« Call Disadvantage | Main | After The Show It's The After-Party »
January 28, 2005
More Technology Switching
Once this post shows up on a tubafrenzy.org page that someone besides me can read, my latest round of technology-switching should be over. This time it's not the phone line but the blog that's getting the upgrade and the simultaneous migration plan. I should've upgraded my slow-as-hell Movable Type installation quite a while ago, but inertia set in...and I got pretty good at mass-comment-spam-deletion via MySQL Control Center. But this new MovableType 3.14 is supposed to have much better support for comment moderation and spam prevention, so I'll give it a shot before abandoning MT entirely. Which is very tempting, given that the MT core is still coded in Perl!
I've also moved this tubafrenzy.org domain over to Dreamhost. The ibiblio folks are an awesome group of people and I'm still a huge fan of everything they do and the way that they do it...but the last several weeks have made it clear that their servers are victim to a true "tragedy of the commons"-type problem, with too many websites competing for a limited amount of computer resources, often without any of the websites being truly aware of (much less paying for!) the cost of their actions. Make no mistake, I lump my own site into that category of problem sites, my Movable Type 2.661 installation got heavy amounts of comment spam hammering away at its slow Perl scripts and I didn't exactly rush to upgrade to superior blogging software or anything. But I don't want to be part of the problem anymore, and I felt that I should bear the costs of whatever bandwidth, space, and processing power I consume. Luckily, this seems like it will be pretty easy to do at Dreamhost since they have really generous space and bandwidth allowances at really low prices. And a Jabber server that I can't wait to experiment with! Plus an awesome referral program to boot....if anyone out there is looking for a cheap hosting company, click here when signing up (and/or mention 'tubacity') and I'll get a whopping $65 credit that I can use to defray future hosting costs.
Dreamhost will never be as cool as ibiblio, of course....if you haven't already seen it, check out the great new ibiblog, moderated by the one and only Bret Dougherty and filled with some cool posts from the likes of Paul Jones and Fred Stutzman.
Now, I just gotta figure out how to do something with this new stylesheet/template, which I don't like nearly as much as "Stormy" with a modified burnt-orange banner up top....
Posted by Tim at January 28, 2005 01:59 PM
Comments
i gotta say it was damn near amazing seeing your site load as fast as it did. good luck with the new setup.
Posted by: justin at January 29, 2005 10:27 PM
I'm having a similar issues, Tim. I have a MT 2.661 blog on ibiblio. I'm also using MT-Blacklist which has caught *a lot* of comment spam and makes it easier to delete the stuff it doesn't stop. But this doesn't stop the DOS like attacks that comment spam cause.
MT does seems slow... but I have noticed that after 9pm or so it speeds up like crazy. Why is this? My suspicion now has to do with the SQUID proxy server that ibiblio uses to distribute the load of a *MASSIVE* number of hits they get every day. Especially, I guess, from about 8am-8pm EST M-F. I could be wrong ...
I use Dreamhost too. They have an incredible web interface and kick ass support. I too love the people at ibiblio.org and don't want to bring them trouble because of crap old MT software. If it wasn't for Paul, Fred, John, and many others a lot of us would be virtually homeless. Thanks for taking care of us guys!
Here is the low down on the recent MT problem. "Version 3.15 fixes a vulnerability in the mail sending packages for all Movable Type versions in which the user has enabled comment notifications. This vulnerability allows a malicious user to send email through the application to any number of arbitrary users."
I used the patch to fix my MT install. With a bit more tweaking this seemed to do the job. For now...
Posted by: Brian R. at January 29, 2005 10:35 PM