- I’ve spent the last several days, beating up on Panther, which is my main desktop computer, as well as doing upgrade work on the other systems here at Casa de Bit. I’ve managed to work through the problems surrounding my voice dictation unit. Since my hands are sore today, from hauling equipment over the last several days, this is a blessing . It makes my maintaining this site, much easier.
- I’ve also been doing some serious work to reorganize my mp3 collection into something a little more portable. I’ve seen radio stations with smaller music collections, so you can imagine the amount of data flying around my routers the last couple of days.
- One major technological advance that I have made, just recently, is I have succeeded in retiring , or at least demoting to spot service, my trusty 3com “super stack” 24 port hub. It’s not a full switch, just a hub. Therefore it was a bit of a bottleneck around here. Interestingly enough, it was the mp3 collection moves that finally pushed me over the edge with that one. I now have two Cisco gigabit switches in place, instead. Makes quite a difference, even though most of the net is still running 100mb. The backplane efficiencies alone….
- As to the blog website, the system seems to be working well, following the adjustments in the cache values that I made. Those of you who understand something of HTML but do not understand how WordPress works will find this of interest; WordPress is database driven, and the web page that you see in front of you, is actually built, brand new, every time someone calls the page. This allows for a great deal of flexibility, but also causes some serious slowdowns, when the server is under significant load, as it has been of late. So, what I have done is to create a situation where the pages that ostensibly get constructed fresh every time, now live , fully constructed, on the servers disk drives, ready to be called. This allows for a much faster response. The numbers suggest that I’m saving upwards of five or six seconds per page load because the server doesn’t have to reconstruct the page every time. It’s a bit more complex, but I think it’s worth it.
- The Swamp Stompers ring, continues its slow growth. I was very pleased to see Sister Toldjah come on board. I’m amazed to see the quality of the work being done on the blogs that are joining us.
- Speaking of quality of work, I should take a moment to recognize the efforts of DavidL, who has essentially been writing his ass off. I knew, when I invited him to come on board that he had some writing talent, and some thoughts that needed saying. But even I didn’t anticipate the quality and quantity of his output.
- For those of you who don’t know, there is a standing offer here at BitsBlog, for a display ad swap. The purpose, is blog promotion. You put an ad on your blog that I create, advertising BitsBlog, and I do the same for you, for an agreed upon period. Drop some feedback, if you’re interested.