T w e n t y S i d e d
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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.
