“So It’s Come To This:” is a scrapbook for my philisophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.
I just upgraded my wife’s G4 to Tiger so she could run the latest version of Quark. I don’t care too much about Quark but I’m all excited to use Tiger. So, of course, the first widget I downloaded was a WordPress blogging widget.
Let’s see if this works out. It could be better than Writely.
Writely - the site I most wanted to get invited to (besides Gmail) has just accepted an invitation provided by these guys. If you noticed the test posts (which I deleted a short while ago) You know I was playing around with the ‘Publish to Blog’ feature Writely brilliantly provided. I cannot express enough how happy I am that this feature works.
WordPress 2.0.4 - in all its greatness - doesn’t have a spellchecker built in and it drives me crazy! I end up cutting and pasting my text to the OpenOffice word processor just to highlight the mistakes so I can correct them.
With Writely, however, I can check my spelling and post directly to my blog. One thing I need to figure out, though is how to add tags/categories to the post so I don’t have to go back and edit those.
I just started using Site24×7 to keep tabs on my hosting provider. Since I signed up with my hosting service, I only had one outage in the many months I subscribed to their service. That is, until today.
Just like the other time I had an issue, the support staff quickly resolved the issue. However, I didn’t know the site was having problems until I tried to visit it - possibly hours after the issue started. Where I work, I have monitors on all the core servers and running services that notify me of any problem. If the server begins to run out of disk space, I know well in advance. If the BES services fails, I know. And if CPU time runs abnormally high for a certain length of time, I get an alert.
So I decided to look for a service that would do this and not charge me a lot of money. Right now, Site24×7 is free and all four sites I actively manage are monitored. Every five minutes, the sites are polled with GET requests. If they fail, I’m alerted to a specific Gmail account I setup and have configured into my Blackberry. I’ll be able to email my hosting support and ask that they look into the matter even while I’m away.
I’ve not tested the service so I can only hope that it works. It does give me some aggregate performance numbers to prove that its actually doing what its supposed to. I’ll only know it works when something goes wrong. But it seems kinda flexible and supports most of the features you want in such a system.
According to their marketing information, it supports HTTPS and authentication. It also can check for defacement by validating against key words you define. It can also deal with dynamic pages. It also handles POST commands and can alert you if there is a dramatic slow-down or sudden increase/decrease in page size.
Of course, I can’t endorse this because I really don’t know if it works but I’m willing to give it a shot. After all, its free for now and it should do what I want it to. If something does happen to the site and I get a notification, I’ll be sure to update this review.
And let’s hope I never do.
So I just completed my first ever upgrade of WordPress and I have to say that I’m very impressed with how easy it is. I just followed the directions of backup the MySQL database, backup the code files and copy over the new ones. My FTP program only overwrote the files that WordPress comes with and none - from what I can tell - of my customizations were changed. Of course, I didn’t hack anything core to the system, really, just installed some plugins and themes.
I haven’t fully tested all those plugins but some of the major ones seem to work. If anything seems broken, please use the contact form to let me know. And hopefully, that isn’t broken.
Fresh on the heels of the Blog To-Do List comes the list of things I added to the blog.
The first is the print this post link on every entry. Click on the link and it will strip the fancy formatting and make the article “printer friendly” for those who just want to read the text (but posted images are included).
The next thing is a view counter. This tells me (and you) how many times a particular post was viewed by people out on the net. I can only trust the accuracy of the counter as I can’t tell if anyone is actually reading this thing or not.
I also added a mobile version of this blog for those on Sidekicks, Blackberries, cell phones, or any really crappy internet service like slow Wi-Fi or AOL. Like the Print This Post plug-in, the formatting is stripped out for fast, easy loading/reading. But unlike the print function, the Mobile Edition shows the full text of the latest post - with the forms to comment on it - and displays the last 10 posts below as links in case you missed a few or want to reread some.
I added polls to the sidebar. I’ll create new polls every now and then and will ask you, my trusty readers, to answer them. Once I have a few polls under the belt, I’ll randomly rotate them to get a good statistical sampling.
Related to post views, I also added post ratings. This gives you guys the ability to rate my posts. I know, I know… they are all 5 stars but not everyone thinks in ways of genius like you and I. So… I’ve given them a way to rate what they just read. Hopefully, they will also comment on why it is they liked or disliked the post so I can get better. It will make me a better writer/poster and the blog more enjoyable to the masses.
I also added a Contact Me page so people can send me messages from the blog. It’s sent to a capture inbox that filters out spam and forwards all real messages to my real email address. Please be gentle and don’t flame/spam/flood me with unnecessary or hurtful messages.
Last (I think), but not least… I added a statistics page that lists some simple information about the blog. It lists how many articles there are, the number of comments, the most viewed posts, and information about the rated posts. Right now, no one has rated anything so it shows nothing for that section but once the readers start pouring in, I’m sure it will change.
