The Quern

It's All Grist for the Personal Mill

Posts Tagged WordPress

Upgrayedd

Feb 14

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Family | No Comments

He spells it with two D's, for a double dose of his pimping...

Over the last couple of days I’ve been upgrading my computer system at home.  The impetus is twofold:

  1. I got a version of Windows 7 as a prize in the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition, and finally decided to use it to do a full reinstall on our primary email machine.  It’s an old Dell XPS, and we’ve had it for 5 or 6 years.  It’ll run Windows 7, and it’s gotten so encrusted with remnants of old software over the years that it isn’t particularly reliable any more, so I backed up all our photos, videos, music, and email, made a list of the apps we absolutely need to reinstall, and took the plunge.
  2. Thomas has been relentlessly hounding me for his own website.  It’s a huge hassle to administer my webserver, though, because I have to reconnect mouse and keyboard and monitor cables.  When I finally got around to it, I discovered the webserver was over 6 months behind on recommended updates, so I spent a good amount of time bringing it up to date.  I also added Mozy remote backup to it, since it handles all my web content and my Perforce source code control depot.  I recommend Mozy very highly; I’ve used it for years and it’s cheap, fast, and reliable.

For good measure, I’m putting Windows Live Mesh on all three of my machines.  This is a very nice, featureful, fire-and-forget RAS package for Windows and Mac computers, published by Microsoft.  It allows easy file sharing and remote access for XP, Vista, and Windows 7 machines.  I found it extremely easy to set up and get started with.

After I got the mesh set up, I was able to quickly install two new websites — one for Thomas, and one for Robin.  Right now they’re just skeletons, but we’ll be fleshing them out soon.  Thomas wants to host Flash video games on his site, which should be an interesting experience, and Robin has long wanted her own blog.  Now she has one!

The Windows 7 upgrade on our main machine is in progress as I type this; I’ll follow up soon and let you know how it worked.

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Jul 31

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Humor | No Comments

blog-tour-overload[1]I recently read a post on Coding Horror where Jeff Atwood was crowing about how well the blogging platform Moveable Type has worked for him over the last years.  I’ve been a WordPress user ever since I started blogging, and hadn’t realized that in a default installation, the dynamic page creation WordPress uses can really limit the number of pages that you can serve at a time.  And although I have yet to write that breakthrough post that gets on Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot all at the same time, I figured it might still be prudent to take steps to minimize the load on my relatively puny server.

After clicking through and reading some of the links describing different caching schemes for WordPress, I decided to grab one of the highly-rated plugins to handle caching this blog.  I chose WP-SuperCache.  Although it has a bewildering variety of options, it boils down to taking the dynamically-generated pages you publish, boiling them down to the raw HTML that ends up served to the client, and caching that on the server.

When this is done, the webserver only has to sling raw HTML to the browser, rather than make multiple round-trips through PHP to the MySQL database to construct the page.  This should be both faster and lower load on the server.

So feel free to load up this site as much as you want, and send links to all your friends.  Sure, even include another few hundred “Anubis Gates” spammers.  I can take it!

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The Egyptian God of Spam

Jul 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor | 2 Comments

anubis[1]I’m starting to get quite an inflow of spam on this site.  That’s not too surprising in and of itself, but what is surprising is that 95% of it is going to a single, very old post — my book review of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

I’m kind of at a loss to explain why, although I do have a few theories:

  1. There is an anti-spam company called “AnubisNetworks” that they might think I’m referring to, and this might be attracting spammer attention for reasons ranging from sheer stupidity to full-on DoS attempts.
  2. The spammers might be interpreting “Anubis” as a misspelling of “anus” and flagging it as a target post.
  3. Similarly, “Anubis” or “Anubis Gate” might have some bizarre and likely obscene meaning I’m not aware of, and thus draws spammers seeking a community of perverts to exploit.
  4. These spammers might be big Tim Powers fans, although this is probably giving them more credit for literary taste than they deserve.
  5. These spam messages might actually be attempted communications from immaterial, primordial entities, drawn through some Jungian affinity by the reference to possibly the most ancient known archetypal psychopomp.  Since these entities would have only the most vague and general knowledge of humanity, their missives refer solely to mankind’s most primal drives — sex, money and cheap foreign drugs — along with a healthy dose of apparent gibberish.  Although seemingly meaningless, they undoubtedly contain a stark, alien wisdom when properly interpreted through the lens of obscure and ancient lore.

I’m really holding out for #5, but I’d settle for that as the plot of the next Tim Powers or Charles Stross novel.

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Cool Plugin — WP-Syntax

Jul 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer | No Comments

nerd-cake[1]I hope to eventually have some more programming-related updates here; I’m working on a solution at work to add compile-time type-safety to Windows message passing that will make a good article (or two) when I’m done.

In the meantime, I have my IFComp updates, although vacation and the sheer number of other projects I have at home is cutting down on the amount of time I have to code in Inform 7.

What both these types of posts need, however, is a good way to format code.  By default, WordPress does not do a good job at all with code samples.  Luckily, however, there are a wide variety of plugins available to do a better job.  The one I chose is WP-Syntax, which leverages the GeSHi highlighter engine to do formatting syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages.

None of these languages include Inform 7, but syntax highlighting wouldn’t really do much for Inform 7 anyway. For that language I’m just happy to have a nice box and a good font, which I get by default.

Here’s a (nonsensical) example for C++, to show off the highlighter features:

template <typename T, typename U>
class Complicated <T *, U> : public ComplicatedBase
{
public:
    Complicated(const CString &szData) 
    { 
        if (szData.IsEmpty())
        {
            m_szData = "Error";
        }
        else
            m_szData = szData;
    }
    virtual ~Complicated() { /*do nothing*/ }
    void SomeFunction() const;
private:
    CString m_szData;
};

…and another for SQL:

SELECT t1.a AS Name, t2.b AS Something_or_other
FROM Table_1 t1
    INNER JOIN Table_2 t2 ON t1.t1_ID = t2.t1_id
WHERE t1.c BETWEEN 4 AND 8
-- had a GROUP BY here...

Pretty cool, eh? The drawback is that the very nice visual editor in WordPress is not compatible with the formatter, but I can live with writing in raw HTML to get results this nice.

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Akismet

Jun 22

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer | No Comments

plugin[1]Due to the recent spam attack, I decided to activate the Akismet spam-blocking plugin for this blog.  It’s something that comes built in to this distribution, but in order to use it you need a WordPress API key, which requires registration with wordpress.com.

So I now have a WordPress account, but since I host my own blog, the only thing it gets me is the short string of digits required to turn on the spam-filtering plugin.

So far I haven’t gotten hit with any more spam, so I’m not sure how it’s working yet.  I’ll update if I’m hit in the future…

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Reboot in 3… 2… 1…

May 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer | No Comments

OK, we’re back up with a new version of WordPress and a freshly-renewed domain.  Expect this blog to fill in (probably somewhat slowly) over time as I retrieve old posts from archive.org, modify the theme, and add some new posts.

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