Since starting at the startup, I now use subversion for more than just checking out blogging software. Comes in handy.

Hopefully the upgrade does not break Spam Karma 2.

Update: Future post seems to work for me.

If you’re annoyed by the wall-to-wall coverage just ignore all the posts that come across the RSS feed with Heller in the title.

So here’s a total breakdown of how much my blog cost me over the last 365 days. All expenses are included less the cost of my own labor. My host is Nearly Free Speech, who have a “pay as you go system”. Costs are deduced a penny at a time for exactly what services you need.

Domain name: $7.99/year

You don’t have to use Nearly Free Speech’s domain services, as third party DNS works too. Heck, you don’t even need a domain name, as long as you are fine with a name like http://your-really-cool-name-here.nfshost.com/.

RespectMyPrivacy.COM Service: $3.65/year

You really don’t need this if you don’t have a domain, or you don’t want to bother keeping your legit personal info off your domain registration. This is a penny per day expense, and can be invoked and canceled at any time.

If you want private registration, it’s worth it to only using the domain services here even if you host elsewhere. By far better terms than over at Go Daddy or any other place I’ve seen.

mySQL surcharge: $3.65/year

Most blog software and many applications require this. It’s only a penny a day for a process, and that one process can actually be spread over several blogs. While you get only one process, you can create an unlimited number of databases.

Bandwidth: $3.31/year

That’s for 3,337,476,262 bytes of data sent out to blog readers in a year. There’s also no limit to the number of sites that you can create. It’s actually pretty easy to create a new site just for messing around with.

Storage charge: $6.53/year

I’m currently using 40,665,088 bytes of storage. The cost reflects a four sample per day average and is billed daily (unless you use less than a penny’s worth – then they will just wait until you do use a penny’s worth and bill you) Honestly, most of this is log files. It used to be higher, but I’ve pressed the gizmo on the panel to rotate my logs weekly and compress them. I suppose I could also toss the really old ones to save a few bucks per year, but I’m not really pressed.

WordPress installation via Subversion: Free

Just a command on the command line and the latest stable version of blogging software is installed on my account. After editing one configuration file, I’m up and running.

Support: Free

Every active account gets free tech support via email. I can attest for the two support requests that I have initiated, both were read by a competent employee and I got a prompt. non-canned, non-copypasta, personal, useful reply. You are expected to know what you are doing, there’s very minimal hand-holding. There’s an excellent support forum too, just in case you have any questions not related to actual hosting.

$7.99
$3.65
$3.65
$3.31
+$6.53

Total: $25.13 for the last year of service. Eleven bucks and change of this is because I wish to have a really cool domain name and I want to have it managed by my host.

My old host was $4 per month or $48 per year (which is actually pretty cheap.) Domain names and privacy was extra. Their plan had a bazillion GB of bandwidth and storage, but as a use it or lose it type of scheme. The business model here is to oversell the service and crowd a large number of accounts on to one server. If everyone wanted to use their full allotment of bandwidth or storage, the server would run out of resources, (and everyone would likely be either “fired” as a customer or forced into a higher tier contract.) Since moving, my site seems to load a lot faster, but I don’t have any hard data to back that statement up.

Sure it’s not for everyone, and there are a few quirky shortcomings, but if you are comfortable running a site on a FreeBSD server, this is probably faster, better and cheaper than anything else out there. As for myself, besides being a cheap bastard, hosting my blog and a few side projects here has been a tremendous learning opportunity.

I can’t link to the private forum where the fix was discussed, but I can link to trac.wordpress.org. It’s Ticket #3742. It’s an update to wp-includes/cron.php. I have no idea if anyone outside of my host is having issues with the future post feature, but there you go. We’ll see if this shows up bright and ugly at 8:00 AM Eastern.

My php-fu is weak. I have only the most vague idea of what’s wrong with the codebase. Some suggest that this might also fix my trouble with trackbacks.

Update: That worked. I can see how a bad cron.php might be the root of all my hosting problems.

The only problem I’m really having spamwise nowadays is people who create actual WordPress spam blogs (splogs) and create actual posts actually linking to me. Ye Olde Spam Karma couldn’t tell the difference between a splog and a actual blog. I’m not sure if SK2.3 fixes that.

I might want to see if I could cobble up a plugin for SK2.3 that would let you create a whitelist to give people on your bloglist a boost of karma, and then just set everyone else that pings you to moderation or something. Unfortunatly, my PHP-Fu is lacking.

