We’ve Got a Good Signal
Posted on October 5, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
So, this is heartening:
Aside from looking like a bar graph for cell phone signal, this shows that now that Whatever’s back on its feet, people are coming back around again. I was curious about how much being away for as long as I was, was going to mean in terms of people reading, and how long it would take to get back to previous readership levels. The answer: Apparently, not long at all. You people make me happy. And feed my monomania! Thank you.
I’m likewise happy to say that it seems that WordPress is handling the load without too many problems; I have the wp-cache plug-in engaged and recaching every 60 seconds, which means that while the database is getting hit, it’s not getting hit so much that it’s buckling under the load.We’ll see how it performs if/when I’m next Farked, but I’m happy to say that for everyday use, at least, my paranoia about my server getting all explody seems to have been overdramatic. I can live with that.
Also, yeah: WordPress is a hell of a lot easier to use so far. You WordPress triumphalists can snicker if you like.
As a WordPress user, I’m actually a little surprised that it’s held up so well under load. No snickering here – just glad to see Whatever back.
Of course since my blog takes forever to load with no traffic, I think I need to reconsider the plugins and scripts I’m running.
I’ll just settle for nodding my head knowingly. :) Glad to see you back up on your feet. Took me a couple of days to realize that I wasn’t getting new updates since your RSS feed is different, since I still had your old MT feed.
Speaking of the different RSS feed, everyone who reads the Whatever via Livejournal should thank my sister Sarah for e-mailing them to have link fixed.
We’re glad it’s up and running again.
Snicker.
WordPress was something that my webhost had as a One Click Install. I’m sure I could install something else if I wanted, but I’m liking WP. Not like I get many/any visitors to my blog, but … yeah. :)
And it’s free!
I switched from Typepad to WordPress and found that WordPress works a lot more smoothly. (…and it’s free!) I’m also finding that your WordPress blog loads a lot more smoothly (in Firefox) than your previous blog. I’m happy that it’s working for you seeing as that’s what I’m using too. If my site ever gets more traffic, it’s nice to know that it would probably hold up.
As someone who (mostly) held his tongue while you thrashed through the various options:
Snicker. Snicker.
Also speaking of RSS feeds, where is it? I’m sure I’m just having a brain fart, but I can’t find it.
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?feed=rss2
Thanks!
Glad to see it’s up and running again. As a WordPress user, I won’t snicker, but instead look on with wonder and approval, knowing if I ever make it up to 30K, I’ll be fine, assuming the host server is up to the task.
Glad WordPress is working out for you. It seems like either all the concerns you heard about server load were overstated, or perhaps you underestimated the capabilities of 1&1’s server.
Well, again, the major issue is calls to the database, and since I’m caching, I’m mitigating that concern somewhat. But, yeah, not as problematical as I feared.
Our host makes a little comment on the Whateveresque the other day saying he’s got a temporary WordPress Whatever up just to play with, and suddenly the Whatever’s back up and running with nearly a week’s full of messages. Man, you sure can get behind the curve around here pretty fast. (grin) All I did was get swamped with stuff to do and was only bipping in and out on the Whateveresque a little bit at a time…
I guess all the WordPress installation needed was a little bacon-cat.
Dr. Phil
So, are you ever going to prettify those urls, or just leave them all ugly and defaulty?
Oh, and *snicker*
Consider this a snicker…
Thanks for the updated feed, I hadn’t known the blog was updating again until you posted on the ‘esque since the old Atom feed wasn’t updating. Got it fixed now.
Another person who didn’t figure out the RSS feed had changed. I looked over the site for a link, but luckily Firefox put an RSS symbol into the address bar. Click! Add! Done.
Ha! That graph looks familiar; we’re on the same webhost! :D
Congratulations on the move.
A bit belated, but that’s kind of your fault, since I’m another one of the victims to the feed address switch…
You know, it’s quite easy to redirect the old feed address to the new one. Or, rather, I expect you don’t know?
Well, in an attempt to be “helpful” rather than “helpy”:
I assume you just copied the previous atom.xml file from the MT installation into the WordPress directory? That’s about the worst thing you could have done, because anyone trying to get the old feeds would just get the same copy knowing that nothing was changed.
Redirecting it to the new feed would have been the best, but even just removing the file and “breaking” it would have been better, since readers would know the feed isn’t working, and would come manually to see what has changed.
So even if you don’t want to redirect the feed, I’d suggest that you’d at least remove the current atom.xml file.
As for how to do the redirection, the two best/simplest options are either a plug-in, or manually changing the .htaccess file on your blog.
A Plug-in has the advantage of having a clear way to manage everything, being very hard to screw up the whole site with, and giving you an easy way to set more redirection. On the other hand, if you only need this single redirection, the plug-in would have some overhead, and I’m not sure if it would play nicely with your hit load or not.
The best one for this that I know of is this one:
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/
It also has the advantage of showing you 404 errors (someone trying to access a url that doesn’t exist) and allows to create quick redirections for them as well.
If you want to change the .htaccess file, it’s fairly simple, and will probably be better than the plug-in in terms of performance, but it’s slightly more complicated to tweak, and you have a bigger risk of doing something wrong.
Look in the /whatever/ folder on the website, you will see a file there called “.htaccess” .
Inside it there will be a bunch of text lines between a “# BEGIN WordPress” line and an “# END WordPress” line. You don’t want to touch it, since WordPress can change that area by itself.
So, make a copy of this section, before/above it in the file, without these enclosing lines, and without the RewriteRule line:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /whatever/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# BEGIN WordPress
…
Replace the RewriteRule line with a new one, that tell the server to take requests for the old feed file and transfer them to the new feed.
I sent it to the atom feed here, but that’s just for consistency (less chance of confusing some old readers by having a feed change type), and because I personally like atom a little bit more (Can’t believe I just said that. Oh, well). Probably meaningless, so if you want to stick to the rss2 feed, just replace the atom here with rss2.
RewriteRule atom.xml$ /whatever/?feed=atom [r=permanent,l]
Again, place this immediately after the RewriteCond line and before the line.
If the file already have a section like this above the “# BEGIN WordPress” line, possibly whoever helped you install WP added some rules there already. Since it’s not automatically generated you should add this RewriteRule line to that section, instead of making another copy.
Err… OK, the commenting system stripped out some lines from the .htaccess example.
Before “RewriteEngine On” line there’s a line:
And the group is finished with a
line. I guess it looked like invalid HTML tags so were stripped…
Also the “” should be there on my before-last paragraph, as in “after the RewriteCod line and before the line.
There must not be be any real spaces after ” ” . I just added them now in the hope the’ll survive to the comment.
Erased again… sigh. OK, let’s try again:
Inside angle brackets. First line is
[IfModule mod_rewrite.c]
and last is
[/IfModule]
Just replace the square brackets with angle brackets.