leyton.org

Well, I’m finally feeling my blogging mojo returning after an enforced absence. Hope to get a bit more up here on various topics as time permits. There will probably continue to be a bit of a running theme, as I’ve been planning to write a few pieces on parkrun (particularly Glasgow’s) – a big part of my life these days.

A few minors – I’ve popped a widget in the sidebar there which shows my last few twitter items. I don’t promise it’s necessarily interesting, but I’ve rather taken to twitter, and enjoy the informal, limited communication mechanism, and staying in touch with friends, and sharing and picking up interesting items and nuggets of information.

Oh, and if you’re on an iPhone or Android phone – pretty much anything with a touch-screen interface, check out the websites dedicated mobile theme, made just for you.

A bit of a ‘meta post’ this one. I’ve been doing some tweaking and fiddling to the website over the last few days. Primarily this means there are some new ‘Chicklets’ and items in the sidebar that may be worth a browse. I wanted to just put a short post together explaining what they are, as they may not be obvious to most folk (especially all you RSS readers…)

• Daily Roundup – This is a trial run for Matt Wardman’s daily weblog roundup. There’s a link below it to the textual version, and feed/podcast subscription buttons, and I’d encourage folk to give it a shot as Matt’s putting in a lot of effort.

• Britblog link and “the brown bar” – There are two links to the britblog.com website. The ‘brown bar’ is a ‘popularity’ guage, and seems to mean this website is in the top twenty (it’s currently #16 on the associated technoranki website), but doesn’t have a title since I changed the main leyton.org landing page to a static HTML page). It’s largely self-selecting, so I don’t think it holds much water that my website is that popular. Especially given the amount of transitory search engine traffic I get..

• The Blogflux ‘BF’ mapstats is a link to see where visitors are coming from.

• The ‘Blog Top Sites’ widget is another ranking service. I’ve just added the counter, so it’ll be interesting to see where it comes in the various categories I’ve added myself.

• MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers is next, and is an interesting ‘website community’ tracker. A useful way of seeing who’s reading what websites, but I just wish they had a smaller widget…

• #1 Top Scottish Website? Me? Again, it’s self-selecting, and I imagine if Celtic or Rangers put the widget on their sites, I’d soon lose that position….

• I’ve also recently moved the RSS feed over to the service at feedburner which means subscribers get a few ‘extra’ items, including my interesting links and a few of my flickr uploads (when they happen). There are some other benefits, including a ‘e-mail subscription’, so you lucky people get a nice e-mail if I post something – particularly useful if you don’t bother with RSS feeds (I’d suggest it’s worth your while).

Traffic to the website continues to grow, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to think so many people – many of whom I’ve never met – read what I write. Whilst I don’t post as regularly as I’d like, and not necessarily to everybody’s taste, I still hope it’s of interest. The frequency I certainly hope to improve… I also hope that some of the widgets, features and changes here are of use/interest. If there is anything people like or don’t like about what I’ve done or changed, I’m all ears. Suggestions are always welcome.

As a systems administrator, I really should have known better. Yesterday, the machine (”dexter”) that hosts leyton.org, and a number of other sites and domains, died a painful death. It’s power supply (PSU) blew. Not content with simply taking itself out, it actually knocked out the entire power strip to which it was connected, taking down a further seven machines. The power strips here are not your cheap and cheerful B&Q white strip, but ones which allow power to be turned off remotely – very useful when the machines in question are hundreds of miles away in some data centre in London’s Docklands. But not something that can be replaced all that quickly or easily.

I should explain that about 18 months ago, I wanted a dedicated box of my own. I was fed up of constrained hosted systems and invariably missing software. I run website systems for a living, so figured I could just as well do it myself. Initially it was also for so-far unprogressed “projects”, but I also figured the hundreds of pounds I spend each year on hosting my various sites and domains could be just as well directed at a dedicated box, especially if I could enlist a few friends to help share the cost. But that comes with implications too – like this – of having to worry about failures, security and scaling issues.

But I digress. After a few hours where I figured the outage was just “network trouble” (It’s a running joke in many IT departments that most problems are, ultimately, the network groups problem; It’s therefore appropriate that most network folk I know have something of a thick skin). Clearly the problem didn’t sort itself out, so I dug out my emergency contact details, and gave my ISP a ring. A helpful chap by the name of Rob was on the line, and explained the nature of the problem. An ETA of 3pm seemed great all things considered.

3pm came and went, and by 5pm I was worrying that my system had died rather more seriously. Another call and an operator was dispatched in the remote and anonymous data centre to attach a keyboard and monitor (aka ‘KVM’) so we could inspect what error messages awaited us. Probably just the file system needing some single-user mode love. More time passed, and eventually my phone rang to explain the PSU had blown and was the cause of the earlier problems. Of course, a bit puzzled they hadn’t checked that all the attached boxes had come up again after replacing the power strip, but no matter. I was now more worried that the failing PSU had taken out the contents of the system – something PSU’s have a habit of doing. Large jolts of unexpected ampage taking out the supplying power strip, could just as well take out internal components… including my hard disk with all the data.

Thankfully it wasn’t the case. My hard disk was swapped into a spare chassis, and dexter returned to business at about 8.30pm last night. Of course when faced with a dead system you start to ask “when was the last backup”, and in my case it was Quite Some Time Back. Automating backups was always “on the list”, but never got very far: It’s a busman’s holiday to be tweaking a system, given I do this day in day out.

