Dull Technical Stuff WRT Site Performance

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 29, 2013

Filed under: Notices 68 comments

splash_internet.jpg

Yes, not much content this week. I’m writing a book, Josh is sick, things are busy, and I’m dealing with a lot of technical site performance issues. Also I might have snuck in a few minutes of videogaming. Like, I beat BioShock Infinite, which is NOT a short game by modern standards.

I installed W3 Total Cache about a month ago. At first it was a miracle, but over the month the site seemed to slow down again. Very confusion-making for my brain.

Last night I began mucking around, trying to figure out what was going on. I messed with some W3TC settings and suddenly I couldn’t administrate the blog. The machine on my web host slowed to a crawl and I couldn’t do anything. I eventually gave up and went to bed. When I got up this morning, the problem had resolved itself and my site was fast(ish) again. It STILL doesn’t pop the way it did a couple of years ago, but it was a huge step in the right direction.

While investigating all this other stuff, I came across CloudFlare. Looks like it’s a content delivery network for small-fry sites. In the past, if you wanted to distribute you content to servers all over the world to balance your traffic load, it would cost huge money. You basically needed to pay for top-shelf hosting in a lot of different places and then pay (or develop) some software to spread the content around. (This is how YouTube handles their ridiculous traffic load. Obviously there no machine fast enough or pipe wide enough to serve all of YouTube from a single source.) CloudFlare looks like it can give small-to-medium size sites the same kind of deal.

According to the site, this can be done for free. I’m still reading the fine print and looking for the catch, but if you’ve got any experience or knowledge in dealing with this sort of stuff I’d love to hear your take on it. I considering signing up, but I don’t want to do anything I’ll regret tomorrow. Or now. Or at some other point in time. I’m trying to avoid regret in an absolute sense, is what I’m saying.

I’ve never known what to do with the front page of this site: www.shamusyoung.com. For a while it was a splash page, but that seemed sort of pointless and self-aggrandizing. Then I replaced it with a simple redirect to the blog. HOWEVER, some people reported that it led to a redirect loop. Somehow, a page at / redirecting to /twentysidedtale/ was a “loop” in the mind of some web browsers. (With no evidence, I’ve chosen to blame IE. Because, you know, IE does have an established history of stupid-making.) But rather than deal with these error reports I just replaced the front page with a stupid, 1999-style “click here to go to the thing” type deal.

Some people are asking for an RSS feed for the podcast. It’s pretty easy to give you a feed for the podcast POSTS. That would be this. But I get the sense that’s not what people are looking for. The problem is, I don’t really use RSS, and I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts. So I’m not sure what this feed needs to have or how I can automate it. Can someone give me an example of the kind of feed you’re looking for?

Anyway. The point of all this is that whatever your complaint is, I’m working on it very, very slowly.

 


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68 thoughts on “Dull Technical Stuff WRT Site Performance

  1. Coblen says:

    Not making http://www.shamusyoung.com redirect to your blog is kinda frustrating. Your one of my top 8 sites I go to so chrome keeps you on my new tab page, but now that link just brings my to a page telling my to go somewhere else. Doubling the amount of clicks to get to your site.

    1. Ditto for me as far as chrome goes.
      As far as a RSS feed, I have never looked into them, but I do use them to subscribe to podcasts (since Zune marketplace is um, lacking). I have yet to listen to diecast, but I’m not grinding in an mmo atm, and that’s generally when I do so.

    2. Jeremiah says:

      I just always had shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale bookmarked, so that’s what Chrome eventually saved for me in my top 8.

      1. Daemian_Lucifer says:

        I just “ctrl+2” and Im here.Yay the glory of opera!I could also “2” then “enter”,but I dont like that method.

        1. Zak McKracken says:

          Oh, I ddn’t know that one :)
          I just open a new tab and start typing “sh”, then press enter. On some days I have to type “sham” before it recognizes the url.

    3. Humanoid says:

      I have a similar problem with just typing in “sh” in the address bar and picking the top entry, which doesn’t redirect to the blog anymore. Ended up just deleting the history entry manually (highlight and hit “Del” in Firefox, think it’s either shift or ctrl-del for Chrome).

    4. AbruptDemise says:

      I also got stuck in the loop, and for the longest time, couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Until now, of course.

      Honestly, a splash page as your front page would work better than the plain text, but avoiding looking full of yourself is a valid concern. Just having it be a bunch of links to various points of interest on the site – Spoiler Warning, the blog, DM of the Rings, etc. – with some prettying up would work nicely, in my opinion.

