Archive for March, 2007
Firstly, let me say welcome to the new server. If you’re seeing this, than you’re reading dotCULT on a newer, faster server that might actually load in under 5 mintues now.
Last night was poker night. That means there’s usually 5-10 drunken guys in in my basement telling lies and playing cards. When Matt and Jesus (pronounced “geez us” not “hey zeus”)…… yes I play poker with Jesus what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, Matt and Jesus got up to leave, then came back in a few seconds later and scared the hell out of my cat with this giant german shepard. Thankfully, he ended up being a nice calm dog (or maybe being around Jesus had something to do with it.) Apparantley he was just wandering around in my driveway.
Jesus said it came up to them when they were leaving, so they put it in my yard while they looked for the owner. Matt had already called the number on the tag and got a voicemail.
“What’s the number?” I said. “It’s warm out, the dog can stay in the yard tonite and I’ll try his owner tomorrow, at least he won’t get run over by a car.”
“it’s 386-,” he started.
Then it hit us, and we both announced “That’s a home phone number - let’s Google it.”
Sure enough, typing the number into Google gave back the guy’s name and address. It was just 2 blocks away. Imagine his suprise when he opened the door to Matt saying “Hey John, I found you dog.”
Thanks Google - without you John’s dog would probably be at the pound this morning.
March 30th, 2007
Just a heads up. I purchased a new server from 1and1.com and then promptly cancelled after them basically just saying “here’s a fresh linux install, ip and root password. have fun.” That’s great for some people, but not for me.
So instead I headed over to GoDaddy and got a dedicated box through them. This time I paid the extra $9/month for Cpanel - much better! (please don’t bother posting the Plesk > * comments here… it’s not!)
Anyway… I moved Feedbutton.com and NoSlang.com over to this newer faster server, so you should see a huge improvement in Feedbutton. Unfortunately, the feedbutton stats had grown to be well over 2 gigs of data, so I decided to make some database optimization changes. You’ll still get the exact same stats, but it won’t take up as much space on my server now.
Sadly though, it means that all the Feedbutton stats were reset. Sorry about that. I guess it gives everybody an equal chance to be on the most popular page though. Check it out.
Anyway.. I hope to move dotCULT over tonite, so this will be the last post until I can get it moved over and the DNS properly switches. (as a bonus, I now get to use jonesy.biz as my name servers)
That’s about it. See you on the new (faster) server…
March 29th, 2007
You may have noticed that many of my sites weren’t up this weekend. We had a hard drive fail in one of the boxes hosing dotCULT, NoSlang, Feedbutton, and some other smaller sites.
The hard drive has been replaced, and everything looks good now. I’d like to say I’m sorry about the outage, I’m doing my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’ve ordered a 2nd server, and will be slowly moving sites to this newer, faster, dedicated box. I’m going to keep the old box set up too, so that way if anything ever happens I can just flip the DNS switch and have another copy live.
Anyway, I’m sorry about the downtime - espeically to the loyal feedbutton users. I promise I’ll do my best to keep it from happening again. Thanks for understanding.
–Ryan
March 26th, 2007
I was looking at some of my MyBlogLog Stats for txt2day and I came across something that I just didn’t understand.
Take a look:
(note: I blocked out my actual visitor stats, as I don’t want to share them… sorry!)
What are these links? This isn’t a referrers list, it’s a “what readers viewed” list. Which means whatever these pages are had my mybloglog tracking code on them.
Of course, clicking them takes me to an error page. I’ve also noticed that that IP is an AOL IP.
Any idea what’s going on? Is this simply a cached version of my website, or a saved offline version?
If anybody knows exactly what these are, please do share.
Thanks.
March 23rd, 2007
Those of you who regularly read this blog might be familiar with an article I wrote last month titled What The Hell is cpsrvd. It was basically just an example of how to write a useful SEO article.
I was searching for information about cpsrvd and realized that I couldn’t find everything I was looking for in one post, so I wrote one of my own. That’s always been a great SEO strategy. In fact, it’s how NoSlang.com and TextMemos.com were created.
Anyway, I noticed a lot of search traffic coming for the term “cpsrvd”. (which will no doubt increase after this article eh?)
Anyway, it wasn’t as much as I had expected from being on the front page of Google for that term. There was a small problem. Take a look, can you spot it?
Look at that title tag. It’s hideous. No wonder nobody’s clicking.
Luckily, there’s a great wordpress plugin called seo title tag plugin that lets you have more control over what your wordpress <title> tags look like.
Here’s that same Google results after the title tag change was spidered:
Looks like it’s not only more readable, but that it actually moved up in the results too.
Remember: your blog title may be great, but it’s not relevant to every article you post. Do your readers a favor and make sure you’re using great title tags. Sometimes, it’s all they have to go on when judging whether or not to visit your page.
March 21st, 2007
The New Yorker posted a coversation between adults as imagined by children but even funnier was the bottom part titled How College Kids Imagine the United States Government.
It got me thinking about a protest group I saw yesterday. Somewhere on Woodward and 9mile was a group of people all holding signs that said stuff like “Honk for peace” or “Honk to impeach Bush.”
While I like that they’re trying to encourage peace (to avoid a political debate, we’ll avoid my feelings on impeaching Bush), I had to question what good they were doing by standing there with their signs.
If you want peace, do something about it. You’re on the right track, but making me honk my horn isn’t going to make any difference in the world whatsoever. Most Americans already want peace - why wouldn’t they? The problem is, what can we do about it?
If you want to make a difference in the world don’t just stand on a street corner, do something about it. Go down to your local soup kitchen and volunteer, get involved with habitat for humanity or UNICEF.
Plant a tree, feed a homeless person, donate money, mentor a child, coach a team, help out at your church, launch a free web service, or if you want to voice your opinion write an editorial for your local newspaper.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, you have the right mindest - but I think you can better apply yourself to reach your goal.
There are plenty of ways to get involved and actually make a difference in this world; standing on the corner and asking me to honk my horn isn’t one of them.
March 20th, 2007
I’ve been having a weird problem with a particular DSL connection lately. It would seem that I can’t access certain websites hosted in the Dallas area. The bigger problem is that these are MY websites!!
At first I thought they were down, but not according to my live 3rd party web stats (and thankfully my Adsense earnings are still growing too.) It seems other people can access the server as well, just not me.
So I used a proxy site (looks like I finally found a use afterall eh?) and the sites load fine.
Next step: tracert. That’s where things got interesting. From my computer, all but 2 hops before the timeout are sbcglobal hops. From everybody else’s, the route varies sometimes.
This leads me to believe that our DSL is using static routing. That is to say, similiar to a cable or phone line there is only 1 path from computer a to computer b. It’s not even trying to route around the downed sbcglobal server in the path.
It seems to me that this is contrary to how the internet was designed. Has anybody else seen this problem before?
March 20th, 2007
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