autonomous alternatives to the statist quo | a collection of Anarchist blogs
blogging
How do I feel about completing the #NaBloPoMo challenge to blog every day in the month of November? In a way, it was like a month of monetarily free therapy. It is hard to beat that!
I was supposed to be writing a post for today and instead, I spent the last four and a half hours researching coffee makers and bento-style divided trays and plates. Seriously. In the end, I did decide that one specific Hamilton Beach brand coffee maker, which brews a full pot on one side and either […]
The #NaBloPoMo writing prompt for November 7th was: Tell us so far what you’ve learned about daily blogging. It is hard. At times. Some days ideas for three or four posts just spring to my mind and I type them all up in a couple hours and then schedule the posts for the next few […]
In the warmer months, I can be found sprawled out in my hammock out on the balcony. There is a certain level of calm that washes over me while swaying in the sunny breeze. Within reach, you can usually find a jug of ice tea (sometimes, a bottle of Maker's Mark) and hand-rolled smoky treats (catnip, damiana, st. john's wort, poppy seeds, and mugwort). I frequently just end up taking a nap and getting very little writing done.
I assume, that on some level, we (those of us who read blogs) are all a bit voyeuristic. I mean, why else would you basically read someone's online journal? To get into their mind and really see what makes them tick. To see where their heart is. What is their story? It is like intellectual foreplay for some of us.
I’ve been using intense debate for the longest time, being a very active proponent of their comment system, hell, even getting a gift T-shirt for my efforts; but now I find myself having to disable the comment system and go back to the default wordpress comments.
The reason for this is that for some reason their comment system has somehow been compromised by spammers, and blatantly obvious spam comments are coming in constantly, and that is even though they are supposed to be going through Akismet which is excellent at catching this kind of stuff.
I didn’t take this decision lightly, I contacted support who initially thought comments were coming through the internal comments, but once I pointed to evidence that it is coming through ID, they said they were going to “look into it” and that I should fight spammer with IP bans, which is a ridiculous idea.
In fact, another reason why I’m ditching ID is that they have completely dropped the community ball. I have no idea what is up, but I got all excited when they got acquired by Automattic, and was expecting to see ID comments start to get rolled out in WordPress.com and stuff which would have been awesome. Instead the ID people literally fell of the map. Their active blog pretty much died, making 1 post in a year, their support either doesn’t reply, or gives worthless suggestions like IP bans on spammers. And most importantly, their development all but stopped. I haven’t seen any improvements in ID every since the automattic acquisition and that’s just sad.
I was content to stick with ID anyway since it’s better than my theme’s built-in ones, but now that it has also become quite a lot of work to scrub my comments every few days, enough is enough!
Perhaps it’s time to look into Disqus whose developers seem to be actually interested in improving and making useful.
Yea, baby, yea!
I have finally moved away from Dreamhost after 6 years of being a loyal customer. After barely being able to run a simple murmur server and 2 wordpress sites without multiple reboots per day due to lack of resources, even on a VPS, enough was very much enough.
So I have finally decided to make the jump into a different host which came recommended from a friend and until now I’m very glad I did so. Not only is my speed blazing fast compared to dreamhost, not only do I have 10 times the available resources, not only do I have full root access and ability to customize my sites fully, but I’m also paying less than 1/3rd of what I used to!
Now this is a significant difference and I really struggle to understand why I had to pay $15 extra a month just to get 300 lousy MBs of ram which was a also a hard limit that caused by whole server to reboot during each resource spike? Why indeed did 2 wordpress sites with no particular frills and a mumble servers with 5 users caused 1-10 reboots a day for years? Why couldn’t dreamhost support in troubleshooting this very worrying performance of their services?
In the end I really had myself to blame for a lot of it. I was far too lazy and a bit scared of going to fully rooted hosting and got very complacent and used to the user-friendliness of the dreamhost panel. It is all kinds of awesome how easy dreamhost makes it to set-up and maintain sites, emails, DNS entries, cro
n jobs and so on. It’s such a pity that their performance has been in the toilet for the past 2 years for me.
