Photography, Games, Wolves, Dogs and other Canines
Webserver
While I am mostly playing around with this site behind the scenes there are often needs for some tweaks. I’d like the different parts of the blog post to the main site. But not only my personal blogs are hosted here, also some blogs from friends. Hence I had the need to stop the amazing plugin „WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages“ to post certain blogs.
While transitioning from a normal WordPress single blog to WordPress Multisite, there were a few things to look out for. Nothing critical, but the solutions below might save you some time troubleshooting.
If you noticed the past weeks the speed of the server went down a bit, which was bugging me a lot. I am running Plesk 10 here and it is really annoying at times. Plesk is using its own system for everything and ofc it changes from version to version, which means it is often more luck than anything if you get things running right away. But I dared anyhow!
Do you know the feelign when sometimes there are more bots than visitors crawling over your site? You look at their websites and realize they are just some crapbots doing stuff that will not benefit you or your site at all. Instead they are just choking up your bandwidth. sometimes when this little server gets overwhelmed by requests the last requests in the log came from bots, especially baidu spider.
I decided that this has to stop!
„How to stop unwanted Crawlers, Bots and Spiders!“ weiterlesen
This one took me a while to figure out. On my main site myrddin.de I am using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver files from different domains and speed up page loading times.
With the new design I am using a custom font and it displayed properly up till I activated said CDN. All Browsers but Firefox continued to properly display the Font and ofc I thought at first that it was my own fault.
After 5 years of writing and getting tired of linking urls that look like http://www.myrddin.de/2011/01/19/enhancement-shaman-soloable-bosses/ I thought it would be nice to get rid of the date part and shorten urls for irrelevant information. The whole purpose of the standard „year/month/day“ structure is to make it easier for wordpress to recognize an url as belonging to a post.
„WordPress updated Permalink Structure, rewrite htaccess“ weiterlesen
The past week I noticed errors and sometimes stalling performance of my PHP-applications. After some research I realized that the error might be related to some Linux distributions using only a small shared memory size which might cause APC to malfunction.
This Server was set up in 2007 on SuSE 10.1 & Plesk 8.1, but meanwhile SuSE 10.1 reached end of life cycle and is no logner being supported. It got increasingly tedious to keep up to date with current security patches. The main reason for delaying an upgrade was that SuSE isn’t very good to upgrade form each build to the next and this server runs several productive realms and databases.
Nevertheless I had been looking around for a decent new Operating System and decided to go for CentOS as it is very friendly towards upgrades.
Anyway here is how I did it.
„How to upgrade SuSE 10.1/Plesk 8.4 to CentOS 5.5/Plesk 9.5“ weiterlesen
For a couple of months I have been moody about this site’s performance. This server serves only a couple of domains and this is by far the most visited of them – yes, really 😀
This server is a vServer from a mass hoster running on ancient hardware shared with other people and I assumed it was one reason aside a bloated WordPress install with loads of plugins that raised response times to an unendurable degree. We had like 5 seconds on a cached page before anything was even served.