    5. Jingleman says:

      So, I’m not really all that tech-savvy, and I don’t know all the backstory here, so this might be a really dumb question: why is http://www.shamusyoung.com not the front page of the blog? Why is all the content on a subsidiary page and nothing is on the more basic URL? I’m not criticizing; I’m just curious about why it is how it is. Seems strange to go to the trouble of registering a personalized domain name and then running nothing out of the front page.

      1. Shamus says:

        Years ago I had other stuff on the front page, and I installed the blog to a sub-directory because it was just an experiment, not the launching of a new life-project and career change.

        Now there are tens of thousands of links to the current location, so…

        1. Tetracyclic says:

          Could you not use an Apache rewrite to redirect any requests for http://www.shamousyoung.com/twentysidedtale/{request} to http://www.shamousyoung.com/{request}?

          Unfortunately my only experience with CloudFare was that we didn’t end up using them, but I believe we simply went with a separate CDN service to serve up all of the static content (images, CSS, JS).

          Without knowing where your performance issues lie it would be difficult to suggest a particular solution.

          Is the site still running on shared hosting? If so, I’d imagine that’s a big source of your problems with a site of this size – you’re always going to be at the mercy of someone else thrashing the CPU, and causing unpredictable usage spikes.

          Setting up a secure and relatively simple Debian based server -honestly- isn’t that difficult. At work we have a fairly short document listing each step required for a fully functioning Apache/PHP/MySQL (or PostgreSQL) server with APC for caching and it’s been deployed by non-technical staff quite a few times. If your only goal with the server is to recreate a basic shared hosting setup, it’s very difficult to run into issues as it’s such a well trodden path and these days there’s very little configuration required beyond installing a big list of packages.

          It would obviously be a big change if you’re not already running on your own VPS or server, but it really is a lot simpler than it may seem.

          I realise this might seem like an overreaction, but of all the many sites we’ve taken over management for, the biggest issue has always been people trying to run complex sites that have grown over many years on the shared hosting package that used to work so well for them. Usually it’s eCommerce sites (especially those running on Magento), but it’s also quite common with moderate-traffic (where moderate is a magic number between n and n) WordPress and Drupal sites that have a fair number of plugins and features and a lot of comment traffic.

          1. Tetracyclic says:

            Here’s a blog post on using Apache redirects to have a blog installed in a subdirectory, but have the URLs rewritten to the root, and still redirect old URLs forward: http://perishablepress.com/redirect-subdirectory-to-root-via-htaccess/

            So http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=19187 becomes http://www.shamusyoung.com/?p=19187, but the old URL will permanently redirect to the new.

            It also has some discussion on WordPress’s in built system, and some variations on the approach.

            1. bbot says:

              .htaccess files are very expensive: for every URL request, Apache traverses the entire directory tree checking to see if an .htaccess file either exists, or has been modified.

              This is why modern web servers, like lighttpd or nginx, do not use them. (This is another one of the reasons why shared hosting scales so poorly)

              Generally, big sites that do complicated Rewrite directives will implement them right in the conf, which is only parsed once on load, rather than on every URL request.

  2. Come on, now. This is obviously EA, Bioware, and Bethesda using the cover of the Spamhaus DDOS attack to also try to take out your blog.

  3. The RSS would be a great help (would have asked myself but as that kind of comment turns up somewhere between the first and third podcast anyone ever posts if they didn’t set up an RSS for it). Basically a lot of people use iTunes (which feeds on an RSS link to know the mp3 location and grab some flagged metadata for their podcast database) and those of us outside of the Apple world of music still use the RSS feed to do what we want (so my phone checks each hour for a wifi connection and if it is hooked up then grabs the RSS feeds for all the podcasts I’ve told it about and checks for new items, new items have links to the mp3 data and so it grabs the files and then next time I want to listen to something my phone has the mp3 sitting there waiting for me).

    A link for many podcasts with RSS feeds: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts

    These give you the ‘every different weird way of doing it’ format you commonly see (I think these are all right, the enclosure is the most common thing that podcatchers* use AFAIK but you don’t lose anythign by adding all 4 types of metadata into your feed):
    {enclosure url=”http://website/filename.mp3″ length=”numberOfBytes” type=”audio/mpeg” /}
    {guid isPermaLink=”false”}http://website/filename.mp3{/guid}
    {link}http://website/filename.mp3{/link}
    {media:content url=”http://website/filename.mp3″ fileSize=”numberOfBytes” type=”audio/mpeg” medium=”audio” expression=”full” duration=”numberOfMins” /} (stupid brackets used in case your html sanitiser wants to eat it rather than converting to safe html symbols)

    Also my friends who run webservers which serve out podcasts say the majority of hits from clients requesting podcasts are iTunes so you want to add the specific iTunes metadata (the mp3 link comes from the enclosure but they like to have extra details for their directory) and then submit your rss url to get it to appear in the iTunes app after a few days for it to process: http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html

    * I don’t like the term but it is the one in common use.

