If you’ve tried to hit the site recently, you may have noticed a “too many CPUs connecting” error pop up. Apparently, my server was complaining about too much traffic coming into the site. Frankly, I find that almost ridiculous, since I don’t normally get more than about 400 visitors per day. (Once in a while it’ll peak at 2,000+, but not often.) Nevertheless, it seems as if many of my WordPress plugins and addons have been hitting the database a bit too hard every time someone comes to visit. Here’s an example:

When someone pulls up a page, the server has to display all the code and images on the site. On top of that, the server has to query the database for the page’s content. Like most web pages today, my site relies heavily on database interaction, not just because of the main article, but also because of the website topics, the “most popular pages” list, the “recent entries” list, the “recent comments” list, the miniblog, and a few other little things I have running in the background. Add to that the fact that there are a few people checking the site via RSS, spiders crawling deep into the site, and that people actually visit the front page, so more than one article gets served up, and you have your equation for trouble.

In response to this, I’ll be making a few changes to the site, including possibly a complete theme change (even though I’ve loved TypoXP, I might return to regular old Kubrick), in order to optimize the website performance. I’ve started by eliminating all of the “most recent comments” lists from the site, since those seem to have been taking an especially heavy toll. I’ve also eliminated a few redundant features which, while small, were apparently affecting the server more heavily than I’d anticipated. If that’s not enough, I’ll then begin to alter the internal pages in order to lighten the load, since about 90% of all visitors enter via individual pages within the site and not the via the front page.

Anyway, if you anyone reading this has any experience with matters like this and can offer advice on the matter, I’m all ears. Frankly, if I can help someone else avoid these same mistakes, then by all means let’s do it.

If you’re reading this through an RSS feed then you may have noticed that some posts seem to show up over and over again. (I’ve been having an issue with my Bloglines account and I can only presume, based on the evidence, that the problem is on this end.) My sincere apologies for that. I’ll try to get to the bottom of that issue. Hopefully, this won’t annoy you all that much. I tried to ignore the problem, thinking that after a while it would stop.

It didn’t.

I then tried to re-create those posts by deleting the original and creating a new post with the same title and content.

That, aparently, hasn’t worked as well as I’d expected.

So now I’m in the scratc-my-head-and-ask-myself “WFT?” process. Please bear with me while I find out what’s going on.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

(By the way, Ski, I haven’t forgotten about you just yet. I’ll be writing that design article for you that I promised. I’ve been looking at blogger and it’s all pretty easy stuff. It’s just a matter of properly documenting it all.)

The second thing: I’ve added a number of plugins which should make the site a bit more interesting.

• I added a set of social bookmarking site links at the bottom of every story, so if you have a Shadows or Del.icio.us account, you see something here you want to put up on Fark, or you want to track your comments using Co.mments, I’ve got you covered.
• I added a search engine tracking tool which figures out what search engine you came from, your search terms, and articles which you may be interested in based on those search terms. Frankly, this is one of my favorite plugins. If you want to test it out, go to your favorite search engine (preferably Google or Yahoo) and type in “Gnorb florida”. Look for the first gnorb.net link you see (should be the first one anyway) and after clicking on it, take a look at the top of the side bar. The message containing all the aforementioned information will be there.
• I added an email obfuscator which covers up emails to keep them safe. If you type gnorb@gnorb.net, the email will be obfuscated in the code and spammer bots won’t be able to grab your email address. (Do a “View Source Code” to test this out. Look for this sentence and try to find the email address.
• I added a list of the most recent posts to the sidebar (viewable everywhere except the front page, where all the most recent articles are, anyway) as well as the most recent comments, so Junior now essentially has his own section on the site, sort of. (I need to figure out how I can get more commenting to happen here. I’m starting to feel all lonely and stuff.)

There’s still a few other things I need to do, such as add a “Blogging Buddies” roll (Quantum, Ski, anyone else — I gots y’all covered), a “most popular articles” list, and do some improvements to the search capabilities, something the previous theme had a royally hard time with for some reason. I also want to see if I can strike a deal with some online comic creator to feature their comics on the site. (Something tells me that’s a bit of a ways off, though.) Still, I think I’m happy with what I have right now, as most of the site now works just fine (which is more than I could have said for my bastardized version of Kiwi).

Oh, and I brought back the alternating headers, at the request of Junior, although they’ll need a bit of fixing. (Of course, if you’re an online comic creator or artist looking for a place to prominently feature some of your work, I’d be more than happy to talk about lending that space out to you.)

