Category: Commentary

So a few days ago I noticed a relatively small, but annoying problem that resulted from the host move. A large number of images didn’t get added to wordpress’s database. The files exist, and display fine when you’re just reading, but I can’t manipulate them through the blog interface. So for instance if I wanted to delete and replace one (perhaps to correct an old typo) I’d have to do that through FTP or similar. Not very convenient. I’ve been looking for solutions, but there just doesn’t seem to be anything really good. I’ll be working on this, but it’s time consuming and error-prone.

As a result of such an error, a few images are missing from the blog entirely right now. Oops. Only like 4 I think, so it’s not too big a deal, but  I intend to fix that of course. It’s just gonna take a little while to untangle this mess.

CPU load problems are gone. It’s actually kind of mysterious. Not only is my new host more generous, and gives me an easy way to monitor load, apparently it’s actually running much better too, at a level that would have been fine on the old host. Go figure.

However, it looks like I’m only squeeking by on bandwidth now. It should be OK, but there’s not much of a safety buffer. However I’d made absolutely no effort to optimize so far. If worse comes to worst I can install Jetpack again; that should reduce bandwidth massively, but I don’t really like that plug-in too much. So I’m going to try some smaller things first. As of today I’ve enabled compression and browser cache again, but on a very limited basis. HTML caching is disabled, so basically it’ll only cache images, and only for a week. I expect this will still be a significant improvement without the risk of breaking Random or anything like last time. Do let me know if you notice any issues though. Next thing I might try is “lazy load”, but I’ll wait and see if this helps enough first.

• Tag Cloud
• Dark Mode
• Images on Tag and Archive pages.

Yep, all of the above should be working now. It actually went more smoothly than I expected.  But there’s always the possibility I missed something, so do let me know if you notice anything wrong.

• Tag Cloud
• Dark Mode
• Images on Tag and Archive pages.

In the hope that I can find the time to work on things this weekend, has anyone noticed anything else weird/broken?

Pretty much everything has been imported I think. A few things are still missing, dark mode, tag cloud… Oh and the discord bot. But everything you see (including the Random link) should work.

Be sure and let me know if you do notice anything broken.

Sorry, still experimenting. I may have returned to my old theme a little prematurely.

As you might have guessed, this means my “overloading” issues are not entirely over. Because of that, I still need to keep a good number of posts going up for a realistic test, but since I’ll be busy with technical junk too, expect to see more “classics” (tumblr re-posts) than usual.

I guess today is a good day to start resurrecting this blog… oh boy that was forced, sorry. Anyways, as I’m sure you know, a few things need attention, Random barely works, Tag cloud is gone without a replacement, Dark mode isn’t available, etc. And although the last word from my host was that it was no longer overloading, I really don’t like how I can’t check on this myself.

At a certain point it was important to keep a normal volume of posts going up for load testing purposes, but as dig in and try to resolve the lingering issues I may once again be updating less often.

So this plugin was designed by morons, apparently. It caches images forever, with no way to remove or update them. Arguably this is sort of generous… but heaven forbid you ever want to change any image on your website. They claim that deleting images or purging the cache is somehow “difficult technically”, but obviously it’s not, at all. Except for the fact that they’re morons.

Anyway, it seems the only way around this is to give the file a new name. But guess what, wordpress may also have been designed by morons and doesn’t make renaming files possible.

But fortunately, someone by the name of Milan Dinić was not a moron and wrote a nice little plugin for renaming files. That was three years ago, but it still seems to work. Thank goodness.

Anyway, if you see any filenames that start with something like fuckjetpack1-, now you know why.

In other news, I’m starting to lose patience with all this (could you tell?), so I’m just gonna turn the real theme on again and hope for the best. Worst that can happen is they ban me and I have to rebuild my site on some better host. That would be a pain, but so is getting stonewalled by these guys.

So the good news is my host’s tech support said my blog is now “running normally” (i.e. not overloading). The bad news is I’m still kind of in the dark about what was wrong before and what fixed it.

I guess we’re out of the danger zone, but questions remain. Like whether I can safely switch back to my old theme.  Over the next few days I’ll be trying to get things back to normal, but it’ll likely be a somewhat slow process.

My host’s tech support is gonna be helping me try to optimize things. You will likely notice a few changes/broken things while we’re working on this. And I may end up having to sacrifice a few features, but I’ll do my best. Clink “Continue reading” for the latest news.

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