    Edit: If you want to be complete then you could point to the xml namespace for the media type (which is a Yahoo RSS thing, they and Apple are the tow big ones that talked extensions of the normal RSS tags to better serve podcast content) by adding xmlns:media=”http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/” as an attribute of the media:content tag. As the Apple link points out there tags want their namespace flagged as {rss xmlns:itunes=”http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd” version=”2.0″} (or push it into each of the itunes specific tags as an attribute). This is all assuming you want to be technically XHTML compliant: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_html_xmlns.asp

  4. “The problem is, I don't really use RSS, and I don't listen to a lot of podcasts”

    While the recently announced death of Google Reader has made this more evident, it always amazes me that people don’t use RSS more. I’ve never met a more convenient way to be notified about website content updates, and then easily read them all in one place.

    As for setting up a podcast feed, I know that Feedburner by Google has such services. I even attempted to test it out myself, but only one episode appeared in my podcast app (#5 oddly enough). But it’s a place to start.

    Edit: Further testing shows that Episode #5 appears to show up because of the Youtube video. My guess is that there is a problem with how the MP3s are embeded in the feed. It is possible that a different format might work (might even work automatically without a separate feed). WordPress has this to say about podcasting: http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting

    1. Shamus says:

      My problem with RSS: I don’t WANT to read them all in one place. I like that every website has their own presentation, and I don’t want the entire web to be reduced to a single font and color scheme.

      Also, I don’t “get” being notified about updates. Everyone’s surfing habits are a bit different, but my own habits run really counter to how RSS works.

      For example, at the Escapist, I follow several things rigorously and don’t need to be reminded about them. Then out of the several dozen news posts they put up a week, I’ll read maybe a quarter of them. If I just subscribe to the site RSS, then skipping these unwanted articles leaves them in my feed, and eventually I have this backlog of stuff I don’t care about that I’ve got to cull by marking as “read”, even though I didn’t read them, I just wanted to ignore them. The feed ends up feeling like my email inbox: This endless stream of content demanding my attention and creating a little laundry list of obligations. And that’s just The Escapist. Then there’s Rock Paper Shotgun, Penny Arcade, and a few other sites where I cherry-pick content.

      Since I want to go to the site anyway, it just seems more convenient to go there and click on the stuff that strikes my fancy, rather than have the RSS force-feed me EVERYTHING and oblige me to manually reject the stuff I don’t care about.

      1. I am reading this as very defensive. If I offended you, I am sorry. If I mis-understood the tone and it wasn’t defensive, I am also sorry implying that it was. Basically, don’t smite me, almighty Shamus.

        I was not intending to imply you were wrong in not likely RSS – merely that I like it so much that its hard to imagine not likely it. I read your complaints and have all sorts of rebuttals/explanations instantly rolling around in my head to respond. They wouldn’t really help, since you do not want/need to consume the internet in the way I do. It’d just make me feel superior and likely piss you off.

        Basically, I really like apple pie, don’t always see why someone wouldn’t want apple pie, and I am sorry you are allergic to apple pie.

        1. Shamus says:

          Oh geeze. I wan’t trying to be defensive or worked up at all. The tone of the comment was intended to be some sort of head-scratching, “I don’t quite understand this” kind of thing. I tried a couple of RSS readers in years past, and got that “this feel like another email backlog” feeling and quit. But RSS is obviously very popular and important to how people govern their internet consumption.

          Sorry if this got weird. I am really curious about web-habits and how people consume their daily doze of information.

          EDIT: Re-reading my previous comment, I’ll bet it odd tone comes from my doing UPPERCASE emphasis. I did a comment yesterday where I needlessly UPPERCASED a word. Strange. Why have I started doing this?

          1. Neko says:

            I put all my RSS feeds, including the Twenty Sided posts one, into my iGoogle page. Which will get the axe this November, but hey at least I’ve got Google Reader to fall back on no wait.

