Thursday, March 27, 2008

Where did Thursday come from?

I turned on the computer today and found out it was Thursday.

How the heck did that happen?

I went to this little blog and saw my last post was on Sunday. And it's Thursday!

We've got a big project going on at work, and I've been tied up with that. Had to work Saturday and Sunday. Yes, worked on Easter. And worked late Tuesday night. Actually, until 1:30 Wednesday morning.

Oh, I've been online a little bit. There have been some problems with a Website -- another Website -- that I've been donating time to, that have been caused by a couple of things.

For one, it's a high traffic site. And any Website that gets lots of traffic can experience performance issues. Think about it. Look at the room you're in right now. How many people are in the room? Okay, now double that amount. Now double that amount. And double it again and again and again and again. By now, you've got a serious problem with traffic. People can't get around as easily.

Websites are the same way.

So, this other Website gets a lot of traffic, and it experiences some performance issues.

Also, the Website has a very inefficient layout. It's written in PHP, but not good PHP. Yes, it's a WordPress blog, but the theme it uses in an older ... and now unsupported ... theme. For small traffic, it's okay. For large traffic, it's no good. And that causes performance issues.

And the Web host has been complaining about the amount of server resources the Website is taking up. They want more money. They have a point: the Website is terribly inefficient, and the server has to work harder to make up for it.

It has a lot of JavaScript that pulls in content from other sources. That's a very slow way to do stuff. Easy, but not very efficient. One or two, fine. Several, a problem. You see, JavaScript is a client-side technology. The upshot of that is that the code is delivered, then processed, then content displayed. And that's a lot slower than server-side technology, where the server executes it's stuff, then delivers it in final form to the browser. All that means that JavaScript causes performance issues.

The Web host has had some issues with a bank of servers over the last couple of days. So that causes performance issues.

All these things have contributed to that Website having issues. And these little things have seemed to reach critical mass.

The solution?

Get a new theme. Drop most of the the JavaScript. And move to a new host.

What's all that got to do with me?

Well, I've been trying to help out. I'm catching lots of flack. And it's all about stuff I've already explained to the actual Website owner.

Now, this isn't usually a problem. But I've been very busy at work. And getting phone calls about a blog while I'm at work isn't vey good. And I have a bad habit of forgetting to turn my phone off during meetings. I got a call about the blog the other day ... and if it had come 20 minutes earlier, I'd have been in the room with Senator Saxby Chambliss and my cell phone would have started playing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" (yes, that's my ringtone).

Anyway, I've been busy at work. And most of my (currently limited) time away from work has been involved in another blog.

And this little blog has suffered.

Not that anyone's noticed.

6 comments:

  1. We noticed Basil, we just knew you had a good excuse. "Take me out to the ballgame." How unprofessional.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I noticed. Especially since you are on my feedreader.

    You still on Dreamhost? If so, where are you looking to move to? I am really sick of the issues. This is the 3rd straight day of their BS. I have been trying to develop a replacement theme for what I am using now, with better sidebar scripts, but, can only work on it periodically because of all the downtime and slow times. Grrrrr.

    I have almost settled on Bluehost. They have what I am looking for, good pricing, and seems like mostly happy customers. Who have you been looking at, Basil? Beth at MVRWC recommends Siteground, which Raven uses. I like that Bluehost has 1 click upgrades for Wordpress. Siteground will charge for it if you do not want to do it yourself manually.

    ReplyDelete
  3. [...] cranking out the new material in a pretty good new format lately. (There would have been more, but this reminds me of me [...]

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, the other blog is on Dreamhost. And they've usually been good, but like you said, the last few days have had issues. Don't happen often, but when it does, it's a pain.
     

    This little blog is actually on Network Solutions hosting. They don't cost much more than Dreamhost, and are very reliable. The drawback is they don't promise as much bandwidth or disk space as Dreamhost. But NetSol's minimum Unix hosting package is plenty enough for me. I have no issues with NetSol. And, they do have an auto-install process for Wordpress. Only it don't work quite as smoothly as the Dreamhost process, so I do manual installation and update at NetSol.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'll have to check them out.

    I have never done manual upgrades or installs, looks mostly easy.

    I'm going to sign up for some other host, move my America Flag blog over, see how easy it is. Importing Wordpress posts and stuff looks super easy now. Hate to give up my test domain of ncdevil.com, though :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh, I have multiple domains on my NetSol account. You gotta look hard to find that it can be done, but actually, it's quite easy. Unlike some hosts that limit one domain name per account.

     

    I really like NetSol, but I hear good things about others, too.

    ReplyDelete

Please choose a Profile in "Comment as" or sign your name to Anonymous comments. Comment policy