With that, if there’s anything you’d like to see, anything you’d think would make a good addition, or anything you feel I can do better here, whether it involves my writing, site features, or whatever, then this is the place to tell me. (And yes, I will be adding more online games. That’s another thing: I need to create a group of links somewhere that emphasizes the online games available here. People seem to like those. I also need to create a section outlining my own favorites from this site. I’ll be the first to tell you that though I’m no Hemingway, I’ve written a good amount of stuff I really enjoy reading. I’ve also written some stuff that I refuse to delete solely on the principle of completeness, which is another way of me saying “What tha — did I write that? What was I, drunk?!” But I digress…)

If you have something to say, say it. Consider this an open thread.

That’s because I’m bored.

By that I don’t mean that I’m bored right now, it means that I’m bored with the way the site looks. You’re probably not (I hope you’re not), but then again you probably don’t look at this site as much as I do. (If you do you’re a sick, sick individual. Go outside and get a life.)

At any rate, I’ve been looking at making a few changes to Gnorb.NET and I’d like to get readers’ opinions regarding the next theme (or themes). The following is a quick look at and review of some of the themes I’m considering installing or getting inspiration from. (Getting inspiration != copying.)

Binary Moon
From BinaryMoon.com

Why I like it:

• Color scheme already looks like what I have now.
• Non-blog looking blog. (See “Squible” below for a more drastic example of what I mean.
• Very easy to read interface. Actually makes the reader want to read it.
• Easy to navigate.

What I don’t like:

• It would be pretty hard to re-code something like that; I don’t think there’s a downloadable theme available.
• I don’t have the mad Photoshop skillz that guy has. My skills are “moderately annoyed” Photoshot skillz, at best. (Actually, it’s more like “moderately annoyed” GIMP skillz.)
• I hate blatant rip-offs, even if they are from a spectacularly designed site. (Truth be told, there are a few “improvements” I would include, like a Flickr image bar and at least the first paragraph of the most recent articles being presented.)

Enlightened
From SubNixus.com

What I like:

• Very light. Heck, it even has orange!
• Simple-enough look.
• It’s a downloadable theme, so there wouldn’t be much time spent coding.

What I don’t like:

• Too “Blogish”. Frankly, I’m a bit tired of that look.
• Not centered, but that could be fixed.

Subnixus
From SubNixus.com

Live example here.

What I like:

• Design is very simple, very clean.
• Easy to read & Navigate.
• Already essentially set up for non-intrusive ads. (Less intrusive that what’s here now.)

What I don’t like:

• Seems a bit boring.

Regulus
From BinaryMoon.co.uk

(WordPress 2.0 Version)

What I like:

• Based on Kubrick, which is what I’m using now, so the internal structure would be familiar to me.
• Lots of back-end options. With a little tweaking this could make one theme become more than one.

What I don’t like:

• Not much different than what I have now.
• Not much different than what I have now.
• In fact, pretty much exactly what I have now, but with some code improvements.

Squible
From Squible.com

Live example here.

What I lilke:

• Non-blogish, like Binary Moon.
• Breaks up the page into a nice set of sections, allowing for a good amount of flexibility.
• The “Feature Article” on top allows me to keep the important content on top and the not-so important content below it.
• Since it’s based on K2 it’s potentially very flexible and sexy.

What I don’t like:

• Not particularly intuitive, since you conceivably have to scroll down to view the categories and links to other posts.
• Easy to get messy with this theme.
• Off the bat, does not elicit a strong “I want to read this!” response from the reader.

There are others, but these are my top choices. I tend to lean more towards the BinaryMoon theme, maily because it looks like Squible and Regulus combined, and mostly because it offers that non-blog feel while still being built in such a way as to make the reader want to view the site. (Unfortunately, it would likely take by far the most work.) I also lean towards Regulus because it’s based on K2, which works because that’s what I want Gnorb.NET to eventually be based on.

At the end of the day, it may be that I use multiple themes, some pre-packaged and some of my own. (I would be happy to contribute to the WordPress community, and this may be the only way I can really do that, other than donating.) This takes time because each theme takes time to set up, and I’d have to do this, for the most part, during late nights (one or two hours at most every few nights) and on weekends. In addition, I want to make sure I have enough time to write. After all, if I have to choose between a good looking site and writing, I’ll take writing every time, hands down.

Anyway, cast your votes in the comments section, and add a few suggestions of your own. And if you happen to be a designer looking for a project with which to showcase your mad designer skillz, well then I’m all ears. Or eyes. Whatever.

