BrakeBlog Oct 2011 – Jan 2012 (Godaddy)

BrakeBlog

Page loadtime High 1086ms – Average 639ms – Low 360ms

Christian Heights UMC (ditto)

CHUMC

High 1730ms – Average 1080ms – Low 379ms

The church website loads 440ms slower on average when it is running normally. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change since the BrakeBlog has transitioned to its new home.

Another thing which is much more surprising to me personally is the radical difference in traffic patterns between my personal blog and the church website. The BrakeBlog received 143 (non-unique) visits in December while transferring 709 megabytes of data during the same period. These numbers are reversed on the church though. CHUMC received only 64 (non-unique) visits while transferring 1,810 megabytes in December. 28 megabytes per CHUMC user versus only 5 megabytes per BrakeBlog user. I have to think that the sermons I post online are far more popular than I realized.

Thanks to Paul Lloyd

Doing this analysis I realize how large both websites are. The church website seems to hit a ceiling at 100 users. I have been disappointed that I haven’t been able to attract more than that. A CHUMC user, however, is much more involved and that counts as much or more than the simple visitor total. After I move both websites away from Godaddy those TX/RX lights on the server won’t be blinking quite as fast as they were.

To all my visitors on the BrakeBlog and Christian Heights, THANK YOU! Stay tuned for the follow-up post when we find out what were the results of this experiment.

Energynet Datacenter

I have been a GoDaddy customer since 2003. For the vast majority of that time the service from GoDaddy was acceptable though not excellent. I tolerated many of GoDaddy issues because none justified the time necessary to switch. The most recent example happened in September 2011. The website for Christian Heights began loading very slowly and throwing “500 Internal Server” errors. When I emailed Support about this, their best response was to paraphrase; “It’s not our fault! WordPress is slow, you need to optimize your database.”

Our administrators actively monitor the performance of our hosting and balance the load on the servers as needed. However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. This can generally be caused by the application interfacing with the database or just to the amount of content the site contains. You can improve performance by optimizing the fields and tables of your database.

They are full of —— er, baloney. I know this primarily because the problem stopped immediately after I contacted them even though Support never admitted to doing anything. I have shopped for alternatives before but never bothered to make a serious move because Godaddy was always the cheapest among the mid-tier registrars. Being cheap always trumped whatever service problems I experienced.

It became a matter of principle when I read that Godaddy was supporting SOPA/PIPA. This time I am strongly motivated to leave Godaddy. I picked Hopkinsville Electric’s Energynet service to be my new web host. Energynet being local is very important. It is the primary reason why I am willing to pay more. I have taken the first step by transferring ericbrake.com to Hover. I expect to move christianheightsumc.org and ericbrake.ws also though not immediately. ericbrake.com will operate as a test site while I learn how to migrate both blogs to new installations of WordPress.

Spam: Prisoner of the Mafia

Some spam comments are just gibberish, others attempt to flatter me with generic praise. On Sunday, I received a unique comment via the church blog begging me not to ignore it.

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia xyzrxyz [deleted] enlargement xyzrxyz and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. xyzrxyz [deleted] enlargement xyzrxyz They’re  coming back now. xyzrxyz [deleted] xyzrxyz Please send help!

Nice try. Still didn’t get past the spam filter though. When the Russians do show up this is the song you should sing as your being dragged away.

ummm, yeah we don’t need anymore of that. My previous theme has been in use for over a year. At that time, a commenter promised that maintainership was being transferred so that new releases would continue in the future. A year later there are still no signs of life to be found. I then started to seriously look at new themes for the church website and the BrakeBlog.

Blog.txt rendered to be unmaintained.

When I started browsing the directory on wordpress.org for ideas I had two goals in mind.

1. The church website and BrakeBlog would be dramatically different from each other after I make these changes. To be clear that the BrakeBlog and the church website are not the same.
2. I wanted at least one theme to have a customizable image in the header.

The new theme for the church is very different from Blog.txt. Zenlite is a single column blog with no sidebar. The header is easily changeable to keep the website looking fresh. Several of the items that were in the sidebar had to be moved, unfortunately.

On this site, Simplish is very close in style to blog.txt. So close that it was a drop-in replacement. I may consider changing the fonts to those used by blog.txt. I like the look of Sans Serif-based fonts over Serif fonts.

Of course, there’s always national news that I could rant about but just quoting a bit of an article and saying I agree or disagree is rather boring. Another thing is the presence of Hoptownhall, there are a lot of topics where I might post on HTH because I can get plenty of discussion surrounding the topic.

On the spur of the moment I bought a subscription to lwn.net. I think I’m going to be very happy with it. Reading through this week’s LWN I was pleased with the twenty bucks I spent. I was so inspired that I went to work creating a LWN badge to display on my website. Go steal it for your own use I don’t care. If you make a better one let me know.

This is the original color image. The camera is a Canon Powershot A300.

This variation shows what can be done with layer masks in the GIMP. To create this effect, I copied the original image into a separate layer and removed the red panic button using a layer mask. Then it was simple enough to invert the mask in yet another layer to isolate the panic button from everything else. I desaturated the layer excluding the panic button and increased the saturation in the layer that isolated the panic button.

Continuing from the previous image this one I increased the contrast and brightness of just the panic button excluded layer.

I live in Hopkinsville, KY. I am passionate about Linux && { Free || Open || Libre }; Software.

A few things about this description are the keywords included like Hopkinsville KY, Linux, and software. The expression Linux && { Free || Open || Libre }; is a shell statement that means “Linux AND { Free OR Open OR Libre };”.

Edit: Darn it! WordPress won’t let me use all of the fancy ampersands and braces. I’ll have to settle for something less ambitious.