Category: Admin

Hard on the heels of the DDoS attack on Saturday, this site was inaccessible for much of Sunday. (In fact I still can’t get to it from my Mac back in my apartment.) Put it all down to planned work, bad luck on Steve’s part, and bad planning on mine.

For a variety of reasons, Steve decided to move grommit to a new co-location center. The move was scheduled for Sunday afternoon (PST), and we all had plenty of time to prepare for it. As Steve describes in his blog, the move itself went OK, but he was caught out by a couple of bad Solaris patches that he decided to install. However by about 9 o’clock everything was up and running.

Everything except geoffarnold.com.

I’d forgotten that our DNS address would be changing, and at 9 o’clock I was enjoying the Tallis Scholars‘ concert at the Town Hall when I received an email from Steve reminding me to update my DNS configuration. After the concert, I headed home, worrying as I went about whether I could remember my login for everydns.net (and hoping that my on-file email address wasn’t the geoffarnold.com one – or, even worse, my old Sun address!). Fortunately I was able to log in and make the changes without any difficulties.

So how come I still can’t access geoffarnold.com from home? Put it down to lack of foresight on my part. The DNS “A” (address) record for geoffarnold.com, the bit that tells other computers what my IP address is, has a TTL (time to live) of 86400. That’s 24 hours, expressed as seconds. So any DNS server that retrieved my address less than 24 hours before I made the change is perfectly entitled to use that copy until the TTL expires. This means that everybody should get the new address in about 14 hours from now. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have logged in to everydns a couple of days ago and adjusted the TTL down to, say 3600 (one hour). That way, when I actually changed the address, I could be sure that the stale information would be gone within an hour.

Next time, next time.

As part of introducing my new blog template, I decided to do some tidying up. Among the new features on the side bar, you’ll see a dramatically reduced “Blogroll”. In the early days of this blog (particularly when many of my colleagues at Sun were also starting their blogs) it was common for two bloggers to add entries to their blogrolls as a reciprocal courtesy, just to increase each others Technorati rankings. Just because a blog was on one’s blogroll didn’t mean you were actually reading it. But after a while it gets unmanageable, and the blogroll becomes several times longer than the average posting. Several attempts to adopt a new template failed because the combined blogroll, category list, and archives sections were just too big.
So today I decided to do something radical. First, I replaced the category list and archives with drop-down menus. Then I revised my blogroll to correspond to what I actually read, based on the list of RSS feeds that I scan each morning through NetNewsWire. (There are many other RSS feeds that I track, mostly from news organizations, but they don’t belong here.)
So if you were on my blogroll and have disappeared, my apologies. It’s nothing personal.

Earlier this evening Kate told me that my blog was getting mangled in Internet Explorer. The last time I switched themes I tested it carefully under all the browsers I could find, including IE. I retested, and although most of the pages were OK, the main page was unreadable. So I decided that it was time for a change. I went looking for a really up-to-date WordPress theme that supported all of the recent 2.0 features.

Here you are. It’s the wide version of Marco Vlieg’s Lush, ported to WP by Christoph Boecken. It includes a nice touch that I know some readers will appreciate: the ability to change the font size using the palette at the top right.

While I was installing and customizing the theme, I added some extra features. The most obvious one is that if you leave a comment you can subscribe to receive notification of new comments. You’ll see other new capabilities over the next few days.

Please let me know of any problems, particularly related to browser compatibility or readability.

UPDATE: Steve and others pointed out that some of the fonts were oddly sized and hard to read (probably because they weren’t anti-aliased). There are two probable explanations: frequest use of fractional scaling, and PC-centric font preferences. I’ve fixed some of the scaling (though not all), and I’ve backed off to simple “sans-serif” for most of the fonts, so you’ll see whatever your browser is configured for. If you choose an ugly font, don’t blame me….

Lorem ipsum, something, something something. It appears that the ex-Sun community aggregator lost track of my blog, which is ironic since mine was the first to be included. Oh, well. Thanks to Oz for catching it, and Linda for (hopefully) fixing it.

UPDATE: Well, it looks like it still isn’t fixed. I’m back on the list of aggregated blogs, but my stuff isn’t showing up. I’m not sure why: this is a pretty vanilla WordPress configuration…..

As several commenters have reported, I’m not the only one who’s having problems. It looks as if Akismet is broken right now.
Meanwhile I’ve installed a new plugin, Bad Behavior, “a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots”. It’ll be interesting to see how well it works. If you find it blocking your comments, please let me know via email.

A couple of blogspam got past Akismet, and they looked like the kind of thing it should have caught. I’m going to turn on full comment moderation until I’m sure Akismet hasn’t been hacked. (For the record, the normal policy here is that I moderate comments from people I haven’t seen before; once I approve a comment, the author is exempt from moderation.)

I’ve just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.4. If you notice any oddities, please let me know via a comment to this entry.
(I’ve also heard of people who are having trouble with the new three-column layout: their browser displays the left column, then the middle, and finally the right, straight down the left side of the screen. If you encounter this, please tell me your browser version and screen layout.)

Those of you reading this blog over the last 24 hours must have been thoroughly confused. I’ve been playing with different themes (about a dozen of them, in fact). I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with the current one (code-named “treacle”) for a couple of days, adding back in some of the elements from the theme I’ve been using for the last few months. Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

You may notice a bunch of new pages appearing in the sidebar. These are still under construction: please ignore them for now….

I’m getting a steady stream of blogspam directed at my blog: around 100 hits a day. The combination of comment moderation and spam filtering means that none of it has got through to pollute the site, but checking for false positives is getting a little tedious. One change I’ve just made is to automatically disable comments on each entry 21 days after I post it. This is unfortunate: some of the most amusing comments have been from people who discovered one of my postings months or years after the event, but c’est la vie.