            I like it because it just gives me links to the pages in question, I can see all the headlines in one place and just start spamming “open in new tab” until I’ve got enough to read. If I don’t click a link, it’ll eventually slip off the feed. No big deal.

            For actual podcast RSS feeds, I had some Perl 5 I made to automagically grab the ones I like. Needs maintainance, though, and since I’ve been meaning to redo it to make it all shiny and new, I decided to compromise and neither use the old one nor make the new one. I just periodically go to places like Roguelike Radio and download new ones by hand, like an animal.

            1. Tsi says:

              God, I also use iGoogle to list all my RSS feeds in a single 4 column page and it’s even set as my Firefox home page !
              Whenever i need to google something or just check for news updates, i middle click or click the home button and there i go. It’s so convenient and fast that i’m mad at google to want to delete this awesome service i’m using for years…
              Google reader feels clumsy and bloated in comparison, hopefully, some alternatives to igoogle exist although they’re not perfect.

          2. Since you are curious, here is why I love a good RSS reader so much:

            It takes the 100+ websites I regularly consume content from and puts them all in one place. The time alone saved from loading up each and every one of those to check for updates makes it worth it. Especially for non-regular updates (or if regular updates are late). I’m never chasing content I want; it all comes to me.

            These feeds are organized in to groups, and can be consumed that way. Though I generally just consume the entire list in chronological order. Want to read an entire article, jump to the actual website with a click. Finished? Move onto the next with a different key.

            As soon as I read at an item, it is instantly marked as read. When I can move on to the next, it disappears from my view. When I leave and return, it opens on the last unread item. No opening bookmarks, scrolling to find new stuff, no looking for where you left off.

            If I want to save an article, I can mark it as unread (so it just appears at the top of the list on refresh), star it (moves it to a separate section) or send it to an external service (in my case Readability, which I use for reading long articles when I have more time). Lots of options depending on what I need.

            I also love easy access on a multiple platforms, be it on the web, on my phone, and on my tablet. Any changes sync between all the difference devices. Visiting a friend and using their computer? Log into my RSS reader and everything is there.

            RSS enables me to consume a wide range of content, with minimal effort, and great convenience.

          3. Paul Spooner says:

            Wait! Don’t tell us! Turn it into a BLOG_POST instead.

            1. Asimech says:

              “I don’t know why you’re tellin’ me aboot it, when you could blog aboot it!”

              (Link-y to reference, Frankie Boyle warning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2aUWfzBfE )

          4. Trix2000 says:

            I use it because trying to keep track of all the bajillions of sites I visit on occasion (or often) got really out of hand.

            I imagine it’s not for everyone – I just really like not missing updates, but can’t keep track of when each and every one does (and some which don’t follow a schedule). Though to be fair there are some feeds I go through more regularly than others…

            Depending on the feed setup too, sometimes you do have to go to the site itself to see anyways. Don’t really know how that’s done myself, but it does get weird to not click through all the time (and I’d miss comments here if I didn’t).

            1. Dues says:

              This is the main reason why I use RSS feeds. Rather than reading a few sites that update regularly, I read hundreds of sites that update irregularly. And even if the site does update regularly, this way I don’t have to keep track of the update schedule.

              PS. If people are asking for an rss link, that might just mean that they are having trouble finding the rss link. You could try leaving an rss icon next to the text link.

            2. Atle says:

              I’m in both camps. I use RSS for keeping up to date with sites I would otherwise forget about. But I also agree with Shamus, I get a huge backlog of stuff I haven’t have time to read yet. And keeping up with the feeds often feels like a shore.

          5. Kernly says:

            One uppercases for EMPHASIS. It makes sense. I guess the problem is that people also uppercase for I AM REALLY MAD AAAAAAAAAH! So people get really riled up by uppercase, which is sad because it’s a really convenient alternative for italics. Like, how do I – ah, there’s a guide up there, cool. But still, having to do that “less than symbol, i, greater than symbol”thing twice is much less convenient than holding down shift for a second.

            1. Bryan says:

              /italics/

              _underline_

              *bold*

              :-P

          6. Blake says:

            In my case I have Thunderbird as both my email client and RSS client/thing,
            it’s very useful for stuff like the ‘Procedural World’ blog, where updates are infrequent enough I’d never go to the home page, but the moment there’s something new to know about I see it.

            If I wasn’t using a standalone email client (largely due to work requirements), I don’t think I’d use RSS, and I would be worse off as a result.

          7. Ingvar says:

            I find RSS to be useful for things that update infrequently enough that checking the site “every X” becomes either infrequent enough that it falls out of the mental to-do list (like, uh, about monthly or longer) or is frequent enough that the typical response is “nothing new”.

