A rant to get me back into the swing of things.
I haven’t posted for a while, not because I have nothing to say. Indeed I have lots I want to say. But because connecting to the admin backend or generally doing anything admin-ish with the blog is infuriatingly slow.
I use Ecto for writing posts, which is great. And that’s about where the great ends.
Normally once I’ve published the post I then end up not being able to view the blog, with constant time-outs and weirdness, I’ve blogged about this before. I’ve even started going through the really rather good series on speeding up sites on the Yahoo Developers Blog: High Performance Web Sites. Which satisfies the desire to tweak and optimize stuff, which I just love [Sidenote: I'm probably going to simplify the templates again].
However that doesn’t seem to overcome the core problem; that the server seems to suck.
And now I’ve also seen a rise in comment spam. I’ve been fairly gung ho about comment spam, probably because I’ve not really been high enough profile to be effected. Well boy did that ever change! My default spam catcher had been doing a pretty good job, and then I started getting spam that basically just said “Cool”, “Nice”, “Sorry :(” and “Interesting” with the username being the spam link.
For the life of me I couldn’t find a way to add those to my spam catcher so I had to delete them using WordPresses own comment management tools. Which took forever to do as each page load (or Ajax delete) took ages to reload etc. etc.
Now I’m also getting the occasional “can’t connect to your mysql db server” messages too, sigh.
Anyway, I’ve been testing out SpamKarma2 and that’s been catching pretty much all the new spams and saving me a lot of time and effort, which is nice.
Which leaves me where? Well, slightly more positive about blogging, which is why you see this post and I’ve starting writing up my notes for a few more. Also prepared to actually phone my hosting services. Before I just emailed them and could provide nothing more than “Look it just doesn’t work”, which while infuriating for me, also isn’t much help for them. I’m going to see if they can move me into a different box, or provide any other insight into what’s going on.
In theory all this stuff is out of the box. I clicked links that said things like “Install WordPress and mysql?” and all was good. I’m now beyond the point of wanting to fiddle around with software and server internals to make things work. The same way I used to really enjoy building my own PC from scratch, but now I’m just “Ok, so I’m paying more, but just give me a machine that I never have to open”. Perhaps I’m just getting old on that front.
So, yes, in short …
Hello World.
