Category Archives: Discourse.net

My Name is Michael and I’m a Tweaker

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Tweaking may be a disease.

In the quest for speed I’ve moved my very long blogroll from the right margin to a special page of its own, Blogs I Read, and linked to it right under the banner at the top of the page.

This chops almost two more seconds off the load time, at least if the barometric conditions are right.

Just one more thing — really, just one more, honest — that I have to figure out: why, sometimes W3 Total Cache decides to reject the IE user-agent and instead of directing it to the amazon cloud server, sends it to my host instead.

The message (in reveal codes) is

Content Delivery Network via Amazon Web Services: S3: staticd.discourse.net.s3.amazonaws.com (user agent is rejected)

But there’s nothing on the list of user agents to reject that I can see which looks anything like IE. (Full list below the fold).

If you are curious, you can tell which version you got by looking at the source files and searching for “staticd” — if you find it, you got the cloud version; if you didn’t it all came straight from the source. The two versions are supposed to be identical, it’s just a speed issue.

Continue reading →

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Done Tweaking?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I got the load time down from 9+ seconds (according to Pingdom) to something in the 2-4 second range. Where it falls in that range seems to depend on the atmospheric pressure.

To achieve this result, I took the following steps:

  • Tweaked some W3 Total Cache settings
  • Stopped banging my head against the W3 Total Cache minification settings, and fired up the WP Minify plugin instead.
  • Swapped out the two slowest design elements for faster lower-tech versions
    1. Put in the HTML version of Sitemeter instead of the Javascript version
    2. Used the sfw of the clock instead of the Javascript version
  • Removed the archive drop-down, which amazingly was responsible about half of the HTML for this page, although it showed up as only one line in the margin if you didn’t click it. Now, instead I have a new freestanding archive page via WP-Archives. This is one part of the revision that still needs work — right now it takes waaay too long to build the archive page when someone visits it, and I fear it could bring the server to its knees if some malicious robot decided to hit it a lot (I have set it to noindex, nofollow and blacklisted it in robots.txt, but that only works for good robots).
  • Installed the Wp Smush.it plugin to automate the reduction of image file sizes that I was doing manually with the GIMP
  • Moved some static files to Amazon S3 & CloudFront, for a cost of a penny or two per day — unless of course traffic should go up all of a sudden.

I picked Amazon because it is integrated with my server and also W3 Total cache. But the user interface is awful and the help files are hard going. I’m still not sure I’ve set things up right.

Stopwatch copyright © 2009 casey.marshall. Some rights reserved.

Posted in Discourse.net, Wordpress | 1 Comment

Tweaking Time

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I indulged my inner geek last night and made some fairly extensive changes under the hood to the blog. If I did it right — always a dubious proposition — then no changes should be visible to the reader whatsoever, except perhaps that the blog will load a bit quicker.

So please do let me know in the comments if anything seems weirder — or less weird — than usual. Or even if they seem the same.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Tweaking Time

IPv6 Considered Dangerous (Updated)

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The blog was down much of the day while I was busy in Baltimore and Washington (how does it know to die whenever, and almost only whenever, I’m out of town?). Here, according to support, is the cause:

The apache service did not like the initial IPv6 assigned to the domain. I changed out the IP and reset the apache service for the domain and I can now view the domain.

I don’t actually understand how this is possible, but if this is the straight dope, it suggests IPv6 adoption is going to be much rockier than I ever imagined.

Update: I asked for further and better particulars, and got this:

The tech who helped you is not in the office. Therefor I cannot give you an definitive answer. However, I had a similar issue on another machine. It appeared to be a kernel bug. The IP was visible to the VPS guest, but could not use. It appache cannot listen on an IP, it will not start. The best course of action was to simply renumber the IP. Hopefully this gives you more insight. If you have any additional questions, please let us know.

Posted in Discourse.net, Internet | 1 Comment

Google Weather Is Back

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

No idea why, but the widget is working right now, so I’ve restored it to the right column. I like the colors.

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

WP Weather Widget is Not Happy

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The WP Google Weather Widget I’ve had in the sidebar decided for no apparent reason today to go nuts.

Instead of a pretty picture, I got:

Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: in {directorypath}/plugins/wp-google-weather/wp-google-weather.php on line 162

The error is highly reproducible, so it looks like it may be toast, although I can’t figure out what might have changed on my end to cause this. Nor it seems can others.

I’ve substituted the WP Wunderground widget, at least for the time being.

Posted in Discourse.net | 4 Comments