            The former leads to not reading through forgetness, the latter leads to not reading through “there’s never anything new”. It’s even worse when the updates are intermittent.

            FWIW, with the RSS reader I use, I tend to go to the “oldest unread feed item”, then either read or skim from oldest to newest, about every week or three. Or sometimes several days in a row.

            And I get TwentySided through a completely different RSS-based import system, but I normally go “Aha, new D20!” and click through to here. Because there I don’t get the comments and here they’re important.

          8. Deoxy says:

            Why have I started doing this?

            Because the shift button makes things upper case instead of bold? Seriously, 99 times out a hundred, that’s why I ALLCAP words – because there’s a quick and easy way to do it, and for bold (what I’d rather use), there isn’t.

      2. Hamilcar says:

        I feel the same way about RSS. I find it only as a replacement for going to the website itself. Why would I not want to go to my favorite websites?

        The only good I have found for the RSS is manga scanlation website updates. There I am following the translations of multiple mangas from different scanlation groups. They have very irregular updates. So the RSS will allow me to see the list of the latest updates on these mangas. There it is convenient.

        1. Walter says:

          I used Google Reader to let me know when there was an update, then when there was I opened the link to the actual content in a new tab to read later and marked it as read in reader. With Google Reader’s death, I now use Blogtrottr to send me an email when an RSS feed is updated and use Gmail’s filter feature to labal all Blogtrottr emails as “RSS” with a red label so they look different than my normal email.

          Speaking of content updates sent to your inbox, I hate how anyone using the new One layout or whatever it’s called has their email changed from “Some Guy just uploaded a video” to “This just in: new video by Some Guy on Youtube”. That makes visually scanning Youtube video upload emails take longer. Also, of course a new layout means you need a new upload subject message. Youtube One is all about standardization, which is why half the people now have a really stupid subject in their emails.

          (Man can I go off on tangents.)

      3. Uristqwerty says:

        In my rather limited experience, Firefox can add a RSS feed as a “Live Bookmark”, which makes it a bookmark folder that automatically updates to contain the most recent posts, and rather than the site’s favicon, each one shows a little icon that indicates whether you have visited that page or not. Clicking on any of them goes to that post on the site, rather than the single-font RSS version.

        It seems like a great way to keep up to date with blogs and things that update rarely (such as once or twice a month), without having to manually check for new content periodically, and without missing new content if you forget to visit for a week or two. (I ignored RSS for years, only recently trying to use it because of a blog or two that almost never post new content but I want to keep up with anyway)

        1. Thomas says:

          I used to do this (until today this is what a thought an RSS reader was) but I began to develop a really hostile relationship with my live bookmarks folder. I kinda felt pressured to click on everything and when I didn’t it was a reminder that I wasn’t keeping up with my entertainment duties.

          So now I endlessly flick between a list of sites which is both inefficient at finding all the things I want and incredibly unproductive but also comes without crippling anxiety =D

          (probably a good time to say I hyperbolise a lot, I don’t psychiatric help. Honest)

          1. Trix2000 says:

            I just shrug and move on – sometimes I have/spend the time to clean out everything, but most of the time I just pick and choose favorites and save the others for when is convenient.

            Then again, most of the content I leave isn’t really time-sensitive. I don’t know if that applies much.

      4. neothoron says:

        The issue here is not about RSS but about its use of it.

        I see two big classes of RSS clients:

        “Inbox style”: that is the type that you describe here: it marks the articles that are not read, and the basic assumption is that you are going to read them all. These are good for websites that have low volume but for which you do not want to miss an article. Personally, I have at least 50 websites (blogs, generally) that do not update often (some of them do not update for months) but I would hate missing these updates. For these, the inbox style is absolutely appropriate – without RSS, I would actually forget going to these websites. (I would recommend developer Marco Arment’s article on the subject for a more developed version of that perspective.)
        “River style”: Basically twitter, but with more sophisticated ordering rules. In this mode, the software does not care and would not suggest telling you how many articles you have not read. These are appropriate for websites for which you are not going to read most of the content, and that generally update often.

        As for your other point (which is about reading the articles on their own webpage rather than in their standardized feed view), all RSS readers I know of allow you to access the original website link with at most a single click (and some desktop ones actually have an option to immediately show you the original website)! So that is really a matter of taste (note that, for some disabilities, it may also be a matter of accessibility).