The other minor issue is that the Spam Karma comes zipped up in a folder called SK2. You know, just like the last version did. I’ve renamed the new folder SK2.3rc4. Hopefully that won’t be an issue.

Watch this space, because If anything goes wacky, I’ll report.

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.

I hope your host has one-click install/update at the very least. If you don’t want to do the whole installation again, it seems you can rename your old files with a .bak extension, and copy over the three new files as a quick fix.

Subversion Mischief:

$ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/

Update: there’s a recommended but optional updated wp-config.php in the new package, but it’s called wp-config-sample.php to keep it from overwriting your current file. To use it:

1. Rename your old wp-config.php to something like wp-config.OLD.php .
2. Open that same file in notepad or another simple editor. Word wrap should be off.
3. In another window, open wp-config-sample.php for editing.
4. Copy over the proper DB_NAME, DB-USER, DB_PASSWORD, and if needed, DB_HOST.
5. Scroll down to where it says ‘put your unique phrase here’, and between the quotes, insert a long string of random upper and lower case letters and numbers, or use this page to randomly generate yourself a string
6. Save this file as wp-config.php . You’re done. If you used notepad, please check to see that the damn thing didn’t add a .TXT extension to the end. Go and load your blog and make sure everything is working.

I though I caught the bug, and searched around for more info. This page talks about “hidden link injection,” while this page has a different exploit regarding a new directory. I seem to have neither of these.

What’s really weird about WordPress now (and before the upgrade), is that it seems that my blog is sending – in response to a request for my RSS feed – zip compressed content whether or not it’s requested or even supported by the reader doing the request. I have no idea why this started happening all of a sudden.

At least, thanks to cURL, I know what the heck is going on.

$ curl http://standardmischief.com/blog/feed/|head

About 50% of the time this will feed me garbage. The head command it there to limit the scope of the garbage.

$ curl --compressed http://standardmischief.com/blog/feed/|head

Nearly the same command, but the –compressed option actually requests compression and decodes it if it arrives that way.

Stumped.

Update, 10 minutes later: As I was composing the service request, the issue seemed to have disappeared. I’ll hold off and keep an eye on the problem. My feed has been off all day (I suppose my reader does not accept gzip), but it’s working fine now.

Update 2: Here’s a terminal screenshot: (179k)

This is also why such sites as BugMeNot and RetailMeNot have been offline. Same host.

I’ve been meaning to post my impressions of my host, and now this timely outage. I suppose my synopsis would be: NearlyFreeSpeech.NET great prices, great service, no sluggish oversold shared hosting, no cut-n-paste email tech support, a truly outstanding privacy policy and unfortunately, lately, the hosting uptime of a free dot.bomb webhost.

Arguably, the uptime should not matter for someone who posts a few times a month, but it sure is annoying.

It seems that despite moving domain registrars, DNS is still set by my ex-domain hosting company for some reason. Those A records are pointing to IP addresses owned by my current domain register, but at their old data center. Forwarding those to the current bank of IP addresses is what the intermittent problem is.

The emal address that I leave in the comment form over at your blog is also in those old DNS records, so that email address may die. I’ve not figured out a solution for that yet (or at least I haven’t settled on a new provider yet)

Update: Should be fixed. Two emails and two non-form letter email responses in about 24 hours took care of it. Love my hosting company.

So I start a voyage of self-discovery on how .htaccess files work in order to fix everything. I figure things out but for some reason beyond my knowledge, I don’t actually implement any of those fixes. Search engines that regularly scrape my pages for content can no longer find my blog, and my traffic drops to almost nothing.

Today I finally fixed things.

The first issue was my root website directory, as many spiders try to scrape my homepage. I created a kludgy html redirect page, but many spiders don’t really like to follow links like that. What I really needed was a 301 redirect, but my attempts to make one using .htaccess were filled with recursive fail.

The solution was a simple php file, placed in my root web directory, called index.php

<?php
header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: /blog/");
?>


The second problem was all the links out there on other blogs pointing to my old posts. I tried to use mod.rewrite again, but that only seemed to work when my posts called for an existing but renamed picture or something. When someone followed an external link to say my most popular post ever, my “Zumbo timeline“, they got a 404. To fix those, I had to add the following lines to my htaccess:


Redirect 301 /2005 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2005
Redirect 301 /2006 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2006
Redirect 301 /2007 http://standardmischief.com/blog/2007

I think that fixes everything.