Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Rebuilding from scratch

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Okay…so here’s the scoop.

In brief — everything died.

Last Thursday, I grabbed a moment during work to check my site, and found out that it was down. This wasn’t immediately a concern — computers do occasionally freeze (though it’s wonderfully rare with OS X), my router has a tendency to lock up on occasion, and I’ve got the occasional tendency to forget about some of the more important of my bills — so I just didn’t worry about it right off.

Unfortunately, when I got home, it quickly became obvious that this was no minor problem. The iMac that I’ve been using for my webserver, was dead — “D – E – D, ded”. No response to any keypresses…no response to the ‘panic button’ reset switch…not even any response after I unplugged it, let it sit for a minute, and plugged it back in. Not a good situation.

Especially when I noticed the faint smell of something burnt lingering in the air.

So, my webserver is no more, and I’m in the process of rebuilding things from scratch. My first priority was to get my blog back up — but to do that, I’m starting with just the default Movable Type template. The rest will fall into place…though it’s likely to be a long, slow process.

On the bright side, I’d done a backup of my website just three weeks ago, towards the beginning of August, so I’ve only really lost about three weeks of posts. On the down side — just copying that backup into the webserver directory of the machine I’m using now, didn’t work, so I still have to rebuild everything. Still, it’ll go a lot faster than if I’d entirely lost all that information, so that’s a good thing.

In the meantime…well, things are likely to be a bit odd around here for a while as I get things going again. Caveat emptor.

Music, music, music

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I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.

Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.

Redesign in progress

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Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.

More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?

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Faster than a speeding bullet

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Major benefit to having my own DSL connection: because it’s up 24/7, I can run this website out of my own house, off of an iMac I have here.

Major downside to my DSL connection: at the level I can afford to pay for, while my incoming speed is great (1.5Mbps, equivalent to a T1 line), my outgoing speed bites (128kb/s, about twice the maximum theoretical speed of a 56k dialup modem).

This has been bugging me for a while — while my outgoing speed is great for the majority of my site (text and graphics are small enough to transfer quickly), the .mp3 mixes I have available for download on my dj propaganda page take forever to download whenever someone decides to grab one. I was whining to Casey about this yesterday, and he pointed me over to a friend of his.

So, at this point, I’d like to give major thanks to Karim, who graciously let me use some space on dragonshed.org to host my .mp3 files. As dragonshed sits on top of an OC3 connection (155.52 Mbps — insanely huge pipe), anyone who wants my .mp3s will now be able to download them at the maximum possible speed of what ever line they are using to connect to the ‘net with.

So, I’m in the process of uploading all my mixes to dragonshed now. I should have them all transfered over to the new server by the end of the weekend. Thanks again, Karim!

(Update @ 12:48 am Saturday — they’re all transfered over now — woohoo!)