Category Archives: Discourse.net

I’ve turned on a couple of caching programs, but with fairly tame settings for now.  Please let me know if you experience any weirdness.

In the fullness of time, I will open the blog to registration, and registered users will get the uncached, most up-to-date content.   Although, in theory, the cache should update every time I post something or someone adds a comment, so I’m not sure why that really matters.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two caching programs working, and my major fear is that they may work at cross-purposes.  I have the W3 Cache, but only partial mimifying.  And I also turned on Dreamhost’s new mod_pagespeed.  As best I can discern, it risks being somewhat duplicative of W3’s mimification, as both try to squeeze out some of the air of javascript and HTML files as well as caching them on disk (W3) and who-knows-where or whether (mod_pagespeed).  It would take rigorous testing to figure out if this a good combination, or which one is better alone, and the truth is that I don’t plan to do that testing any time soon if ever.  On this, I hope to free ride on the efforts of others.

I’ve just solved a problem that had eaten my RSS feeds, and there odds are there are more.  So please let me know if things are acting stranger than usual.  (And whether the blog now seems faster or slower than it used to.)

Thanks for your patience….

If you are reading the blog via RSS, like most people, you won’t (I hope) notice any problems, but visitors here are probably in for a rough, or at least random, week or so as I sort through technical problems….

As you can see (if you are not reading this via the RSS feed), things have changed around here. I’m now on WordPress, and the blog has a totally different and I think much better more modern look. The old template was more or less hand-coded by yours truly back in the day when just having a unique template was an achievement.  If all goes according to plan, not that it ever does, there will be more changes over the next week or two as I work out any bugs, and then, once the dust settles, maybe play around a bit.

Please be patient with me if things go funny from time to time. The new system is much more complex and (I hope) flexible than the old.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Incidentally, I should mention that right now the comments are set very restrictively, and just as a temporary measure I have to approve the first comment by every poster before it goes online; once you have had the first one approved subsequent comments should appear automatically. As soon as things are a bit more organized, I’ll change that, probably to a system that lets logged in users post more freely than drive-by commentators. (Currently the option to become a logged-in user is disabled. One thing at a time.)

One major difference between WordPress and Movable Type is that WP wants to build a page for every visitor, while MT builds a static page whenever new content is created, then serves that page up to visitors. Obviously, static pages are much faster. So WP users throw in a cache, which speeds up pages. I’ve got one, but it remains to be seen how well it performs and whether this cheapo shared server is up to the job. 

So here too, please be patient while things get sorted out.

UPDATE (12/8/2010): I’ve switched to a much simpler theme.   Perhaps not as elegant, but so far easier to live with.

I got invited to a local bloggers' brunch and had a very good time. There's a write up at South Florida Daily Blog, Blogger Brunch Bonding.

What struck me the most besides what Rick mentions — and the moment where the woman from the next table joined in was almost a Woody Allen – Marshall MCluhan moment — is that we're all of an age. Where are the young local political bloggers? On Facebook?

Sometime Real Soon Now™ the blog will go dark for a day or so, and when it emerges, it will be running on WordPress, and have a brand new much more modern look. If all goes well, all the current pages will be ported to WordPress versions of the same posts, with the same URLs. And no content will be lost. (Look! A flying pig!)

I imagine there will also be a period of tweaking and bugswatting after that happens, so I'll ask for your patience.

Exactly when we'll pull the trigger, I'm not sure, but some time between this Monday and next Monday seems most likely. I hope you will like the results; I'm quite sure folks will let me know if they do not.