- WordPress 2.3.1 (from 2.2.3)
- K2 RC3 (from RC1)
- some changes to font types and sizes
- new logo
- updated versions of plugins
I also used the excuse to update Ubuntu to Gutsy (from Feisty) on this server. One command, one reboot, and all done.
Archive for the 'The Tlog (site)' Category
If you read this blog through the feed, you may not even notice it, but it has just moved to another server, and it got a new domain to boot. 
Instead of tlog.dehumanizer.com, this blog is now at www.thetlog.net. Like in my previous move, old URLs are redirected to the correct new ones, except for the front page, which shows a message telling people about the move for 5 seconds, and then redirects.
If it’s not too much work, I’d ask you dear readers to please change your bookmarks, and any links you may have on your own blogs or sites.
By the way, this blog is now also using page titles without the blog name. The more I think about it, the more I believe it’s a good idea.
And now for the OpenBSD 4.0 upgrade, in a few days. Sigh. A blogger/sysadmin’s job is never done…
Things mostly went well, though it certainly took much longer than I expected.
The OpenBSD 3.9 installation, itself, went quickly and perfectly. Copying configs from the old HD, and adapting them, took a bit longer.
One of the initial problems was that, while OpenBSD 3.7 had no problem using Ultra DMA 5 on my VIA VT82C571 controller, 3.9 “downgraded” it to non-Ultra DMA mode 2. Copying stuff between drives was noticeably slower. A quick Googling found the workaround, and everything was fine (and faster) afterwards.
MySQL 5.x (and 4.x) still has the bug where the client utilities link to -l../.libs/libmysqlclient.so.15.0 instead of -L../.libs -lmysqlclient. It has been reported often, but the MySQL guys, apparently, can’t seem to be bothered to fix it - it seems that, to them, free Unixes mean just Linux. It compiled fine (after working around that bug), but then Apache couldn’t start with PHP (which was compiled to use MySQL) enabled. This had happened to me before, so I knew MySQL was the problem; I looked around in ports (which maybe I should have done from the beginning, but I didn’t expect the MySQL port to be so up to date), and there it was, a working MySQL 5 + PHP + Apache.
eaccelerator stopped working, however, It compiles and installs, but the httpd children began to segfault all the time. Since PHP is the same as before, I’m guessing it’s Apache - OpenBSD still uses a heavily patched version of 1.3.29, the last one before the licence changes. I’ll have to look into it later. Still, the server is certainly quick enough :).
Everything else seems to be fine, and it’s great to have more than 100 gigs of free disk space (I also added a new drive), too.
This server will be down tomorrow, for about an hour or so. I’m going to add a new hard drive and some more RAM, and will upgrade OpenBSD 3.7 to 3.9.
It’s not that the server actually needs need more power right now, as it’s more than enough for what it does (blogs, mini-sites, proxy, email gateway, firewall/router, and some other stuff). But I have a few plans…
- Complete the Anti-Spam Gateway guide. There are at least 2 more parts to be written, which I hope to do tomorrow.
- Change the looks a bit. Not something dramatic, probably just fonts, colors, and some stuff in the sidebar.
- Add some more software to the almost forgotten “Software I Like” series.
- Update the Top 10 Posts page.
- Ponder whether a Portuguese-language version of The Tlog (without the blogging stuff, as that already has its place, A Arte de Blogar) is a feasible idea.
- Think about, eventually, finishing the Blogging Tips series. There’s always something more that can be said about blogging, but that kind of thinking leads to “feature creep”; the series has to end at some time, though there will always be posts about blogging - and perhaps more blogging-related series, about specific subjects - and shorter, too. Anyway, when this series is finished, I have to start working on the ebook…
I don’t know if it’ll last. But, as I write this, and for the first time…
… FeedBurner is reporting 100 unique readers (not necessarily subscribers) to The Tlog’s RSS feed!
(as I said, this number fluctuates a lot, so there aren’t 100 subscribers - I’d guess the number is closer to 60 or 70. But it’s still a landmark, to see FeedBurner reporting a 3-digit number for the first time. Now, where’s the champagne…?)
Everything went smoothly; I only had to edit the Bunny Technorati Tags plugin according to these instructions.
I’ll upgrade the other blogs soon.
… or whatever holiday you celebrate!
See you in a couple of days…
It’s been working perfectly. It caught every single spam message in the last couple of days, and required no action from me. Instead of having 15 emails in the morning asking me to moderate spam comments, I just get a report telling me what was caught, and why.
I had expected some kind of bayesian filter, but this plugin does much, much more. Just look at the configuration panel in the WordPress administration section - it’s really well done.
I should have installed this much sooner.. but better late than never, right?
Look at this blog’s posts, both old and new. Even the most successful posts. See any comment spam?
Nope, because moderation stops it. (as an aside, I consider “hi, nice blog” posts to be spam, though not of the “sleazy” kind.) Manual moderation… until now.
But it’s getting quite annoying, because I have observed a pattern in several of my blogs, where a bot tries to post a 3-line spam which starts by complimenting the post, or the entire blog, in a generic way (and in English, even in my Portuguese language blogs), and then posts 2 or 3 links, disguised as news or technical articles. This happens in quick succession (usually 15 or so posts in a couple of minutes), coming from different IP addresses (probably zombie machines).
I have experimented with the Bad Behavior plugin before, but ultimately I had to disable it, because it blocked traffic at the HTTP level, including some legitimate (but perhaps not as well-coded as they should be) bots or external tools - once I couldn’t even connect with Konqueror until I changed my id string!
So, for the last couple of days I had to be moderating 15 or so posts per day… per blog… as spam. Recieving an email for each one, of course.
No more. I’ve installed the Spam Karma 2 WordPress plugin. Let’s see how well it works… the administration interface is excellent, and the plugin seems very well comprehensive and documented. So far, so good.
Now, where are some spammers when we need them?
Here it is (drumroll…): Top 10 posts at The Tlog.
Comes from the top accessed pages, from day one until today. Includes short descriptions of every entry.
I’ll try to update it every month or so.
Due to both laziness, and a lot of my own customization that I don’t want to have to do again, I use variants of a single WordPress theme on all my blogs. And one thing that had been bothering me a little was that individual posts’ pages didn’t show the sidebar.
Today, I finally did something about it, because, after a little thinking, it came to me that it was “hurting” my blogs a lot.
And I don’t mean that in the sense of “not showing the sidebar ads”. It’s a lot worse. The sidebar shows categories, static pages links, links to archives, and other navigation stuff. Someone who arrived at a single post from a search engine, or from the RSS feed, or a link to an article in another site, never saw the sidebar.
Now, it’s true that you can browse to the blog’s front page by clicking on the blog’s title, but it’s not obvious to many people. Including the navigation stuff on every page is very important.
One advantage of having variants of the same theme in every blog is that changing this required just making a diff file after editing the first blog, and using it to patch all the others. I had to also change a few ads (the “leaderboard” ones), because they no longer fit on the page.
I just changed this a couple of minutes ago, so it will take some time to see what difference it makes - but I expect a rise in “pages browsed per visit”, and in ad earnings as well.
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