Category Archives: Discourse.net

My hosting company has just announced that IPv6 is now available:

This new address is tied to your hosting machine, but other services like email and MySQL are not yet supported. We also don’t (yet) support IPv6-only domains; you’ll need to have an IPv4 address on there too.

Given it is a parallel IP number, and only for http access at that, will this achieve anything meaningful? Is there any downside?

Today’s Zits hit home in a way the cartoonist probably didn’t intend.

You see, Google Webmaster tools says it takes from 5 to 7.5 seconds to load this blog. Having run a bunch of tools to analyze what’s going on, most of the slowness is all the stuff going on in the right margin, although a degree of the variability may turn on how many graphics I’m showing on any given day. I’ve played some games with optimizing the code, thrown up some cache (although I think the googlebot gets the uncached version) and there is no doubt some more I can do to speed up the javascript a little, although trying to optimize javascript takes me out of my comfort zone.

But basically, either I accept that things will be slow here — slower than 70-85% of the pages google visits — or I start cutting the clock, the casualty count, the weather, and then some of the continually updated stuff like recent comments.

Given that most people read the site via RSS (hey, you’re missing out! come joint in on the comments!), does the stuff in the right margin even serve any purpose? Other than of course, I sort of like it that way?

I long ago stopped doing any of the promotional activities that help blogs get noticed. Traffic duly dropped, although it remains high enough to make both puzzled and happy. Page speed is said to be a factor that Google considers in ranking pages. Maybe I should bow to the search engine gods and drop the things that slow pages down the most?

I’m moving to a new and faster and (slightly) more expensive server. Or at least I’m trying to. Things might get odd for a bit until the dust settles…..

Then the DNS change will have to propagate to where you are, and so on.  Bottom line: if you made a comment any time after about 7pm Eastern time, there’s some danger it may not be there tomorrow.   And there’s some danger everything will be just fine.

Basically, WordPress puts a bigger load on the server than MT did (but is easier for me to manage), and in the past  couple of days first Yahoo then the Library of Congress decided to crawl the site from head to toe.  Meanwhile, yesterday the spam hit the roof, and who knows something else probably happened too, so things slowed to a crawl.   I haven’t the patience so I’m throwing hardware at the problem.

I’ve turned on a couple of caching programs, but with fairly tame settings for now.  Please let me know if you experience any weirdness.

In the fullness of time, I will open the blog to registration, and registered users will get the uncached, most up-to-date content.   Although, in theory, the cache should update every time I post something or someone adds a comment, so I’m not sure why that really matters.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two caching programs working, and my major fear is that they may work at cross-purposes.  I have the W3 Cache, but only partial mimifying.  And I also turned on Dreamhost’s new mod_pagespeed.  As best I can discern, it risks being somewhat duplicative of W3’s mimification, as both try to squeeze out some of the air of javascript and HTML files as well as caching them on disk (W3) and who-knows-where or whether (mod_pagespeed).  It would take rigorous testing to figure out if this a good combination, or which one is better alone, and the truth is that I don’t plan to do that testing any time soon if ever.  On this, I hope to free ride on the efforts of others.

I’ve just solved a problem that had eaten my RSS feeds, and there odds are there are more.  So please let me know if things are acting stranger than usual.  (And whether the blog now seems faster or slower than it used to.)

Thanks for your patience….

If you are reading the blog via RSS, like most people, you won’t (I hope) notice any problems, but visitors here are probably in for a rough, or at least random, week or so as I sort through technical problems….