Various Blogging Notes
April 9, 2007
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Blogging, Technical Functions : Trackback,
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I know it doesn’t look like anything changed, but major changes happened behind the scenes of Cerulean Sanctum:
Speed - The blog should load faster. I patched WP-Cache in Wordpress to allow for GZip file compression. Because of latency issues with my satellite Internet connection, it’s tough for me to determine if things are loading faster. I’ve had one person tell me already that it’s loading more swiftly, so that’s good. Let me know if this isn’t the case.
Lessened server load - I’m not a log freak. I’m not checking logs all the time. About ten days ago, I switched to a new logging feature and nearly died when I saw the number of non-blog-related server hits for the site. I counted nearly 200,000 hits this quarter alone coming from MySpace users hotlinked to my image directory. Some exceedingly popular blog in Denmark (!) had nearly 70,000 hits on one hotlinked image of mine. I also beefed up my robots.txt file to cut down on bot hits from spurious search engines, plus I banned a number of sites that were linking to Cerulean Sanctum for less than noble purposes. All told, I suspect I cut my server load by half. That should speed things up too since there’s less competition for server attention.
Officially routed all traffic from the old blog location - This blog used to be Blogger-based, though I hosted the files on my own server. Many of you linked to the Blogger-based site before I switched over in April 2006 to this dedicated cerulesanctum.com domain and started using WordPress. This weekend, I setup a redirection from the old blog to here. Unfortunately, I could not route all URLs directly to their original sources since Blogger truncates filenames and Wordpress doesn’t. After importing the Blogger blog to WordPress, I had about 250 filenames that didn’t match up, so for now I’ve set the routing to route to the same month the original file was in. Users following links to the old Blogger-based blog will get routed to the correct month that contains the post they’re looking for, but not right to that post. I may rectify this in the future, but after spending hours trying to correct filenames, I felt I had better things to do. Maybe in the future I’ll fix all the new URLs to match the old, but for now this is the best I can offer.
RSS/Atom Syndication - I had to make a further adjustment in the blog feed. I also installed anti-leeching software to cut off sploggers (spam bloggers—another group of nefarious villains I didn’t know existed) who scrape feeds. If you’re not receiving Cerulean Sanctum’s feed correctly or can’t see the post images in your feed, let me know and I’ll massage the settings.
If you’re a blogger and would like to know how you can better your blog using the fixes I’ve implemented, let me know. The inner workings of the processes that make blogging possible are more nebulous than some of us realize. I thought I knew what was going on, but I realize now I simply had my toe in the pool. Plenty of junk happened behind my back. It may be going on behind your back, too.
This week promises to be an enormously busy one, so blogging may be light. Sorry. I have drafts of my novel to get out, short stories to shop to publications, a couple corporate freelance writing projects to pen, an orchard to tend, 13.2 acres of grass to mow, two Web sites to build, and some business cards to design. And then there’s homeschooling!
Life is too busy.
Peace,
Dan
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This post hadn’t even been up for twenty minutes before it got splogged! How ironic. Even more ironic, the splogging was done by hand and not by scraping the feed, so it got past my feed watcher.
Nonetheless, the two splogs got blacklisted.
Dan, is your orchard surviving these cold temps?