fouldsy.com

We were weathered in again this morning, although a couple of airplanes did circle overhead for a few minutes before giving up without landing, but this afternoon the weather broke and a bunch of planes made it in to land. Thankfully our food from Bethel was on one of them - only took 6 days to travel 40 miles! Was also pretty fun riding the 4-wheeler on the boardwalks when they’re covered in compacted snow like this At least we have some decent food to eat for the next couple of weeks until our big Span Alaska order arrives.

Today’s been kinda fun though as I e-mailed Tony Richards from Lakeland Cam last night as his daily photos yesterday were stunning. I’ve checked his site daily for about 7 years and he always has excellent photos of the Lake District - lucky guy gets to wander the fells every day and photograph them as he does so. He included my e-mail on his site (he usually puts one or two messages from visitors on there each day) and it’s pulled close to 4,000 visitors to my photo gallery in the last few hours Kinda cool, as I think there’s some pretty good photos in there and no-one’s e-mailed yet telling me otherwise!

It’s been weird the last few weeks though as I’ve had an offer for carrying advertising for sports/entertainment, an offer to review computer certification preparation software, and an offer to write a weekly report for a snowmobiling site out of Canada. There’s always been a good number of visitors each day to some of the Linux stuff or web scripting I’ve done, but for something that’s really just a personal blog, it’s cool to see people coming in from all over the place and getting involved. The more the merrier!

Now, if there’s any breweries out there wanting someone to review a beer or four, or if Cessna want to provide one of their Private Pilot Training Kits for review (I’d also go for a G1000 equipped 172R if they were really pushy…), I’m all ears

The last week or so I’ve been having problems getting anything on the webserver that runs a few of my sites. No big deal as most of them serve static content or are handling podcast media delivery of the Unsigned Rock Podcast, but it’s only from this home connection that it fails. The sites are still working as I’ve got a few hundred hits from various football sites recently about my Sunderland vs Newcastle derby match post from last year given the next derby is coming up next month, and there’s been comments left on the blog, so it just seems to be me.

The ISP is clueless (literally…), and a traceroute happily shows data being routed well outside of the Unicom equipment and down through LA to Phoenix and ping works. Isn’t a browser or OS issue as it’s replicated across OS X, Ubuntu and Win XP, and so across Safari, Firefox and IE. FTP also works without a problem, as does my e-mail.

I’m running through Tor at the moment which is running fine (although obviously a little slow), so it’s not like the ISP is dropping all the traffic. Just seems weird the Unicom routers handle the traffic in + out fine on other protocols, but HTTP fails running direct through them yet pointing the browser to a Tor proxy works. Doubt the ISP would be blocking the server on their proxies, but maybe. As it’s not just one domain having a problem, I don’t think it’s an ISP proxy or firewall issue though. Any suggestions welcome as I don’t want to run through Tor everytime I want to make a blog post!

Well, only took Lycos about 10 days but the fouldsy.com domain has finally been transferred out, so pretty much everything is up + running on the new server with GoDaddy. E-mail MX records are currently being validated after creating the new accounts, so there’s going to be a period where e-mail doesn’t work. Must have transferred some time in the early hours of the morning, as I had received e-mail okay overnight whilst it was via Lycos so can’t grumble too much.

Hopefully everything will be sorted by this evening - makes it so much easier now I have 4/5 sites I run all on the one server and with one control panel!

With the current hosting plan with Lycos due to expire at the end of October, have been looking around at other webhosts. There’s quite a few sites I run elsewhere, and seems silly to pay for various different hosting plans, but most are fairly limited in terms of number of domains which can be managed from them. UK hosting companies suck. Plus, with moving to the US sometime soon (God I’ll be happy when I don’t have to keep saying ’sometime soon’…), I wanted to run things from a US-based server.

So, I opened up a hosting plan with GoDaddy which although some people have had problems with, most of my domains are managed by them without issues and it’s always the case that you only hear the negatives. I’ve never talked about webhosts when they’ve ‘just worked’. The new server lets me manage multiple domains as separate sites which is nice, but it meant any domains already handled with GoDaddy automatically had their DNS entries changed to tie in with the new hosting plan. Normally, I wouldn’t argue - one less thing for me to. But, effectively it took 3 of my sites offline and displayed a nice ‘website under construction’ page

Just about getting the Unsigned Rock Podcast back up + running, but rather than being able to plan a slow migration, it’s a bit more frantic now! Have got holding pages up on the other sites now, so fingers crossed it will all be sorted in the next couple of hours. I won’t move fouldsy.com justyet, thankfully both domain + hosting is managed by Lycos so this carries on and lets me move everything across, bring it all online, and test before making the switch! Also means e-mail runs as normal, so bear with me - I’ve already refers in from other sits wondering what’s happening

Although I’ve ran various websites for a number of years, none have ever been bandwidth intensive. This blog probably pushes things more than any of my previous sites going back 8/9 years, but only because I try to jazz things up with images in blog entries, and have a couple of hundred photos in my photo gallery.

