I just took a quick peek at the “Top Posts & Pages” stats for my blog, as calculated by the WordPress.com Stats system. I had it run the numbers for my most popular posts of all time, and was both surprised and dejected. Apparently, this is not an edublog after all.

I’m actually not sure what kind of blog this is - my most popular post of all time was a comment on potential political/police entrapment of protestors. Followed, way back, by a stupid post on how (the then newly released) Google Maps could see my house. There are a couple of posts with source code or tips. One on MediaWiki. At #19, the first post that might be interpretted as educational in nature - talking about podcasting.

Whatever. It’s my blog, and I’ll probably keep posting crap on all kinds of topics. Maybe I should set up a new WordPress Category just for “edublog” posts…

It’s my blog, and I get to determine what is spam and what is not. The latest round of human-generated spam is getting past the automated spamblocks because the comments look valid. They’re natural language, often on topic, and occasionally even interesting or insightful - or relevant to the post being spammed.

I’m using a few WordPress plugins to help ease the pain, but for the love of Xenu, this bullshit should not be necessary.

But, if I think a comment is spam, I reserve the right to nuke it. Or to remove the URL and leave the comment in place. It’s my blog, and I’m sick and tired of people crapping on it in order to game google. PFO.

If you can read this, then the FeedBurner feed redirection is working properly. If your feed reader didn’t update your subscription automagically, the URL to the main feed for my blog is

http://www.darcynorman.net/feed

Hopefully things won’t get confused or lost in the shuffle…

Seems to have worked, so far. The “Similar Posts” plugin borked, so I had to disable that. Everything else Just Seems To Workâ„¢.

So, what’s the difference between Categories and Tags now? I used to use Categories as tags. Are they both interfaces to the same table in the database? One way to find out…

Update: oh. they’re separate things. well, that’s silly. so, now all of my old /tag/tagname links that used to point to category pages now point to empty “tag” pages because none of my posts have actual tags. That’ll be fun to clean up…

Update 2: wasn’t so bad. just went into the permalink settings and had “tags” point to /tags and left my “categories” pointing at /tag. Not exactly what they had in mind, but whatever.

I got an email saying there was something wrong with my feed, as it’s apparently borking in Sage. I can’t seem to reproduce the error here (Sage is borking in general for me, and the feed validates and renders in the aggregators I’ve tested).

Anyone else having problems? Something I should be worried about? Maybe just something intermittent? Something related to Feedburner?

Also, this is posted using the new ecto 3 alpha - I haven’t used a standalone blogging app in years, but if this works, it’s about as close to the perfect app as I can figure. Even offers searching and sorting of Categories, and resizing/uploading of images…

Update: Cool. It worked. I’ll be buying a license for ecto 3. Haven’t used it since back in the Kung Fu days (wasn’t the original version of the app called KungLog or something?)

I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.

Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats - how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.

I apologize in advance for any RSS noise as this kicks in. Hopefully it won’t republish all posts in the feed, but if it does, “mark all as read” or in Google Reader parlance “shift+a”.

Shortly after I made the switch from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2, I started thinking about the various apps and hosting providers I’ve used to run my blog. I actually had to mine the archives to remember it all, because it’s changed a lot. Over the last 5 (or 6, depending on how it’s measured) years, I’ve used 6 different applications, on 4 different hosting providers. That speaks volumes about interoperability, making it easy enough to move to a completely different weblog applications on 5 separate occasions. Sure, there was some data altered and URLs adjusted, but all posts and comments made the transition successfully each time.

I’ve now been on WordPress 2 for just over a month, and have no plans to change weblog applications again (although I’ve said that 5 times before…) I may still be changing hosting providers, if Dreamhost doesn’t work out (it’s going pretty well, and the company is really nice to work with, but they’ve been having a LOT of issues lately. Cats in ur serverz or something…)

I’ve been using Drupal for my blog for just over a year now, and it’s been a really great platform to work in. I use it pretty much all day for projects at the U of C as well. But it just feels a bit lacking in the area of managing a personal blog, compared with WordPress which is built solely for that purpose.

I’ve been missing things like email subscriptions to comments, and some of the other niceties that WordPress has had nailed for a long time, but are missing in Drupal.

So, if you can read this, it worked. But things are going to be messy for awhile while I finish tweaking stuff. If anyone knows the quick easy SQL to run to recount all comments for posts, to properly set the value of wp_posts.comment_count I’d appreciate it. All comments are properly in place, but they don’t show up in the comment count indicator until/unless someone posts a new comment on the blog entry.

