Category Archives: Site Stuff

Site Stuff

Today’s Downtime

Err.. sorry bout that…

It appears that Dreamhost uses servers and internet connections that require electricity.. so, after the (probably now unemployed) Power Company worker shut off half of Los Angeles, Dreamhost no longer had a connection to the internet (and from this post on their blog, they had their own little catastrophe to deal with to).

From the Dreamhost blog:

When the power went out for the city, the UPSes came on, and things were fine (that’s when Nate made that last post about us being okay). However, as they started to run out the generators had to kick in. It turned out, and this is the boo-boo, the generators could NOT generate enough power for all the data centers after all! And so, rather than just doing some sort of lower-level of power output, they are apparently configured to all just shut themselves off when things are overloaded.

Of course, there are lots of people yelling at the DH guys for not keeping everything running during the outage..but.. DH also mentions that all 3 of their network providers were knocked out to..so it wouldn’t have mattered if DH’s building had been able to keep the power on or not (well..I guess it would have minimized the downtime).

Personally? I think they handled it pretty good..little room for improvement.. but, since its probably better then what I could have done had I been running my own server (ignoring the fact that I don’t live in LA, so the blackout didn’t affect me)..I don’t have any complaints…

Site Stuff

Movable Type Anti-Spam

One of MT 3.2’s new features, is the integration of SpamLookup, in conjunction with a built-in junk scoring system. So far, its been working flawlessly. I haven’t seen any comments/trackbacks getting junked that shouldn’t be, and only a couple of comments have made it through the filters to get to me for approval. This morning, I found out that this combination has more tricks up its sleeve… it can also auto-ban IP addresses that submit too many junk comments/trackbacks (apparently, 45 in a row is enough to trigger the auto-banning, since that’s how many I had in my junk folder)

Definitely a handy feature..

Site Stuff, Tech

Its released!

Today, Six Apart has officially released Movable Type version 3.2. I’d imagine there will be much downloading and upgrading done tonight! Since I’ve been running the betas, my favorite new feature is the “junk” feature, which works to help prevent comment and trackback spam.. and it seems to work pretty good.

I’m downloading now, and will update tonight. Two important tips… back up your database! and make sure that you have the mt-site.js file up to date… otherwise funky things happen on comments

Site Stuff, Tech

Adsense Changes

Google has made some changes to their Adsense program..

  • They’ve changed how they match AdWords up with Adsense ads.
  • According to some people, they’ve made changes in how they figure out how much you get per ad view/click through
  • You can now have up to 200 channels

None of these really matter to me, as this site isn’t here to make money off of. Sure.. I’m going to make a few bucks each month between Google and the iTunes affiliate program..but not enough to quit my job for..

The change they made that interests me?
You can now specify to Google’s bots and spiders, which content on your page should be considered when matching ads up to your page. The benefit? no more ads for blogs, because its looking at the sidebars (or, at least..that’s the idea)

To tell Google what content to look at just add:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
and
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

around the content you want included. Next time Google checks your page, more weight will be given to this content.

This should help improve which ads show up when…and for those sites that are ad-revenue driven, it’ll help them make more money.

Site Stuff, Tech

Dynamic Errors

Since I’d switched over to Dynamic publishing, I’ve been unable to access the site stats. Dreamhost does some auto redirecting for requests for a non-existant webpage, to get switched over to the Analog page. Normally, this works fine..

Where it runs into a problem, is with dynamic publishing. The way MT does dynamic publishing, is through some rules in the .htaccess file. Basically, if the file really exists, MT doesn’t try and generate the page. But, if the page doesn’t exist, MT tries to generate the page..

You see where the problem lies don’t you? I need to get to a page that doesn’t exist..but MT won’t give me a page that doesn’t exist….it dynamically generates a 404 error page.. Google, was not my friend for this one.. I couldn’t find any reference to the necessary changes to the .htaccess file to restore access to my non existant stats directory. I was however, able to locate something in Dreamhost’s knowledge base (I know.. who’d have thought the answer would actually be where it belongs?) To help out any others who might be having the problem, and didn’t find an answer.. here’s what works.

Add these lines to your .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$

RewriteRule ^.*$ – [L]

And everthing will be all warm and fuzzy again!

Site Stuff

Layout part 2

Oh yeah.. the Stargate influence on the lettering in the center banner? (The letter A, done in a Stargate font)… that’s all Janice’s fault.. she’s become a Stargate geek! in fact, she even made me change the ringer on her phone to the Stargate theme music!

Site Stuff

New Layout

As you can (hopefully) tell.. I’ve changed the site layout.

Instead of waiting for the final MT 3.2, I went ahead and upgraded to the beta 5 build. I’d been running it (the beta) for awhile with no problems, so here’s hoping it continues to be problem free. Janice’s blog, has been upgraded to 3.2b5 as well.. so if you haven’t seen a default template for 3.2 yet, head over there.

In addition to the MT upgrade, I’ve changed the style sheet.. I know its hosed on Internet Exploder..but, what do you expect? IE doesn’t support w3c standards yet (and if I remove all the ads, this page will validate against standards). I did test it in both Firefox and Safari for Mac, and it looks good there, so let me know what you think about the new look. Also, I’ve switched to dynamic publishing for all the individual entries, so let me know if anything seems sluggish..it hasn’t in any of the testing…but.. this is now the real world..so who knows what’ll break =)

Site Stuff

Or..Maybe not

Looks like I spoke to soon last night.. 6A is releasing beta 5 today, not the ‘final’ version of MT 3.2… so, it looks like I may get to upgrade this site to beta 5, so I can make sure I get all the templates and stuff updated while I have time… Which is ok, because as easy and smooth as these upgrades have been, going from beta 5 to the ‘final’ 3.2 should be painless

Site Stuff

MT 3.2

Looks like Six-Apart may be releasing the non-beta version of MT 3.2 as early as tomorrow. At least, they probably will, unless someone finds a showstopping bug. According to this entry on 6A’s beta blog…this is the last chance to file a bug report for the beta..I think its ready.. I’m running 3.2b4 on a seperate install for testing…and it seems pretty solid to me, the one bug I did find during beta was promptly squashed in one of the nightlies…so I’m hoping they’ll release it tomorrow..so I can do the upgrade and new templates/css while still on vacation….

Don’t forget to backup your database before upgrading!

Site Stuff

Movable Type Beta 4

Beta 4 was released on Friday… and it looks good. There’s a big list of bugs that were squashed in this update here. I’ve upgraded my test site to it, and its seems to be going well.. no problems with the upgrade.. this release came with the updated version of SpamLookup..

From the looks of things, I’d expect to see the final release of 3.2 by midweek.