Moved Blog to WordPress.com

I know that my blog has been pretty quite the past few months (I’ve been super-busy!) but kubasik.net was never really meant to host the traffic this blog was generating, so to make things easier on all 6 of you who read it, I have moved the blog to WordPress.com. There are still redirects at Kubasik.net/blog as best as it can, but let me know if you are finding dead links!

Failed Movable Type Experiment

So I attempted to migrate my blog from WordPress to Movable Type Open Source. I’ll go into specifics later, but suffice to say that it was a miserable failure. Problems with planets, constant admin interface crashes, extremely spamable, and most of all, just unusable.

As a result of my reversion back to WordPress, I have lost a few posts, I will try to migrate them back, but its possible I’ll just do a major ‘things that we have missed’ post in a bit. Anyway, more updates coming soon.

The Deed Is Done

A successful (so far) WordPress upgrade. Version 2.3 seems cool enough, If you spot a problem, please let me know!

Edit: It appears that I may have spoken too soon… Some fickle behavior from plugins that used to like categories,  but I guess that was to be expected. =/

Switching to Yahoo Publishers Network

I decided to give the Yahoo Publishers Network Beta a try, I never really make much money from ads, but it will be nice to have something to compare Adsense to.

So feel free to play around with the new ads, and my new analytics system (sorry if its slow!).

Php Troubles

Sorry for the downtime this afternoon, had some php problems, luckily, sorting them out seemed to fix some other underlying issue, and the site is far more responsive. I hope no planets or readers got spammed in my attempts to fix everything!

Lame Blog Linking Help

Miguel de Icaza has asked for some simple link help in getting Lame Blog some better Google results. I dunno if this helps at all, I don’t have a great Page Rank (I think its a 4 at the moment) so maybe its hurting, but the planets I get syndicated to do way better, so hopefully it helps.

New Theme, OpenID, and Sorry if I Spammed

Hey, so the 10 of you that actually visit my blog and don’t read it through a planet, you may have noticed me having some fun today. I decided that my blog was going to support OpenID, despite my hosting provider not having the needed math libraries, so my apologies if logins aren’t as speedy as you would like. However, dependencies and the like were not the hard part of the process at all, the OpenID WordPress Plugin doesn’t really integrate into the site unless your running Kubrik or a derivative.

Luckily, there’s an easy enough solution, the OpenID API is pretty easy, and it didn’t take much to get everything (including Comments, and logging in via that link!) more or less running smoothly. On that note, don’t hesitate to nag, I hope its something people actually want to use. Its in that spirit that I have this little poll, no obligation, I was just thinking about pushing for Gnome to consider the MoinMoin plugin on live.gnome.org.

Ajax Polls and Planets do not like each other! Please participate in the poll here.

My last fun tidbit for the evening is actually really useful, if anyone runs a WordPress blog, they know that its not the fastest or lightest thing in the world. But, most likely they have heard of wp-cache2, and have reached a comfortable compromise. One thing that really sucks about wp-cache2, is you can’t compress pages and use it, which means were missing out on the biggest web speedup there is. I realized this evening that you can totally utilize php’s native compression, and completely bypass the issue. If you add the following to your .htacces in the wordpress folder, your looking at a significant speedup, at least, I noticed one.

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2

I believe the compression levels are 1-5, but don’t quote me, I’m using 2 for the moment, and I’m happy, I might do some more tweaking later though.