nerdylorrin.net » Blogs

2010-05-08 Kiwi upgraded

Lorrin — Fri, 21 May 2010 05:06:05 +0000

(belated notification)

Two weekends ago I upgraded kiwi to the latest Ubuntu release. I think the only visible effect is a major update to the WordPress administrative interface. For those of you using webmail (oh wait, that’s no one outside of this house) the upgrade paves the way major updates there as well. Blogs were down for a couple hours, everything else for a few minutes.

2010-02-26 Web, Mail outage

Lorrin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:52:19 +0000

Kiwi ran out of disk space and memory (perhaps running out of disk space resulted in no room for the swap file to grow?) around 1 am PST this morning. Upgraded both and brought back online around 6:45pm PST.

Web sites (except Gallery and Wiki) and mail were down. Everything should be back to normal now.

2009-10-09 Web outage

Lorrin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:04:41 +0000

Module misconfiguration on kiwi brought Apache down from 9:15 – 11:00 PM (PST). Web sites (except Gallery and Wiki) were down. Everything should be back to normal now.

2009-08-21 Web outage

Lorrin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:04:28 +0000

An upgrade on kiwi didn’t go as smoothly as one might hope. Web sites (except Gallery and Wiki) were down starting around 9 pm PST. Blogs in particular were down for about three hours. Everything should be back to normal now.

2009-03-27 Web, mail outages

Lorrin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 06:16:03 +0000

Websites (other than wiki and gallery) and mail were out a few hours this evening (approx 4:00 – 7:15 p.m. PDT ). They’re hosted on kiwi, which locked up and needed to be restarted. Unlike the December outage, this time it was just kiwi and not the parent Xen host. Root cause unclear. Spam Assassin was churning through a bunch of spam at the time, but that could be a random correlation.

2008-12-24 Web, mail outages

Lorrin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 06:09:19 +0000

Websites (other than wiki and gallery) and mail were out a couple times this afternoon. The parent Xen host crashed twice and was rebooted by RimuHosting. Sigh. Hopefully it’ll stay up this time.

Update 12-25: I must have jinxed it. Host continued to have issues and was out overnight. (Sleigh riding with Santa?) Seems to be back up now after a Xen upgrade.

WordPress upgraded

Lorrin — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:09:14 +0000

I’ve upgraded WordPress, the software which runs the blogs, from 2.0 to 2.2. The visual editor is improved in many ways:

built-in spell-checking
tabs for flipping between Visual and Code views

However, you may find that it is disabled by default! To enable, go to Users -> Your Profile and select Use the visual editor when writing.

Other enhancements include auto-saving of posts while you edit them, better performance, and improved comment spam filtering.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any problems.

Dealing with comment spam

Lorrin — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:45:49 +0000

Some blogs on nerdylorrin.net have unfortunately been getting a bunch of comment spam. If you’re getting spammed, please take the following steps:

Go to the WordPress.com signup page.

Pick a username. Enter your email address. Select “just a username, please.”
Click “Next.”

Wait for the activation email. Click the link in it. (This will take to a page with your new WordPress.com password. You actually won’t need this password for these steps, but it might be good to write it down anyway.)
Wait for another email to arrive. This will contain an API key.
On your blog’s Site Admin, go to “Plugins.”
Activate the Akismet plugin.
A message will flash in red at the top. Click the link to “enter your WordPress.com API key”
Enter the API key from step 3. Click “Update API Key.”

That’s it! Akismet checks comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. This approach seems to require the least work for bloggers and commenters alike. If it’s not effective I’ll look into other options.

Click for more information on WordPress.com API Keys.

FYI, Akismet’s privacy policy is “we don’t save comments that get submitted to our Akismet comment spam blocking service unless they were marked as false positives; in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.”

Blog E-mail notifications

Lorrin — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:28:19 +0000

WordPress can now be set up to send emails out when there are new posts to your blog. This is intended for readers who aren’t hip to the wonders of RSS.

To enable, go to Site Admin -> Plugins and active the WordPress Email Notification Plugin.

Note: If you’re not using the default or Tarski theme I’ll have to make some tweaks before users can sign up. Let me know.

Permalinks Fixed

Lorrin — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 22:15:18 +0000

Options -> Permalinks now works correctly. This lets you have permanent links to posts that look like http://www.nerdylorrin.net/blog/2006/06/04/sample-post/ instead of http://www.nerdylorrin.net/blog/?p=123.