In the meantime, all static pages (including About, Contact, Links, etc…) are borked. I’ll fix them up as I have time.

Update: Lovely. Looks like new comments are being rejected here. wtf. worked fine in staging before moving here… A blog without comments. Good thing I left Drupal…

Update 2: Things are pretty much up and running. I’ve added a bunch of modules, and will start playing when I have/make time. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I miss some of the power of Drupal, but am liking the simplicity of WordPress.

I've been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I'm still busy doing stuff. I'm still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I've also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.

Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn't have an impact on my posts here.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of defusing effect that activity on social networking sites may have - I post there, and it satisfies the social component of posting here. Posting here doesn't affect posting there.

So, I'm starting to think about the relationship between social networking and blogging. They're definitely related, partially overlapping activities, but they also have their own subtle difference. Blogging is (for me) about personal knowledge management. Capturing the content and context of what I'm doing. Social networking is about context more than anything. Which looks at first blush to be purely banality. And yet, it affects me on a deeper level.

I was in Vancouver for an "eCOP" pathfinding meeting, and found that I flipped open the MacBookPro during breaks. What did I check first? It wasn't email. It wasn't my blog (or blog stats, or blog referrals). It was Twitter. I felt more connected to my distributed community of edubloggers (and others) because they're always there with me, no matter where I am. That's powerful stuff. Now, how to better make sense of that? Or does making sense of it suck the soul out of it? 

The database gods are laughing at me. This time, the mysql database for my blog fell over. Died. Unresponsive. It was an ex-database. Pining, as it were, for the fjords.

The blog dropped offline for an hour or so, and when it eventually came back, there were all kinds of scary database error messages being spewed into the log. I took a closer look, and the Drupal "cache" table was wedged and corrupted. Thankfully, it's just a cache, so I nuked the table and recreated it fresh. Easy peasy. I've got lots of backup snapshots, so it would have been almost as easy to restore any other table, but with the potential of lost content (posts and/or comments).

It looks like everything is back up again. Poking around the admin side of the blog, it looks like there was another nasty evil spam attack this morning, with 99% of it blocked by spam.module, but some actually got through. No idea if the database crash was related to the spam attack.

Update: Nope. It wasn't that simple. Now I'm getting the MySQL "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" error again. Crap. And phpMyAdmin is locking me out. Hopefully, that just means Dreamhost is working on the database from the other side. I'll try to stay away for awhile. Dangit.

Update 2: It's back up, and feeling much more responsive. I've tweaked the throttle settings, which disable some of the more database-intensive sidebar blocks when lots of users hit the site. The throttle has already been thrown, with 257 simultaneous users (256 of them anonymous). Hopefully that will help prevent the database from wedging again. 

It’s a total non-issue for me, but Dreamhost (the cool company that’s hosting my blog) is going through some rough times in their data centre at the moment. Apparently the heat wave in California is wreaking havoc on their power situation, causing a power outtage. The generators kicked in, but there was a short. And a fire. Hell broke loose. (the mention of the fire has disappeared from their Dreamhoststatus.com blog, so maybe it wasn’t that bad…) So, my blog was down for awhile. Really no big deal. If you can read this, it’s back up. I’m guessing there may be periodic outtages while it’s sorted out.

David noticed and emailed me within minutes of the blackout - well before I would have. Actually, he seems to notice every outtage or hiccough on my server well before I do…

btw, Dreamhost is so unbelievably cool as a hosting company. I accidentally discovered that they have installed Appleshare services on my server (perhaps it’s standard on all of their servers?) - I can have my hosted directory mounted on my desktop, and take advantage of Finder-y goodness rather than resorting to FTP or shell connections for everything. Nice. So, I have a 20GB (that’s GigaBytes) volume, accessible anywhere, via FTP, AFP, or shell connections. They also offer WebDAV for directories (which I don’t use), and Subversion, and one-click installs of every web app I could ever want. And the shell account is fully enabled, with access to emacs, cron, rsync, lynx, etc… not like the silly locked down accounts some providers offer (what? we had no idea you’d want to edit files. we have to enable emacs for you… mysql command line access? really? why would you want that? etc…)

I’m babbling. Dreamhost is an insanely cool hosting company. I’m extremely happy with the service they offer, and this minor downtime is trivial (and unavoidable, given the fragility of the North American power grid - does this scare the crap out of anyone else? A fuse can blow in southern Ontario, and drop the entire Eastern seaboard into darkness. Prime targets. yikes.)