        1. Wedge says:

          Yes, this is basically what I use(d) Google Reader for–websites that have a fairly slow stream of content where I don’t really want to miss anything. Examples are webcomics (I read a few dozen) and small blogs like shamusyoung.com. I’ve tried using it for news sites that have lots of content, like the escapist, and it’s too much of a barrage.

      5. Taellose says:

        Prefaced with the caveat that this is an explanation of my own browsing habits, and not advocating that others should emulate me:

        Personally, I follow a lot of comics, which is how I first started using RSS. Every one of them has a different update schedule, and I got tired of having to remember when each of them updated (3 times a week, 2 times a week, once a week, once a month, whenever the author has time…). Subscribing to all of their RSS feeds let me stop having to keep track. Half of them include the comic in the feed, and half of them don’t, but I don’t care. This way, I don’t end up needing to load the site for 50+ comics every day when only ~15-35 of them update on any given day. As a bonus, some comics are heavily story-oriented, and update slowly. So I can star/save-for-later the place I left off, and read through a backlog all at once.

        I expanded into using RSS for sites like Kotaku, Gizmodo, i09, etc. because I liked to stay apprised of what was going on at the site without having to keep track of where in their site I last left off. I don’t read every article, just the ones I’m interested in. Again, often times the RSS feed doesn’t include the whole thing, and that’s fine – the one’s I want to see I can load in a background tab. I go through a category, load a dozen tabs in the background, then read them one at a time. The list view of the feed lets me crunch through a series of articles much more quickly than scrolling through each site, reading the articles I want, backing up, continuing on, loading the next site when I’m done, and so on. When I’m done with everything in a category, there’s a button that lets me mark everything else as read so I know those things are old and I don’t care about them anymore. I use it in a similar fashion for other kinds of news, too, like different sections of the New York Times, which each have their own feeds.

        It’s also great for the blogs of people like you that I follow, which often get updated irregularly. With an RSS subscription, I don’t waste my time checking for updates that aren’t there – the RSS tells me. Again, sometimes they include the complete text of a new post, and sometimes they don’t, but it doesn’t bother me to go to the site – I just don’t want to have to keep active track of everything myself.

        1. Viktor says:

          I have a very neatly organized set of bookmarks. My webcomics have their own folder, which is subdivided into other folders based on update schedule. Then I just right-click “open all in new window” on the folder for the current day. This is simple and didn’t need me to learn how RSS works, plus, I can find the comics I like and binge on their archives easier. Or find old, now-dead ones.

          1. Dues says:

            I used to do this too, but these days my rss feeder tracks 800+ comics and a large amount of them update less than once a week. If I switch back to ‘open all in new window’ I think that I’d crash my browser.

      6. I am another person who really likes RSS, but I don’t use it for stuff I know I’m going to read anyway. I use it for sites that are less frequently updated or small enough that I don’t check them very often. I also have a pretty high bar for being included in my rss subscriptions, so there’s a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio, at least, for me.

        It fills a gap that can’t really be filled any other way (for my purposes), so I find it really valuable.

      7. X2-Eliah says:

        This is exactly the same as my browsing habits, btw. And, like shamus, I want the context of the content too – site, presentation, location etc.

        Moreover, I *don’t want* notifications. Why should I? Browsing is a pastime, I’m not going to drop everything and rush to the mobile/pc just because “escapist magazine posted another reiterated newspost OMG!!!! NOTIFY NOTIFY NOTIFY BEEP BEEP”. I’ll read their stuff if I feel like reading that site, and if I can’t find it, then that’s their fault and a part of the article in a meta sense (consider it a ‘user experience’ metatag).

        Plus, I have my basic site rotation as part of my bookmarks bar, and that’s enough.

        Also also alsO, I think RSS readers circumvent adverts, right? Because the reader isn’t passing the ads to the human-reader, but just the textcontent (maybe images?). So, all the hate on people using adblock? Turn that towards RSS-users too, kthnxbai.

        1. Nick Lester Bell says:

          There are different levels of “notification.” My use of RSS does not notify me of new items anywhere outside of the reader app itself. No flashy lights or loud beeps.

          For me, using RSS makes browsing more of a “passtime” not less. My reader collects all the new stuff that comes out, storing it all in an orderly fashion until I am ready to look at it. Nothing gets buried or lost, no matter how much new things appear in front of it.

          As for ads, a website is completely capable of inserting ads into the RSS feed. Many due, especially for larger sites. I had an amusing instance of this with the New York Times. All of their updates have an ad at the bottom for “Taptu”, an RSS reader. I imagine they heard about Google Reader getting dumped, and saw a golden opportunity to try and steal users. It worked well enough on me that I checked out the website.

