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference between the current theme and the previous version, other than the addition of tags to the post metadata.
Speaking of tags, I’ve mentioned before that I had been using the WordPress category system more like a tagging system, and that I regretted that decision. I’ve begun the process of undoing that choice by converting a large number of my old categories into tags. I’ve still got more categories than I want, but I’ll finish whittling them down later. I also want to experiment with cross-referencing my post tags with the tags in my Delicious bookmarks and my Flickr photostream.
This screenshot shows how glTail visualizes a comment spam attack in my configuration.
A few days ago, in my usual daily link browsing, I ran across a link to something called “glTail“, which was described as “realtime logfile visualization”. I’m often keeping an eye on my server logs to catch unusual activity, so I thought I’d give it it a look. There’s a video there that shows it in action — very cool!
For those of you aren’t interested enough to click the link yet, let me see if I can give a description that does it some justice:
It’s written in Ruby, and requires OpenGL. Runs fine on my laptop under Ubuntu. And if you don’t know how to program in Ruby, don’t let that discourage you — I don’t know Ruby, but I’ve been able to modify the code enough to copy the “postfix” parser into a new “sendmail” parser, and customize it slightly. And I’m thinking about trying to write a parser for my MySQL logs. Hopefully, a future version will add more built-in parsers and move configuration into an external file, though.
Currently, I’m using it to monitor three of my WordPress blogs, plus my mail server. Several times now, I’ve easily spotted comment spam attacks, and quickly plugged them in my firewall. I added handlers to pop up notices whenever a comment is posted, and to track the posts-per-minute by IP number. One of my co-workers is planning to use it to see if our load balancer is actually balancing our web server requests evenly. All-in-all, glTail is a nice tool for your sysadmin arsenal.