I could even have lived with the 2-5 seconds per page load, or the visible lag I has in a simple ssh connections to their servers. But 20 server reboots in a day while dreamhost support were telling me it’s my own damn fault for running vanilla wordpress, was just too much.
All that was part of the reason why I’ve been so inactive in blogging lately as well, aside for my newborn child and my new hobby in octgn development that is; it was just so frustrating trying to blog in a server that took second to load each panel and literally went down every time I hit “publish”.
I hope that I’ll start writing a bit more now that my snazzy new system doesn’t seem to be making it a chore to put two words together on the net 
I start looking forward by looking back. The past year has not always been terribly productive blogging wise. For a variety of reasons, but one that seems to be forefront in my mind is that blogging somehow conflicts with my degree course. Conflicts in the sense that I feel that I should be putting all my writing efforts into my coursework and other real world commitments. Hence you will have noticed that many of my recent posts on here have been reposts of coursework essays once I have finished them.
But back at the beginning of last semester one of my module leaders said that we should be writing regularly, separately from and by way of practice for formal academic writing, whether coursework essays or examination scribblethons. And then there's my almost non-existent note-taking on things I read for my course. I rely mostly on memory. But then when it comes down to actually writing essays I struggle to find something I read somewhere that I thought would be useful. And I have of course come across ideas in my readings that are not directly useful for particular essays but which it would be worth commenting on for my own use at least in future.
I've no great desire to comment regularly on political goings on though - I'm thoroughly sick of the venal, post-ideological, bickerings of warring would be rulers. Nonetheless if I am focussing on reading and writing around my academic work most of the posts on here will be to do with politics, political philosophy or economics issues. And sometimes of course some current issue will coincide with or illustrate something I've been reading or thinking about.
I started my degree partly because I wanted "credentials" to back up future writing and research, so I ought to practice writing as much as possible, I guess. So with all the best intentions of a new year's resolution, I'm going to aim to write a reasonably substantial piece each week, except when I actually have coursework to write, which I will continue to post when I do. We'll see how that goes.
Sometime in the next couple of months I'd like to upgrade my server software as well, and probably move the whole thing to an Amazon cloud server or similar. So there may well be big changes in look and functionality in the foreseeable future.
To start with, then, I want to do a couple of posts reflecting on what is now the halfway point in my degree...
So, here’s a new version of the site. Still in a very basic form, with only the most barest of plugins. I’m checking to see what the stability is before proceeding but the positive is that I already see that php calls do not automatically take 10 percent of my available ram each. More like 3-5% each which I hope will be manageable once the caching plugin picks up.
This is the second time I’ve had to do a complete wipe of the blog and restart. The first time was after a being hacked and finding it impossible to wipe all traces of the code which meant that they kept getting back in. This time I went even more radical and completely nuked my existing database as well, because it’s the one I’ve been using since 2007, which means its full of crud from all the plugins I’ve installed and uninstalled since then. I sincerely hope this was a big part for the memory leaking because if that doesn’t work either, I’m at my wits end, and I’ll probably have to start seriously considering moving away from Dreamhost.
So now I wait and see if the site will avoid imploding from those DOS-like requests I’ve been getting lately.
I’m desperately trying to figure out what is causing my website to implode a few times a day by running out of memory. So to this end I’ve gone to a simple theme and disabled my fancy intense debate comments which seemed to be incurring a very high load on the site. It remains to be seen if that will be any help but I can only hope.
I don’t know why, but it seemed like I was getting DOSed a few times a day by a russian IP address. It was just accessing a few of my posts which, when going directly to the wordpress comments, spawned some php processes that were not taken care of by my caching plugin. This is the reason I disabled Intense Debate. It remains to be seen whether that will help but I’ll guess I’ll find out today noon, which is when the site usually goes down.
I also switched to the basic WP theme, just in case it makes a difference. I think it’s slowly time for a change anyway.
Insightful? Funny? Informative? Convincing? Helpful?