          1. harborpirate says:

            I think the simplest explanation is this:

            RSS is a DVR for web content.

            People who don’t use it have trouble understanding why anyone would need it. People who’ve switched will swear to you that they’ll never go back to a world without it.

            I don’t even know what day my TV shows are on anymore. All I know is that they magically appear in the list some nights and then I watch them. The same is true of my web browsing using Google Reader.

            Just as with TV, this type of technology is much more valuable if you’re trying to follow a lot of stuff at once.

            RSS means that my content comes to me, all in one place, all when I want it to. Tivo for the web.

            1. Blake says:

              Best explanation ever.

        2. Alan says:

          Everything Nick Lester Bell said is true, to which I’ll add one important point: you can publish an RSS feed that doesn’t include the full content. A bunch of the webcomics I follow have an RSS feed whose text is pretty much just, “The comic for March 30, 2013 is up; click to read it”; and clicking on it takes you to the site. The various news sites I follow tend to just give the first paragraph or a brief summary. Obviously I prefer to read in my reader itself, but it’s a reasonable compromise for sites that feel it’s important that I enjoy the context, or sites that aren’t comfortable with running ads in RSS feeds.

          I suspect those of use who use RSS readers tend to “read” far, far more content than your average person. A good RSS reader makes it easy to scan a lot of news, something like scanning the headlines in a newspaper, but aggragated across multiple sources.

      8. Irridium says:

        This is also why I don’t use RSS feeds. I don’t visit many sites, and while I do have a few I occasionally visit, I still like checking up on them after a long period of time and finding a bunch of new content for me to read. This applies to comics as well as news/articles.

        I get why people would want to be notified when stuff gets posted, but I’m good checking up every now and then.

  5. Paul Spooner says:

    “The point of all this is that whatever your complaint is, I'm working on it very, very slowly.”
    Oh good. I’m glad to hear that my frustration in the lack of modern computationally centric, flexible, extensible role-playing frameworks will be satisfied… long after I’m dead no doubt.

  6. Harry says:

    Although it is, admittedly, an awful piece of software, I keep track of most of my podcasts via iTunes. I think moving the Diecast to iTunes would not only be more convenient for a lot of the people who already listen, but might even expand your audience! You’ll have to get other people’s input on how to actually make this happen, though, as I have no idea, but I get the impression it’s not difficult for an amateur podcaster to get their show on iTunes – most of the podcasts I get on there are made by enterprising amateurs who record at home rather than in a studio.

    1. zob says:

      I second this notion. If (or when) your podcasts become popular that might create some bandwith issues with your provider. I’d suggest using a third party site like podbean or libsyn for hosting your podcasts and then releasing them on itunes.

      @Harry there are some sites on the internet that give you the address behind that bloatware called itunes but I’d think twice about using them if the podcast in question is getting some compensation from itunes.

    2. Blake Winton says:

      I’ve put a hand-edited rss feed up on my site. It’s usually only a couple of days behind, but it’s what I use to listen to the Diecast in iTunes…

      Shamus, feel free to take a look at it, and steal it for your site. (I’m not a giant fan of hand-maintaining stuff like this. ;) Oh, and if you have any questions about what I did with it, or why, or if you want me to take it down for some reason, just let me know.

      1. harborpirate says:

        I just wanted you to know, even if this feed disappears or stops updating tomorrow, this made my day.

  7. Daemian_Lucifer says:

    I suggest a kickstarter for Shamoose to open his own server farm.Maybe even hire a couple of interns to do the mundane stuff for him(“Hey,you,wheres my 10 hours of minecraft for today?!Get those blocks dug!”).

    1. Ciennas says:

      I never got more deeply into minecraft then the droid demo. Can’t you build a mining machine?

      I know you can work in co-op.

  8. Lanthanide says:

    I don’t know anything about cloudflare myself, but thestandard.org.nz, which is a large blog about NZ politics and sometimes gets posts with 200-300 comments on it, does use cloudflare. I’d say The Standard is bigger than TwentySided, but it’s not a mega site.

    Email the site admin, which you can find here: http://thestandard.org.nz/contact-us/ and I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you his experience with cloudflare and other “running a popular blog” things.