But I should really have known better. Especially as the server was hosting friends websites. Losing my site and data, and all these weblog posts, really would have been a pain. But to have lost friends content something worse altogether.

So given the extremely close shave I experienced, I’ve today spent a few hours automating database and website backups, and setting up automated jobs to pull the content down to my Mac on a regular basis. The joy that is Leopard’s Time Machine means the backups are archived too. So dexter can die a horrific and painful death now, and I can confidently restore my site on a new machine easily.

A close shave certainly, but to good ends.

So, dear reader, if you’ve not done a backup recently yourself, well, take my experience as a useful warning and get on with it now, or at least check your hosting provider does it. Try to automate it so you don’t need to worry about it in future.

A few tweaks, courtesy of the ever-more-impressive wordpress, which powers all that you see.

I’ve had a few server related problems this last couple of weeks. MySQL backing up, load rising, apache processes growing, and load rising as a consequence. Combine that with MailScanner going a little AWOL at times (Spamassassin is chewing up a lot of CPU), and things can just snowball into an unresponsive server.

So in order to address this, I’ve just installed wp-cache, which, well, caches the pages and serves them much quicker. Reduces the amount of database activity considerably, and has already improved the responsiveness of the website.

You’ll also notice the little icons at the foot of each page. These come courtesy of wp-notable, which enables the various social bookmarking services to be used a bit more conveniently. Not sure if they’ll remain a feature for ever, but will see how things go for now.

Well I’ve decided that, as my day job is a Systems Administrator, and that my various domains are costing a fair bit to host, I’m as well to secure a dedicated server in a managed data centre, and set things up ideally for my purposes. Not least for leyton.org, but also for places such as theorypractice.org, and leytonconsulting.co.uk. It’ll also enable me to install some software for a business idea I’m playing with (more on that in due course), that requires a more complex environment than most hosts offer.

This will enable me to setup a few services that are impossible to do now, including proper mailing software for labtastic.org, although the wordpress mailing gateway hack is working quite well.

I’ve also a few friends interested in joining in. Whilst I couldn’t necessarily host for free, I’m hoping that I might be able to offer hosting for friends for, at most, the same cost they’re paying now, probably less, but with better services and flexibility than now.

So, if you’re interested in shifting whatever domain you might have, and don’t mind making the assumption that I know what I’m doing, feel free to get in touch.

How to integrate Wordpress and an e-mail list, such that posts to the e-mail list get posted as weblog articles (for wider reading of the discussions), but that responses get attached as comments to reflect the discussion and debate?

Below is an early-preview of a tweak I’ve made to Postie, the excellent Wordpress plugin to integrate e-mail and wordpress.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a fan of Desperate Housewives, so I generally crank up the computer and do some weblog fiddling when it’s on. Last week, I took the plunge and upgraded Labtastic to Wordpress 2.0, as it was badly broken anyway, and it seemed like a good starting point to explore this new release.

This week, as the machinations of those American Housewives continues, I figured I’d do it for real. So Techie Musings has been upgraded as of a couple of minutes ago, and I’m about to tackle my diary (which forms the foundation of leyton.org).

Let me know if you experience any weirdness! Also, look out for some new ‘features’ I’m hoping to add to the website!

Updated to Wordpress 1.5.2 this evening (so far, so good), and during writing, browsing and thinking I thought “I wish I could do delayed posts”… I suffer from restrictive-internet-usage-policy at work (typical and quite understandable in many finance organisations), and also found I had a few things written in just the one evening, but didn’t want to post it all immediately.

Well, it transpires Wordpress had this feature all along, and it was simply a case of RTFM. So this post, along with a number of others on my diary have had the timer set to publish a little later than is really the case, and might give the impression I’m managing to type things up during the day.

Hope to have a bit more to write up on some technical matters in the next week or two too.

One of the perks of wrenching Techie Musings over to wordpress was that the spammers suddenly found themselves firing blanks. I watch the access_log as they fruitlessly POST to the old MovableType installation, which I’ve replaced in all the key places with a simple file which returns a 200 success status and little else.

Unfortunately though a few of them have clocked on to the fact that things have changed – probably by the change of URL for the two weblogs meaning they’ve picked up a “new” weblog. This week has seen hundreds of spam postings, but thankfully the basic Wordpress installation, combined with a good list of spam words means it’s easy to identify the spam. All posts to the weblog from unknown posters are held for moderation: Once you’ve posted a comment and I’ve approved it, your posts appear immediately.

Still, it’s frustrating and arduous work. I’ve installed a spam nuker to help remove the flotsam that hangs about by merit of the wordpress treatment of spam. Next week, assuming I have time, I’ll probably go about installing something altogether more clever to tackle the problem – probably Bad Behavior as it addresses the identifiable behaviour of spammers rather than the spam itself. I’m still adverse to a captcha, although I know that has a quick win, mainly because I don’t like to discourage posters and I’m finding captcha’s are getting increasingly difficult to identify.

Update – I’ve today (July 18th) installed bad-behavior on my diary weblog, which receives 90% of the spam to this site (presumably) because it’s currently updated more frequently, and more visible on the weblog ping sites). Fingers crossed it’ll help matters, as it’s escalating daily. Needless to say, please e-mail me if you experience problems commenting.

I’ve just Upgraded the site to Wordpress 1.5.1.3, which appeared earlier this morning. It’s easy enough to apply the upgrade, so long as I remember to keep the themes I’ve tweaked from the default. Certainly no problems so far, so looking good.