Lee.org

I figure that this google sitemap generator can’t hurt my chances of being discovered as a rising budding star.

More interesting is that the sitemap (in the sidebar too) is pretty well human readable.   This tool made that possible.

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

WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 are peachy kean but one annoyance is the odd hard-coded thumbnail size. Thumbnails are fixed at 100 x 100 pixels or something like that.

The Flexible Upload plugin lets you get past that silly limitation in the WP interface. So now I can specify silly tiny thumnails or gigantic, sumptuous thumbnails, as I see fit. It also has some other nice bells and whistles. :-)

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.

I just finished installing WordPress 2.1. If you notice anything wonky, please tell me.

With the installation of WP 2.1, I was finally able to fix Spam Karma‘s captcha. That should do a good job against the increasing number of almost-false-negative comment spams.

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.

Please note that I changed it so that if you want to subscribe to comments while you are leaving your own comment, you have to check the check-box.

(this should reduce the number of bounces I get from fictitious people like WinFreeViagra@yahoo.net.

(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: I removed this plugin. I now just trust in Spam Karma

Spam Karma does a great job of managing my comment spam. But I’d like to do more to keep those 500 comment spams/day out of my database entirely. So I’ve installed the Challenge plugin. It’ll make you do math in order to leave a comment. Spammers hate math. It’s like their kryptonite. I hope you don’t hate math so much as to not leave a comment.

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.