Category: WordPress

The ephemeral internet

In moving my blog to WordPress, I’ve accidentally created a little side-job (or mild obsession?) for myself: cleaning up old blog entries. I have over 1500 entries in this blog, so I can keep myself (pointlessly) busy for quite some time, just combing through old entries and cleaning them up a bit.

First, I have a lot of old entries that don’t have any categories assigned. This bothers me for some reason. So I’m going through those, a few at a time, and categorizing them. And the really old entries don’t have titles, because Blogger didn’t initially support post titles. So I’m adding titles to some of those. And I’m cleaning up random embeds, YouTube links, and the like.

Once thing I’m noticing is how many of the links on older posts are dead now. In particular, music-related links seem to be the most ephemeral. Links to old band websites are often dead, the bands in question apparently disbanded, the members having moved on to other bands, or living quiet lives with nine-to-five jobs, or whatever people do when their bands dissolve.

Many old domains are now in the hands of some fairly iffy companies that hoard domain names, and just put up ads on them, and/or offer to sell them for exorbitant prices. My brother Patrick’s old domain, for instance, can be bought for just $1995. Geez.

There are some really odd changes too. An old domain that used to be associated with The Pixies is now being used for a blog related to DIY home repair. I’m not sure if it’s a real blog, or a test site, or part of a scam, or what. Weird though.

I’ve found myself using the Wayback Machine site to look up some older stuff. Not everything can be found with that, but a lot of stuff can.

I’m also finding myself a little dismayed about how my brother Pat’s footprint is disappearing from the internet. I just went ahead and saved to PDF a couple of pages honoring him, just in case they disappear. I’ll probably upload them here, at some point. No point in getting too deeply into this right now, but it’s something that’s been on my mind lately. I know that dwelling too much on the past isn’t healthy, and I’m trying not to do that, but I can’t stop myself from engaging in a certain amount of nostalgia.

1&1 back to normal?

It appears that 1&1 is back to normal. Everything seems reasonably responsive, both on the front-end and in the admin. There’s been no explanation posted to the Twitter feed or on their status page, so I don’t really know what went wrong, or if it’s really fixed. That’s a little frustrating.

I started looking into the possibility of switching hosts today. Depending on how well 1&1 holds up, I may consider that. I’m paid up through November, so maybe I’ll revisit things in the fall.

1&1 woes

Well, it appears that the reason my site has been really slow for a couple of days is due to a problem at 1&1. They acknowledged the issue on Twitter yesterday:

Hopefully, they can get it resolved soon. Meanwhile, I guess I should take a break from messing with this site, and maybe go outside and get some exercise! (Too bad it’s been raining all week.)

UpdraftPlus Backup and other WordPress stuff

I finally got around to installing a backup plugin. After looking at a few possibilities, I settled on UpdraftPlus for now. The free version does scheduled backups, with e-mail notification, of both the database and the file system. For now, I’m just backing up to the local file system on my web host, but at some point I’ll try sending them to Google Drive or DropBox, both of which are possible with this plugin.

It looks like the free version will do everything I need it to, but if I want to switch over to the premium version, it’s $60, with one year of support and updates. Subsequent years are discounted a bit. Oh, and I should really try doing a restore, from my production site to my test site, just to make sure those backup files really work. (I have enough IT experience to know that I can’t assume that those files aren’t just filled with zeroes…)

One another front, I recently turned on the site monitoring feature in Jetpack. Based on the reports I’ve gotten over the last couple of days, my site apparently goes down more than I realized. I’ll have to keep an eye on it for a while, and see if this is an anomaly, or if 1&1 is just not as reliable as I thought. Or it may just be that my home page sometimes takes more than ten seconds to load, which is a separate problem. (Though I’d think the Jetpack monitor should be getting the static cached version of the page, which should load pretty quickly.)

And speaking of slow load times, the WordPress admin on my site is still working pretty slowly most of the time. I know I can’t fix that with caching, and I’m not sure what I can really do about it. I guess I can deactivate some plugins and see if there’s a particular plugin causing the slowdown. Using SSL might be contributing to the problem, but I don’t want to turn that off. So I guess I’ll do some research and some experimenting over the next few days. Fun!

WP Super Cache

So after seeing 10-20 second load times on my home page (via http://tools.pingdom.com), I decided that I really needed to install a caching plugin. So I went with WP Super Cache, as that seems to be well-supported and stable. So far, it’s working fine, and page load times are down to 2-3 seconds, which is much better.

Somehow, the idea of using a plugin to generate and serve static pages seems like a step backwards to me, but I guess if it’s well-written and intelligent about regenerating the static pages when needed, then it’s fine. I know I can’t expect WordPress to run at top-speed in a shared hosting environment, but I was surprised to see how slowly stuff was running.

Oh, and I have seen a slowdown in the speed of the admin pages since I switched them to SSL. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can do about that, short of moving to a faster environment or turning off SSL.

WordPress caching plugins

I’ve been thinking about installing a caching plugin on this site. After reading this thread on reddit, I think W3 Total Cache is out. Maybe I’ll try WP Super Cache instead. That one sounds like it would be more straightforward to remove, if need be.

from Drupal to WordPress

As a guy with a good bit of Drupal experience, and a limited amount of WordPress experience, I’ve thought about writing up a little comparison & contrast essay for my blog. I just found this post from a guy who has a lot of Drupal experience, and is just getting into WordPress. I agree with most of what he’s saying here, and have definitely noticed some of the same stuff that he has. So now I guess I don’t have to write up that comparison/contrast post!

One note though: since I started using WordPress, I’ve been keeping an eye out for something similar to drush, the command-line tool for Drupal. Well, I stumbled across it today: WP-CLI. I’m not sure if it does quite as much as drush, and I’m also not sure if I’ll be able to get it working on my web host, but it looks useful.

too much to do this weekend

I just figured out that both AnimeNEXT and WordCamp Philly are happening this weekend. I kind of like the idea of checking out a WordPress gathering, and the Philly WordCamp would be relatively convenient. And I haven’t been to an anime convention in a few years, so it would be cool to drop in on AnimeNEXT and check it out. Maybe I can drive to Philly on Saturday and drop in on AnimeNEXT on Sunday? Of course, I need to fit my laundry and grocery shopping in there too somehow.

SSL is working

So my SSL cert came through (after about 12 hours, instead of the expected 4). I’ve added:
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
to my wp-config.php, and it seems to be working. I think it’ll be OK to have the whole admin under SSL and not just the login; SSL doesn’t seem to have slowed down the admin interface.

I realized also that I should make sure the WordPress iOS app will connect with SSL. According to the FAQ, it does, though I don’t know if I have any good way of checking that.