Running the Unsigned Rock Podcast for what, 10 days, has shattered my low-bandwidth idea! You take a 30Mb podcast, get 50 people downloading it within 24 hours, and 10Gb a month quickly disappears. So, I have moved the media content delivery across to Libsyn, which seems to be working very well.

It does pose some interesting questions though. I have a domain registered through GoDaddy, web hosting provided by Lycos, and media content delivery handled by Libsyn. Sometime soon there’s got to be an all-in-one solution. Libsyn provide a half-decent blog, but is limited in additional themes and plugins. Most webhosts do provide different plans (I’m on a fairly basic plan) to grab more bandwidth and diskspace, but they don’t provide the same kind of load balancing as the Libsyn network.

With it becoming more + more common for people to want to store photos, audio + video on their own webspace, are we going to see content delivery networks merging with the traditional webhosts? Suppose there’s always going to be those that simply want basic webspace to host a few pages without all the bells + whistles, but the the trend over the last 6 months or so seems to be pushing to more bandwidth-intensive sites. Hence all the debate over internet neutrality.

Well, it’s taken a while, but I’m just about finished playing, I think! Bound to find something else to tinker with (like re-theming the photo gallery in-line with the blog again…), but am pretty happy with the layout now. It was a more a design challenge since I’ve never been overly design’y, prefering to tinker with the code to run stuff rather than how pretty it looks. Have certainly learnt more about CSS than I thought existed and I considered myself no slouch before-hand!

The inspiration for this came from the tutorials on designing WordPress themes from Urban Giraffe. Some cool feaures integrated into the blog now include the collapse sidebar menus, taken from the fancy archives plugin by Andy, heavily modified to then take the rest of my menu structure!

Clever playing with RSS feeds now imports my last 10 del.icio.us bookmarks, most recent articles I’ve Digged, top 10 artists listened to via last.fm, etc.

Although I’ve managed to avoid a lot of the hype around AJAX, in-line viewing of comments is now available - whenever a post has been commented on, a link from the front page allows the comments to automatically expand for viewing if desired rather than loading the individual page. When posting comments, this process is now AJAX enabled as well, inserting + displaying your comment without the whole page reloading. Pretty neat and makes things a little more slick.

I’ve also managed to make the whole thing XHTML + CSS valid as well as providing XFN-friendly links wherever possible!

Anyone that finds any problems wins a prize (well, not quite, but at least a virtual thank-you!) and if you like/dislike anything, let me know

I’ve had SpamKarma 2 installed since just after I moved the blog to WordPress a while back, but it’s been sat quite happily without much to do. Maybe it deserved a nice meal after a long hard week - it’s munched up 5 spam comments in the last couple of hours

Also, for anyone running the site statistics WP plugin, to stop spam comments being displayed as your latest comment title (even though it correctly doesn’t increment the post count), simply add ‘WHERE comment_approved = ‘1′ before the ‘ORDER BY comment_date DESC LIMIT 1‘ section for the section requesting the comments.

Well, I’ve been playing around quite a bit the last day or two. As I’d pulled down an update to The Gimp (no jokes please - check the website if you don’t know what it is!), I wanted a chance to try it out. Usually I’m crap with graphical stuff, but the spiffy logo at the top of the site was knocked up in about 5 minutes and will stay until I get bored!

I’ve also integrated my photo gallery completely, thanks largely to the Wordpress Coppermine integration plugin which is pretty cool. Let’s me grab photos straight from the gallery and put them into postings, and upload photos directly into the gallery from Wordpress. Plus, with a change to the search section, whenever you search for something, it will also pull back results from the available photos and albums in the gallery! The gallery itself has been themed to match the Kubrick theme the blog runs off, but heavily modified to take version 1.4.3 of Coppermine. The theme only existed for 1.3.x - anyone after a copy, let me know.

For the last 4/5 days there seems to have been persistent problems with the webserver, provided by Lycos Webhosting. Disappointingly, I moved to Lycos as I figured a fairly big-name company might provide some kind of reliability after problems with my previous host. Although they’ve been fine for 3 months or so, it was clear that with the server not handling PHP requests at all something had been ballsed up at their end, and their ‘Premium Support’ which is only available 8a.m-5p.m Monday - Friday has yet to answer a support request filed on Wednesday afternoon.

But, hopefully things have been resolved. At least the site has been up for more than a couple of hours without falling over, which is nice. Wonder if it will continue working, and what kind of explanation is given for the failure…

With the photo gallery up and running, I was after a way of grabbing basic stats from Coppermine and integrating this alongside the blog stats. Coppermine has some quite nice stats built into, and I was keen to simply get a quick photo + album count. Unless I’m missing something obvious, there doesn’t seem to be a a simple way of getting this out of the database. In the end, cpmFetch seemed like a straight-forward way of doing it, short of writing my own SQL queries, and although I’m not likely to use the ability to grab photos straight from the gallery, at least the functionality is there.

For anyone looking at getting basic stats from Coppermine, simply adjust the location of your cpmFetch install, and customise the formatting of the output:

require_once "gallery/cpmfetch/cpmfetch.php";
$objCpm = new cpm('/gallery');
$objCpm->cpm_formatStats('Gallery: %f photos in %a albums');
$objCpm->cpm_close();