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2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 1,500,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 64 days for that many people to see it.
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 1,000,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 43 days for that many people to see it.
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 530,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 23 days for that many people to see it.
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 350,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 6 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!
Backing up Der Flounder
I’m very fortunate that WordPress.com’s hosting has provided me with a free way to blog without having to worry about anything besides “Is it up?” However, along with the question “Is it up?”, there’s the possibility that the answer someday may be “No”. The usual answer to this problem is “Set up an automated backup”, but I had the following technical issues to deal with:
- Backups can only be made manually via the admin console
- Backups made via the admin console would not include the hosted media (images, videos, etc)
- Media is linked at a separate address
- I do not have shell access to the server(s) hosting the blog (which would allow me to set up a normal WordPress backup)
Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward solution: mirror the site to a local backup using HTTrack. See below the jump for the details.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for Der Flounder.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 50,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Decommissioned one of my home servers.
Since it was a nice Saturday with not much to do, I decided to decommission my oldest Mac server at my home and move its functions to another box that was newer. The oldest box (a Blue and White G3 running 10.4 Server) ran my VPN and DNS service which I didn’t want to have to rebuild, while the newer box (a Quicksilver G4) at this point was mainly acting as a Tivo media server using Tivo’s Tivo Desktop software. Since I could easily rebuild the Tivo stuff, I decided to go ahead and clone the older server’s boot drive on to the newer box’s boot drive.
This proved to be a little trickier than I’d originally thought. My original plan was to boot the newer box in Target Disk Mode, mount it as a FireWire drive, and clone directly from my old box. It was at that point that I discovered that the FireWire ports on my old box had given up the ghost at some point. I was contemplating the hassle of physically moving the drives when I remembered that I had a bootable clone drive installed in my old box. I could use ASR to make an image of the old box’s backup drive using Disk Utility, then use the disk image to image the boot drive of the newer box.
Once I had my image built, I posted it to one of my 10.5.x boxes and turned on the Apache webserver, then booted my newer box off of an OS X Server install CD. I was then able to re-image the newer box’s boot drive using Disk Utility’s ability to run a restore using an image pulled over HTTP. The imaging itself completed without a problem and the server booted itself without issues. Once it was up, I installed the Tivo Desktop software and rebuilt the Tivo media server. The effective brain transplant looks like it has been a success, which was the desired result.
Moved to a new home.
I’ve been futzing on and off with my home-based WordPress blog for a while now, as I started having a number of speed issues with PHP. Since WordPress offers free space, I decided to make the move over to their digs. My new address (if you’re still using the old http://www.taomechworks.net/blog address) is https://derflounder.wordpress.com
XCache
I struck out with APC after trying a few times and not succeeding. Fortunately, I was able to find XCache, a comparable PHP opcode cacher that had one big advantage: clearly written directions on how to install XCache on OS X. In my case, I was installing it on OX Server, instead of OS X, but it looks like the instructions work on Server as well. After installation, to avoid any glitches, I tried disabling wp-cache2. Speeds looked good after that, so I tried enabling wp-cache again. Performance actually went down when I enabled it, so I disabled wp-cache2 again. I think I’ll leave it disabled, and see what XCache can do on its own. So far, it’s definitely snappier.
(Hopefully) Improving Speeds.
Since it’s a quiet Saturday, and I lack things to do besides haunt my going-out-of-business local CompUSA, I decided to see if I could improve the dog-slowness of this blog’s loading. Happily, it looks like the answer is yes. Thanks to a WordPress plug-in called wp-cache2, it looks like some of the speed problems have been resolved. Now I just need to get APC running (hopefully, avoiding this problem and this pitfall) and this site should be in good shape.
Der Flounder 
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