Category: Site Info

Don’t mind me, I’m experimenting with some ad formats from FastClick. There will be a small one appearing on the upper right of this page and one at the bottom.

If you see a problem with these ads, please let me know, I’m just trying to find a way to make a few bucks on this site to support hosting fees, etc… . If you find them intrusive, let me know!

And no, I’m not selling out, I just figured if I could make a few bucks on this, I could convince the wife to let me spend more time doing it, so click away, folks!

I got a few hours of sleep last night, but I can’t say the same for the person who helped me migrate all my sites over to the new machine. But 99% of the work has been done so UtterlyBoring.com as well as most of the other sites I manage has been moved to a nice meaty dedicated box in the Savvis datacenter.

Thanks go to Karin at Door County for making this possible. She stayed up all frickin’ night (while I got a few hours of sleep) to make sure things went smoothly. I’ve dealt with Karin several times as she was a support tech with my last two Web hosts. She had an extra box that she was just running a few things on, and hooked me up with it. Karin, I’m eternally grateful for all your help, as I know I couldn’t frickin’ do this alone.

I still have to move my main domain, as well as a Dada install (that should be fun), as well as re-setup all the hacks I had implemented before. But this site should run a pile faster now, even if I get hammered with traffic again (my load was pushing 14+ all day yesterday on the old machine).

Update at 5:00PM: So far so good. Got the mailing list all setup again, got orty.com all transferred over and going, and everything’s good to go. I just need to get some security stuff installed and configured (mod_security, clamav, logwatch, some exim hacks, chkrootkit, etc…) and this thing will be good to go.

The new server (a Fedora Core, Intel P4 2.8/1024MB/2x80GB HD) is a speedy little bugger. The load with a top command hasn’t gotten above .2 all day (while my old site was running at 14 or above for most of the day). I managed to push 11 Gigs of data yesterday on my old server, however, so it still hung in there just fine, considering it was getting hammered (e-mail me if you want details on my previous VPS host — they’re good folks, I just outgrew it). I usually push about 230 megs a day here, tops, and the amount of traffic I did yesterday (9,000 unique visitors, 50,000+ page views, 19,000 Google Ad impressions) is more than I’d usually get in a month.

Again, thanks to Karin (who really needs to update her blog now and again) for hooking me up with this server to play with, and helping me out with my stupid questions along the way. Hopefully this site will load fast for all you folks in the future, and will be able to survive an onslaught of traffic a bit better now.

Meanwhile, regular blogging to return tomorrow — I need to get some sleep tonight (was up far too late last night).

As mentioned earlier, this site is running a bit slow because of a link from a major gaming site (that was later picked up by a pile of gaming forums — welcome to you all!). I’m in the process of moving this site to a meatier server (probably will make the move tonight or tomorrow night). That should speed things up quite a bit, and I’ll post more details about the server and such after everything gets moved properly.

A hearty welcome to those gamer freaks nice folks 😉 over at BluesNews.com. A video I posted a long while ago is their site’s “Media Of The Day” meaning my site’s getting pummeled with traffic (more than this lowly VPS can handle). If anybody’s willing to mirror the 800KB video, feel free to e-mail me. Meanwhile, click on a Google ad or two while you’re here, enjoy your stay, and I apologize for the slowness for everybody else. At least the server’s still serving requests, so it’s still hanging in there (hopefully I’ll be getting a new dedicated box at some point — anybody have one cheap?).

Meanwhile, blogging and links will be posted later once server load goes down a tad.

On my horribly dated “To-Do” list, I said that when my Blogrolling.com membership expired, I was going to implement something else. Blogrolling.com’s service works, but when the service went down, it made this site take a while to load (anytime you have to pull data from another server, things are going to slow down a bit).

My membership for blogrolling.com expires this April, and I wasn’t really wanting to spend another $20 on a service I really don’t use all that much (as you can see by some of my dated links on there, it’s been a while since I’ve updated things). The “something else” solution above hadn’t been updated for a long while and the site was full of errors, so I didn’t really feel like installing it, either.

Then Arvind, the studly MovableType guy that I’ve linked to here several times, decided to create MT-Blogroll. With a bit of work, I had it import my Blogrolling.com OPML files, I created an index template using the plugin’s tags, and now the right-side links on this site are now being powered by that plugin and that PHP-included index template. The site appears to be loading a split second faster now because external lookups don’t have to be made, and now my site won’t go down because of an inaccessible blogroll (if it can’t access the blogroll now, it’s because you can’t access the site). Thanks, Arvind!

For those of you who signed up to receive my daily posts via e-mail, some of you may not be getting it. Why? Because you have crappy e-mail accounts or overzealous filtering.

So if you’d like to receive my posts via e-mail, that’s all fine and good, but please don’t sign up with a Hotmail or AOL account, as they work about once every two weeks, nor sign up with your military e-mail address, as the government e-mail servers give the posts here a “AKO CONTENT VIOLATION” error on a daily basis.

If you want to sign up for my mailing list, that’s fine and dandy, but do it with a good e-mail account. While Gmail is still in beta, they have a crapload of invites to give away here (I’m going to be dumping all my invites that I have there as well). I’d recommend you go and get one of those, and get rid of your Hotmail account.

I’m going to be experimenting over the weekend with placing Google ads in various places around the site, to see if any of them perform better (I only run them on the bottom of the page, currently). Why? Because I’d really like to get this site (and the other sites I manage) onto a meatier dedicated server (I’m currently on a wussy VPS) so that they can be more responsive and easier to manage. If you find them obtrusive and annoying, I apologize, and feel free to post comments here. Or donate a crapload of money and the ads will go away (if everybody who came to this site on a daily basis donated a dollar or two a month, I could quit my job and do this full time). Or just e-mail me if you have a dedicated box (with a reputable host) that you’d be willing to give to me cheap or in trade for an ad here.

Or maybe I could just quit my bellyaching and get back to work…

Well what do you know. Thanks to the handy Google Alerts, I found out that The Independent mentioned this site in an article about blogging:

Yes, yes and yes. It is not that blogs have encouraged those with dull lives to write. They always have written – the blog lets them to do it in public. Some write monstrously self-regarding round robins each year; the blog lets them to do it cumulatively. The great blogs will survive, even those that make a zen-like, minimalist art-from out of their own dullness (see, for example, http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/) or those that, even in their dullness, manage to fascinate (http://utterlyboring.com/), if only because they give some insight, however accidental (or self-consciously contrived) into other people’s lives.

I’m dull, but I fascinate. Right on! I think this site is in need for a new motto.