  9. Bryan says:

    Hmm. Was the favicon removal intentional? Seems to be gone today, though it was present yesterday…

    (If it was intentional, then carry on; it’s not like it was that critical. :-) )

  10. pinchy says:

    Hey, I can get to the front page using IE instead of looping now, that’s kinda cool. Was getting annoying only having IE on the work computer and not being able to add anything else.

  11. bigben1985 says:

    I have way too much stuff that I follow online to remember all of it. It goes in convenient groups in my RSS and it tells me when there is new content. And because I grouped it, after I read the interesting stuff, I just click one button and everything I don’t care about in that group is marked unread and never bothers me again. I use Feedly, by the way, it works in the Browser!

  12. Peter H. Coffin says:

    *most* of the time, I’m even hitting your articles from links inserted into my LiveJournal stream of posts. I’ve been doing this so long that I can’t even really remember if it’s done via real RSS or if LJ simply checks the twentysidedtale/ page for changes even couple of hours. The presentation is the whole article posted, with pictures, and (for me — i think it’s a setting) a placeholder for embedded video, but no comments. Which strikes me as a nice balance, because I can skim the article, think about it while doing other things, then click through later once enough comments have piled up so as to have something to respond to. And, with the exception of some of the old Let’s Play reposts, I’m pretty much always coming through to read and post comments. Which reminds me; this setup I’m using had been in place at least like 4 years, because I think I started using it during the Silent Hill Origins Let’s Play.

    1. Ingvar says:

      It’s an RSS feed (most clearly visible if you go to the “user info” page; well, feed info page).

  13. TMTVL says:

    And here I was thinking you’d put a link to the forums on the main page. By the way, Shamus, could you put a link to the forums somewhere?

    1. Shamus says:

      I’m trying to avoid having too many people join at once. I mentioned it in the podcast where someone would have to type in the address manually. Then I mentioned it on Twitter via a retweet. And it’s also getting mentioned here in the comments.

      If all goes well, then maybe in a little while I give the forums their own post.

      If that works out, they’ll get added to a menu.

      This “baby-steps” approach keeps the launch slow so I can learn the ropes before I have to contend with a lot of posting activity.

  14. Andrew says:

    W3 Total Cache (at least in my tests) is actually Slower than a stock site. any time it saves by not running chunks of wordpress it spends running itself. WP Super cache is somewhat better, but both have drawbacks and don’t really work well. A site i manage has to deal with DDoS level load every now and again, had to write my own cache and leverage cloudflare (it can handle 5k req/s :D). The real problem is wordpress, it’s ABSURDLY slow, but there’s no suitable alternative.

    Do some profiling, xdebug + kcachegrind works well, you have to try make page rendering fast. Can’t really cache pages with comments and thats probably why causing issues with W3TC; it CAN be done, the plugin i had to write does it, but it is very messy and error prone.

  15. X2-Eliah says:

    So, hey, what if the whole “spoiler warning forums” was just an elaborate April Fool’s joke by Sham- ?

  16. william dutton says:

    It could actually be your mysql db instance that is having problems. If that is also only shared hosting.

    I run a meager wordpress website which gets 3000 hits a month and i was noticing slowness, so i moved the php/apache side to the vps i hired from dreamhost. Well now that i look at the cpu usage and memory usage of my site after that, it was still slow. xcache or simliar apache caching plugins are great if your have pockets of money to put into memory. All this points to is that the shared hosing mysql instance is just plain slow, and if thats slow comments and all other counters as well are showing dynamic pages slow down as well.

    hope this helps.

    also on my problem. dreamhost has a bad habit of all db’s move over to vpsmysql or you are all stuck on shared, and as i have 10’s+ websites running on it i don’t want to pay for the extra overhead of the 10’s+ -1 websites which only get 100 page visits a month.

  17. Rick says:

    I’m not a WordPress developer (I use other tools) but doesn’t WordPress have a custom fields system? Could this be bundled with the RSS code to alter the RSS feed for audio posts?

    Also, I tried CloudFlare once and a 2 minute server outage turned into over an hour of website outage while their system tried to serve what it could but failed, even after the server was back up. I could have set something wrong, but I didn’t want to hang around to find out.

  18. Steve C says:

    Hey Shamus if you want a quick, easy and free way to reduce some of your server load then you could coralize some of your links. For example I did not download your podcast from your server. I downloaded it from an invisible cloud of data where nobody actually uploaded it. I used this link:

    http://www.shamusyoung.com.nyud.net/diecast/diecast7.ogg

    All you would have to do to implement it is do exactly what you are doing now with one exception. Format the download links like I just did. It’s just 9 extra characters but it saves you a ton of bandwidth.

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