As most of you probably noticed the blog was down a every now and then the last few days. This is because we moved the blog once more.

I just didn’t like the restricted environment of a shared hosting account with CPanel, so I have switched the blog over to a Cloud VPS on the Rackspace Cloud

Now after setting up the blog on this new server we encountered a problem, We were going into deep swap usage on the server, meaning it would basically lockp-up entirely.

So after discovering this I went to research on how to resolve this and eventually made the switch from Apache with PHP as a module to nginx with PHP-FPM.

It still requires some tweaking but behaves a lot better compared to apache, especially now PHP isn’t loaded to handle static files.

I’ve also uploaded a shiny clean install of wordpress, meaning all wordpress files are in their original form and all plugins have been reinstalled and reactivated.

All that remains now is to get IntenseDebate to behave itself again, now waiting for it to import the comments.

Well that’s it for today, onto another long period of uninterrupted blog uptime galore.

~Xeross

After reading this post by Myrhial Arkenath I decided to overhaul some aspects of my blog too, adding some plugins and changing some settings.

Permalinks

As you might have noticed I have changed my permalink structure, up till about 10 minutes ago the structure would’ve been /year/month/day/post-name however the date part is completely unneeded and just makes the URL longer. So now I’ve changed the structure to be /post-name as can be seen in your url bar right now (probably).

Plugins

Next to this I’ve also added some additional plugins, for info on what they do again check Myrhial’s post

• WP Super Cache
• SEO Slugs
• Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs aren’t yet implemented in the blog theme but will be added soon.

~Xeross

As most of you have already heard (And as some of you have already blogged about it) David Perry (A.K.A. CrazyKinux) has posted the new Blog Pack member list on his blog. Almost immediately as I got word the new list was up I went to check it out (As I was secretly dreaming of  a place in the pack myself).

So after opening the post and scrolling through the list of  people that made it into the new pack I felt a sudden burst joy and amazement as I was on the list. I didn’t expect it as I didn’t think my posts were of that great quality, but it seems CK finds them valuable so I’m now a proud member of the pack.

So here once more is the list of people that made it into the new blog pack, congratulations to both old and new members alike.

1. A Ghost Blog, by Mr NOXx
2. A Merry Life and a Short One, by Hallan Turrek
3. A Mule in EVE, by Manasi
4. Astral’s EVE Trial by Fire, by Astral Dominix <– NEW
5. Beginnings of Piracy (The), by Mail Lite <– NEW
6. Captain’s Log (The), by Prometheus09
7. Chocolate Heaven, by Kala <– NEW
8. DeafPlasma’s EVE Musings, by DeafPlasma
9. Dense Veldspar, by Ahnog <– NEW
10. Diary of a Bored Spaceman, by Rolinthor <– NEW
11. Diary of a Pod Pilot, by Myrhial Arkenath
12. Ecliptic Rift, by Casiella Truza
13. Elitist (The), by Xeross <– NEW
14. EVE Monkey, by evemonkey <– NEW
15. EVE Newb, by Spectre
16. EVE Online Wormholes, by Star Defender
17. EVE Travel, by WebSapceships <– NEW
18. EVE’s Weekend Warrior, Tony
19. EVEOGANDA, by RixxJavix <– NEW
20. Finders and Keepers, by Aiden <– NEW
21. Flashfresh – A Pirate, by Flashfresh
22. Freebooted, by Seismic Stan <– NEW
23. Guns Ablaze, by Jager Da <– NEW
24. Hands Off, My Loots!, by Cyberin
25. Helicity Boson, by Helicity Boson <– NEW
26. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, by Kirith Kodachi
27. Jump on Contact, by Zetetic <– NEW
28. Jumping through Wormholes, by eve_riotrick <– NEW
29. K162space, by Blake
30. Kane Rizzel – A Pirate’s Perspective, by Kane Rizzel
31. Kirith Darkblade, by Kirith Darkblade <– NEW
32. Learning to Fly, by Arukemos <– NEW
33. Letrange EvE’s Blog, by Letrange <– Forced out of retirement
34. Life in Low Sec, by Mynxee
35. Mike Azariah, by Mike Azariah <– NEW
36. Morphisat’s Blog, by Morphisat
37. My Loot, Your Tears, by Khalia Nestune <– NEW
38. Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog, by Nashh Kadavr <– Pulled out of a black hole just in time!
39. Our EvE, by Kename Fin <– NEW
40. Planet Risk Show (The), by Luminus Aardokay & Quivering Palm
41. Postings from the Edge, by Zapatero
42. Rettic’s Log: The Chronofile, by Rettic
43. Rifter Drifter, by Wensley
44. Roc’s Rambling, by Roc Wieler
45. Sweet Little Bad Girl, by Shae Tiann
46. Tales of Clan Oriana (The), by @Clanoriana <– NEW
47. To Boldly Go, by Katia Sae <– NEW
48. Venoms Bite, by Venom <– NEW
49. Wench with a Wrench, by Maeve <– NEW
50. Yarrbear Tales, by 00sage00
51. CrazyKinux’s Musing, by myself!!!

Edit (03-03-2010): Updated, added links to all blogs.

Yep that’s right, the blog has been moved once more, we already had the blog situated at Lonetrek Hosting for a while now but after having a thorough chat about it with Anthony (The owner and founder of Lonetrek Hosting) I decided to upgrade to the Grid Power package in combination with the 75% ISK discount.

This brought my hosting costs/year down by over 80% compared to HostGator, with Lonetrek I pay 30$ a year (+ 250m ISK for the discount) and with HostGator I had to pay over 120$ a year. So now the blog has moved over the shared subdomain has moved over and I’ll be moving over all my other websites too.

So mad props to Anthony for providing great and personalized support and I recommend everyone that’s thinking about self-hosting their blog or hosting a website or something to go for Lonetrek Hosting.

I have once more remodified the theme, it was a fair bit of work but I’m satisfied with the result, a gaming blog just looks a lot better with a dark theme in my opinion.

I’ve also modified all images currently used in posts to be either PNG or GIF so that they can be properly viewable on both light and dark skins.

I’ll be adding a style switcher too, this will make the old style be just a mouse click away. Please tell me what you think of the new theme and if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Thank you.

I’ve decided to change my nickname here on my blog and on other places (Twitter, Etc.) back to Xeross, I’ve been using Xeross for a lot longer and it just fits better, the blog’s name won’t change and other then my nickname nothing will change.

~Xeross

Since I’ve started playing WoW again and also have also been blogging about it I added World of Warcraft Tooltips (Quests, Items, NPCs, Etc.) to my blog, there isn’t any WordPress pluging at the moment that does this (Atleast not on wordpress.org) but it’s actually pretty easy.

All you need to do is add the following html code to the section of your wordpress template.

<script src="http://static.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>

And after that any links to Items, Quests, Etc. on WoWHead will automatically have a tooltip when you hover over them.

Example: ‘Tis the Season

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask them.

~Xeross