As I’ve mentioned on Twitter (And possibly on here) I was looking at moving the server again. This move has now taken place. We’ve moved from BuyVM to RAMHost.

People visiting from the EU should experience reduced load times (Statistics show +/- 500ms saved), and for US people it probably loads slower (Or BuyVM was so slow that it still loads just as fast).

I still need to set-up our caching server so you aren’t waiting for PHP to do its business.

Tag Clean-up

I also just went through the entire tag list, renaming tags, removing tags that were too generic and re-assigning some, and with this I also fixed some mistakes in various posts.

I also noticed tags aren’t showing on posts, and because of the clean-up they’re actually useful now, so I’ll also need to correct that in the future.

~Xeross

Yesterday my new phone (An HTC Desire Z) arrived. It’s great to not have my phone lag out anymore like I had with the Wildfire.

It also has a physical keyboard which makes writing large amounts of text a lot easier than using an on-screen keyboard, so perhaps I can now start writing blog posts whilst on the bus, etc.

~Xeross

I’ve switched the blog back to single-blog mode, rather than multi-site as this is more maintainable and the reason for switch to multi-site was invalid.

Most stuff is working again, though a few links are broken, and I need to fix the navigation to show hierarchies.

Now off to bed for me.

~Xeross

So I have now moved blog.xeross.nl to this new location (Which is http://theelitist.net), this to keep all my blogging more or less centralized, I’m not sure what I’m going be doing with the Xeross.NL domain name, but I’ll redirect the old blog to this one.

Other than that I still need to configure some things, etc, etc. but at least we’re up and running.

~Xeross

So in the past weeks I’ve put quite some time and effort into getting WordPress Multi-site to do what I want, so this is basically the result so far.

The front page on http://theelitist.net will still show all posts but you can just go to one of the sub-blogs from the top menu of the main page if you’re only interested in that section.

Things that remain to do are:

• Making sticky posts work on the aggregate blog
• Write a cross-posting plugin
• Reconfigure all previous plugins and set-up sidebar
• Fix commenting

Now my goal today was to get this online and that goal was met, now it’s time for me to head to bed.

~Xeross

P.s.: Please leave a comment if you find any bugs, comments on the blog might not work yet so you can contact me on twitter @Xeross if needed, thanks.

As I have recently moved the blog to yet another VPS host (And this one is finally stable and not slow) I can now start focusing on getting everything that I host back to full health, a quick outline of what needs to be done:

• Blog
  • Setup W3 Total Cache for faster page loads
  • Setup WP-Varnish (Can handle a lot more requests than W3 Total Cache, and I feel like getting my geek on and trying it out) (Finished)
    
  • Fix TweetBlender errors (Should be fixed, we’ll see)
  • Better Disqus styling
  • Fix nested lists (Fixed)
  • Replace TweetBlender with own plugin that supports varnish (And that doesn’t put inline javascript in every fucking page)
• Killboard
  • Fix errors when logged in (Fixed)
  • Set up cron-jobs for automated fetching (Completed)(Doesn’t Work)
    
  • Put varnish in front of the killboard for caching (In Progress)
• Shared(.theelitist.net)
  • Give the main page a facelift
  • Fix PeaProxy

I will update this page as I progress through these, and may add things in the future. These changes should also not cause downtime, but some may.

~Xeross

So I figured another update would be appropriate considering the blog went down for a few hours today.

So we’ve once again moved to another server, and are planning on staying on this one for a long time, as we have finally gotten rid of the shit that is 2host.

Now the actual reason for the downtime wasn’t the above but was that there were some bugs/issues plaguing the blog, namely that:

• IntenseDebate didn’t prevent spam from being added to wordpress’ internal comment database.
• The RSS feed had whitespace at the top causing FeedBurner to choke on it
• Some other small annoyances (This is really just a filler I don’t recall anything else)

I moved away from IntenseDebate over to Disqus, which already seems to work a lot better, and the RSS issues were caused by some plugin files that had some odd double spacing issues.

So now the blog is moving merrily along again, now I’ll just have to revisit W3 Total Cache to improve load times.

~Xeross

We had to move to a different node because the datacenter our old VPS was in was being closed. We might need to do another migration in the near future but we’ll see.

Anyway the blog is back up, welcome back.

So as some of you might’ve noticed (As I asked people on twitter for opinions on the new downtime page), the blog was down for some brief maintenance tonight.

The reason was that somehow multiple aspects of the site weren’t working, especially a lot of the admin interface, up ’till the point where the post editor didn’t work anymore.

Luckily it turned out to be a simple file-ownership issue and everything is working again, the only thing still malfunctioning is the little WordPress.com Stats Graph in the admin bar, but I don’t even use that.

Now all that remains is to enable all the plug-ins that I threw out again, such as the caching plugin which sped the website up by quite a bid.

Anyway, Xeross out.

The blog had some downtime a while ago, we’re still not sure what the cause was but all we know is the entire server was down.

Currently everything is working again, now we’ll just have to hope 2host doesn’t somehow fail again.