Leaving VPSLink Moving to Blogger and DropBox

Its been quite the bumpy ride moving from my own virtual private server to a 100% blogger hosted blog. Blogger's custom domain support is flaky at best with recommendations across the web to fix issues with it by turning it on and off over and over again. I've also moved all of my files from the files subdomain on vpslink to the free 2G I get at DropBox. So far I have had nothing but positive experiences with it.

The down side of moving off my own server is that all of the google search result listings for my old blog now error out. I also had alot of problems migrating my wordpress export file into Blogger. Each service has their own export/import file format. There are web based tools like Wordpress2Blogger that will convert a wordpress export to a blogger import file but I have had mixed results with doing this.

Now that Google is providing Java support through Google App Engine, I have little reason to continue to pay 40$/month for my own server. I look forward to playing with GAE later this year.

Mindjunk is now super fast

Lately Wordpress has slowed down greatly. It was taking well over 100 seconds to load pages. I tried a bunch of different solutions: disabling plugins, using a stripped down theme, converting the database tables to InnoDB. Nothing seemed to help. Then I noticed something. The wp_postmeta table had ballooned to over 52,000 records. I was able to figure out it was Ultimate Tag Warrior that had caused this. I enabled UTW and used the "Tidy Tags" feature and wp_postmeta went down to 28 entries. Now pages are loading in a fraction of a second. Needless to say I will not be using UTW anymore. I need to find a more efficient plugin to tag my posts.

I also want to say thanks to creators of my new theme , 281 , it is very fast and clean.

Geek Central

I decided to host a message board for someone I work with. For a couple reasons...

1. Ads suck and they were currently on a adified free server. 

2. If people start coming to it, maybe it will get my blog some free exposure. 

3. I have spare bandwidth I am not using.

 

Check it out. It doesn't look like much at the moment but I am still setting it up and everyone hasn't made the move over yet.

The joys of wordpress

Oh the joys of wordpress 1.5.1! I have gone plugin crazy, installing ones from all over the web and creating ones I cannot find. I have created a adsense plugin, to randomly decide where its going to put the adsense block. Also in WP1.2 I had a plugin that would place a little graphic at the end of every post like in wired magazine. I couldn't find it, so I just reimpliemented it. I don't know if WP1.2 had this, but I would like to thank the developers for filters. It makes my life 10x easier.

Right now I am making a post to try out this wysiwyg plugin. The rest of this bost isn't going to make much sense so just ignore it:

I am bold. I am italic. I like smilies . But I like images even more  (booooo images dont work)

Wordpress 1.5.1

**Mindjunk has successfully been moved to Wordpress 1.5.1 (from 1.2.?)!!**

I finally finished creating a theme for it. As always, my themes are minimalistic. A couple things I still need to do are

Find and install all my old plugins
Reimpliement my "usersonline" block
Recreate the dbuser switching code

About time.

I am now finally a proud writer upon our fine website. He did the website work I'm just here to help :P

Time to get cracking.

Waiting

Why haven't I posted all day? I have been waiting for a situation to resolve itself.


What does the above graphic mean? It means as of 9 minutes ago this has officially become a solo project. My partner in crime Brandon didn't really seem to interested in the project anymore. I decided to set a deadline if he had not registered by midnight tonight it would become a solo project and according to the user list, no Brandon.

>(17:30:26) Stephen: btw can you get on and register again?
>
>(17:30:32) Brandon: yeah sure

I gave him 31 hours to register, I think thats fair enough considering he has a lot of free time on his hands. I am really not mad at Brandon. I would just rather deal with this now instead of later when I am expecting him to be into the project and I am the only one working. So, welcome the the __solo__ project, Mindjunk.org. Nothing has changed on what the site will cover, but it will defiantly be more tech and less games.

What a ride!

After geeklog was up and running smooth I came the the realization that WordPress could handle multiple authors. I didnt relize this! WordPress is a wonderful piece of software. So, I guess welcome to version 0.2 of MindJunk.