Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 released
Monday, September 29th, 2008http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Anyone Else having Issues with VPS
Friday, September 26th, 2008Weird issue on my sites recently. I have one VPS account with Plesk and the ports all get locked in a ‘CLOSE_WAIT’ state. Using ‘netstat -p” shows its usually httpd locking them up. Restarting VPS will get the ports unlocked but in investigation I found restarting Apache from the Unix command line does the trick to.
Anyone have any experience with this type of issue and how to fix it?
One of our sites was hacked
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008Put in a whole bunch of PPC (pills porn casino) links and we only noticed because the site wasn’t ranking when it should have, and by looking at the source code. The sire is pure HTML, no applications installed. How the heck they got in I don’t know, all I can assume is they got into the box through someone else’s site and added these links. Now I have to spend time cleaning it all up. Were do I send the bill for the cleanup?
Site Performance
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008The speed your site responds to queries is used as part of the overall ranking algorithm - sites that don’t respond at all are likely to get dropped from search engine indexes. Therefore turning on any performance enhancements you can is a must if you want to maintain rankings.
To that  end I’ve been working on performance on our sites. My previous post was about turning on PHP errors and correcting them. One page on an internal site went from taking a few minutes to render to under 20 seconds all because I had $$var instead of $var in one line in a loop. (For those not in the know about PHP, $$var causes $var’s value to be referenced, so if $var = ‘test’ then $$var is treated as $test).
So next up is MySQL performance. If you have a database driven site using MySQL (most Unix blogs are like this) then you’re almost sure to gain performance improvements from turning on MySQL cache. By following the recommendations at http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3110171 you will give a performance boost for your site. How much depends on what your site does. On a blog the performance improvement will be minor but over thousands of visitors it will add up to less disk activity overall. If you have a large database driven site doing number crunching (we have one of these) it can make a huge difference to response times.
I don’t know how this works on a shared host as all our hosts are either dedicated or VPS (virtual private servers). You may want to send the URL to your host to see if they will implement the necessary changes.
Site Stability Issues
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008We are now back up after being down for nearly a week. The problem was the site had lost its main hard drive. We had a second hard drive and there were backups in place on the second hard drive but the host did not know about them or couldn’t restore them as they should have. They moved us to a new machine and gave us root access, we restored the hosted sites from backups and didn’t lose much of anything.
A friend lost a hard drive on his web site, had no backups and lost a number of sites that were generating good income. Now he’s in litigation with his host over it. Much cheaper to pay the $10 per month your host charges for backups, or if you have a stable site download the files and the database to your local hard drive.
Remember - always have backups and check they work.
Site Hangs Waiting for External Javascript
Thursday, August 21st, 2008This applies to you if you use Google Analytics, or any other third part javascript and your site stops responding whenever the third party site goes down.
One of the main ways this affects users is the page does not display in their browser, and in the lower left of the browser window they see ‘Transfering data from pagead2.googlesyndication.com’
The problem is caused by the script tag being in the <head> section of your site. If you move it to just before the </body> the browser will render your entire page before waiting for the third party site to respond. This will also improve the overall responsiveness of your site.
New iPhone 3G is now in stores in 22 countries
Friday, July 11th, 2008According to the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7501321.stm . I don’t own an iPhone but I’ve played with one and they are really cool. I ended up buying a T-mobile Shadow which I like except the keyboard is a multi-tap one rather than a full qwerty and it gets annoying correcting the auto-spell checker (’do’ always ends up ‘dp’)
For those who own an iPhone and want to connect their iPhone to Exchange 4SmartPhone have launched 4iPhone.com - a service to enable just that - check it out at http://4iphone.com/
Disclosure - owners of 4SmartPhone are personal friends.