Category Archives: Discourse.net

Bugs in the System (Resolved) (Not)

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Formatting on the blog seems to have suddenly gone all weird. If I had to guess the cause, it’s some misbehavior of WP Super Cache, which I started using about a week ago instead of W3 Cache. (The change was to placate my ISP, which claimed that timeout problems were related to not having their favorite cache software in place.)

Why this should happen a week later, I don’t know, and odds are I will not figure it out until late tonight or tomorrow because I have to go out very shortly.

Sorry about that.

Update (18:30): it is fixed. I really don’t think it is anything I did.

Update 2 (12/2): Mobile stuff is borked. I’ve put a band-aid on so that it renders legibly, but comment reading and writing on the mobile version is broken. I believe this is connected to what broke comment preview on the main site. I also believe I know a solution — change WP Super Cache from mod_rewrite to PHP mode, then tag the AJAX code with stuff that tells the cache how to process it. But that’s not a trivial change, and it will create server load, at least initially, so I have to clear it with the ISP (who claim to be investigating why the server crashes at random intervals since they upgraded Debian, and asked me not to change anything while they investigate).

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

A Small Data Point on the Recovery

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I’m prepared to believe that the economy is picking itself up off the floor: in the past three or four weeks, I’ve had more requests to advertise on this blog than in the preceding six months.

I turn them all down, because I don’t blog for money and I think ads could be used to argue that my blogging hobby is no longer covered by my insurance.

But perhaps the requests might still amount to a leading economic indicator?

Posted in Discourse.net, Econ & Money | 5 Comments

Eight Years!

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I started this blog on Sept 15, 2003.

And it’s still going despite everything.

If you are a regular reader and haven’t done so already, please take a minute and tell me a little about yourself.

And thanks for stopping by.

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments

IPv6 Service Restored

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

ipv6 readyI’m happy to report that Discourse.net is again responding to IPv6 requests at 2607:f298:1:102::1f7:4c71.

Thank you to the alert reader who noticed that it wasn’t working.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on IPv6 Service Restored

My Name is Michael and I’m a Tweaker

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Tweaking may be a disease.

In the quest for speed I’ve moved my very long blogroll from the right margin to a special page of its own, Blogs I Read, and linked to it right under the banner at the top of the page.

This chops almost two more seconds off the load time, at least if the barometric conditions are right.

Just one more thing — really, just one more, honest — that I have to figure out: why, sometimes W3 Total Cache decides to reject the IE user-agent and instead of directing it to the amazon cloud server, sends it to my host instead.

The message (in reveal codes) is

Content Delivery Network via Amazon Web Services: S3: staticd.discourse.net.s3.amazonaws.com (user agent is rejected)

But there’s nothing on the list of user agents to reject that I can see which looks anything like IE. (Full list below the fold).

If you are curious, you can tell which version you got by looking at the source files and searching for “staticd” — if you find it, you got the cloud version; if you didn’t it all came straight from the source. The two versions are supposed to be identical, it’s just a speed issue.

Continue reading →

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Done Tweaking?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I got the load time down from 9+ seconds (according to Pingdom) to something in the 2-4 second range. Where it falls in that range seems to depend on the atmospheric pressure.

To achieve this result, I took the following steps:

  • Tweaked some W3 Total Cache settings
  • Stopped banging my head against the W3 Total Cache minification settings, and fired up the WP Minify plugin instead.
  • Swapped out the two slowest design elements for faster lower-tech versions
    1. Put in the HTML version of Sitemeter instead of the Javascript version
    2. Used the sfw of the clock instead of the Javascript version
  • Removed the archive drop-down, which amazingly was responsible about half of the HTML for this page, although it showed up as only one line in the margin if you didn’t click it. Now, instead I have a new freestanding archive page via WP-Archives. This is one part of the revision that still needs work — right now it takes waaay too long to build the archive page when someone visits it, and I fear it could bring the server to its knees if some malicious robot decided to hit it a lot (I have set it to noindex, nofollow and blacklisted it in robots.txt, but that only works for good robots).
  • Installed the Wp Smush.it plugin to automate the reduction of image file sizes that I was doing manually with the GIMP
  • Moved some static files to Amazon S3 & CloudFront, for a cost of a penny or two per day — unless of course traffic should go up all of a sudden.

I picked Amazon because it is integrated with my server and also W3 Total cache. But the user interface is awful and the help files are hard going. I’m still not sure I’ve set things up right.

Stopwatch copyright © 2009 casey.marshall. Some rights reserved.

Posted in Discourse.net, Wordpress | 1 Comment