Lee.org

I used to have Search Everything installed but it broke in some version of Wordpress. Well, it’s back. Now, when you search on my blog it looks at all of the comments as well as posts. You can also search for phrases with “quotation marks”. :-)

woopie

I’m sure you noticed that there’s now some ads on my site. I’ve been playing with them since May 15th or so. Here’s where I’ve come to…

I put one ad at the bottom of each article page in (what I hope is) a relatively unobtrusive spot with unobtrusive colors. Very popular pages that I don’t care too much about (like this) get a few more ads sprinkled in them.

Google Adsense says that my blog site gets about 500 ad impressions per day. Wordpress stats agrees with that but Analog stats says I’m getting more like 2,000 page views/day in my blog folders… hmm. Maybe it’s that Analog is counting spam bots and web crawlers. On the ads, Google says I have a clickthrough rate of about 0.5%. The site makes $0.50/day…. about $180/year. So the site pays for itself and buys me a nice dinner every few months. You might be able to extrapolate your potential earnings from these numbers.

I suppose it’s worth it.

I can now inundate you with sounds and videos from my vast repertoire thanks to the FLV Embed plugin. I found that WP-FLV had trouble when you’d try to edit an existing post with an flv in it. It would lose the tag due to an incompatibility between the flv tag and the graphical input method in Wordpress 2.1.

To make an entry, I just write something like this:

(open square bracket)flv:http://lee.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/swarm.flv 360 270]

Dreamhost made it pretty easy to upgrade. Push the button. Wait a while. Tada. :-)

At first blush, it looks like performance is much improved :-))

Update: Ah. Performance increased because Dreamhost automatically upgraded my WP-Cache from 2.0 to 2.1. It appears that WP 2.1 wasn’t compatible with WP-Cache 2.0. All is speedy now.

Update. It was to 2.1.1… now it’s 2.1.2

One (or more) of my snazzy Wordpress plugins is making my WP2 install run slowly. So I’ll be fiddling with Wordpress plugins for a while. I’ll display another theme for a while until I figure out what’s up. Here’s a pretty theme as a replacement, Thirteen.

After trying out Snap Previews on TJIC’s site for a while, I find them useful. If you disagree, tell me.

If you dislike it, it can be turned off of all the sites you visit by clicking on “options” when a Snap-thingie pops up. I’m still wondering whether letting Snap look over my users’ shoulders is the right thing to do… hmmm.

I had a little trouble installing it with my theme. My custom theme didn’t initially have the following standard code in the footer template: <?php wp_footer(); ?>

update 6-22-07: I removed it after using it for a while.

• While the popup is coming up, you can’t click on the link; this happened a lot.
• I started seeing some semi-pseudo advertising going on. I forget exactly what. Maybe it was “search for pages like this one” or some such. And there is a Firefox “search plugin” for users… so they’re using the plugin to get data from me.
• Why in the world would I want the Snap popup to have a “search the web” text box? -That- is advertising.
• It was kinda annoying.

(note: I disabled the plugin. See the comments for more info)

To try and keep the 100+ comment spams per day out of my life (and even my ‘moderated’ pile), I’ve installed Math Comment Spam Protection. I’ve tried several “makes you add two numbers” plugins and this one seems to work best with what I have. If it makes posting comments too terrible, please tell me…. in a comment… or…. whatever.

Update Feb 10, 2008: See this post where it is now successfully installed! W00t!

Update Nov 10, 2006: FastCGI isn’t stable. So I am disabling it. I’d sometimes see a 30 second timeout error right next to a 2 second load time. It just isn’t stable. :-( Sometimes it would crap out on an upload, sometimes on downloads…

The whole site should be much faster now that I’ve set up FastCGI on my Dreamhost account :-)

Here’s how I had configured it:Put the following at the beginning of the .htaccess file of the directory I wanted to run FastCGI on. IE: in ./lee.org for the whole site or in ./lee.org/blog for just the blog:
Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi


Create a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi and put it at ./lee.org. Make it executable by the user. Put the following in it:

#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi


Click the checkbox in the Domain section of the Dreamhost Panel saying “FastCGI”.

That’s it.

The old backup program had some issue when I moved servers. This one doesn’t have any issues. I didn’t install the very latest 1.7, I installed a slightly older one because it wasn’t compatible with WP1.5

WP-DB-Backup