SemioLogic: WordPress is a wonderful tool, but if you’re looking for a CMS, by itself WordPress just isn’t enough. The SemioLogic WordPress plugin turns your blogging software into more of a content management system, allowing you to set up both static content sites and dynamic content sites from your WordPress install. As of this writing, version 3.2 for WP 2.0 just came out, so go ahead and try it out.

Pizza Guy Delivery Stories: It seems the more your job forces you to deal with people, the stranger the stories are you’re able to tell. This collection of stories comes from pizza delivery drivers all over the country. If you’ve ever worked customer service or tech support (or in delivery, for that matter) you’ll enjoy this set of tales and not feel bad at all for these people, because you’ve been through similar, if not the same. Funny, funny stuff.

How Readable is Your Site?: If you run a website (likely a blog) then you’d probably be interested in seeing how readable your site is. This tool will help you figure out if you’re writing for the masses or if you’re better off saving your words for top secret government. Overall, my site’s just a bit more complicated than Mark Twain, but less so than TV Guide. Still, some posts should have been academic papers instead.

HUGE list of linux commands. On one page: This page just warms my command line-lovin’ heart: it’s a massive collection of a buttload of Linux commands, with a short explanation of each one, organized alphabetically within sections. (This link provided to you by Digg.)

Need to Email Large Files?: DropSend allows you to send files of up to 1GB and doesn’t require installing any application to your computer. (Source: The Evangelical Outpost)

If you have any seriously interesting links you think readers should know about (no cas1n0 or p)rn sites, please), drop me a line in the comments section.

After having upgraded to 2.0 myself, I can honestly state that although I like the improvements, had I known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Among the commenters, the consensus seems to be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Aparently, the improvements in the latest version of WordPress are mostly internal (except for the editing screen, which broke one of my plugins, FrameBuster).

Actually, one of the issues that’s been bothering me is the habit WordPress seems to have when editing a post of deleting all the Technorati tags I assigned to it, so I have to re-assign a post its tags every time I post. Pretty annoying.

There are other goods and bads, but overall, although I like it, I would probably recommend other bloggers hold off, especially if you have a lot of plugins. If you don’t, go for the upgrade. You won’t be gaining much, but you’ll be gaining one or two things of interest.

Edit: The site’s pretty much complete. Turns out most of my plugins worked just fine. I’ll still have the goet the updated versions of the ones that didn’t, but it looks like everything’s back to normal. I’d like to thank the WordPress theme for the awesome job they’ve done. If you want to try WordPress for yourself, head down to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog, or go to WordPress.org and download the software for yourself.

Last nigh my site went down. As of this afternoon, that’s fixed.

The old bBlog part of my site is still down. That’ll get fixed.

I’m upgrading to WordPress 2.0 today while I watch the Bucs/Redskins game. After that’s over with, I’ll have to spend some time getting all the plugins and themes back in place. In the process, I’ll finish getting all the stuff out of bBlog and wipe that system off “my” server.

Once all that is done, all will once again be well.

This is the beginning of the end for site changes. Thank God. In addition, thank Nate, and the WordPress team.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my team needs me. Too bad there’s nothing I can do here but yell “Go, Team, Go!” Not like it’ll make a difference — the Bucs are down 14-3 — but I do it just for fun.

By the way, check out my WordPress.com site, Gnorb’s Kitschy CyberXtreme iBlog. (Because one cliche catch phrase slogan just isn’t enough.)

I’m not a huge fan of horror-scopes — in fact, I only look at them when I want to get a good laugh — but today’s astrology.com.au reading is creepily on the mark:

Mercury passing through your zone of self means you’re hyped-up in your communication. You’re plugged in, talkative and ideas come from all directions. Avoid needless arguments today though. Walking or physical exercise might help relax your mind. Peace is your keyword for the moment.

Weird. I’ve been like this all week though, not just today. Don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I have like 6 different entires — on notepad — waiting to be put up. If you happen to see an elevated level of activity this week, now you know why.

As a sidenote, I saw something pretty cool today on Digg.com. WordPress has come out with its own web-hosted version of its awesome WordPress blogging software. From what I’ve seen, the backend doesn’t look too different from the self-hosted version, save for some functional limitations (themes, plugins, and a few other things). Doesn’t look bad, and I’d gladly recommend it to anyone wanting to get their own “my cats are cool” page like this one. (Because my cats are cool, daing it! Well, they used to be until one of them died and the other became a fat, furry imitation of a meat loaf.) Check it out at WordPress.com.

How can I produce better content for indexing?

Help our spiders find your content in its entirety by outputting valid markup for your web pages and feeds.

The W3C Markup Validation Service will help you identify and correct markup errors on your site. Modern spiders can work around some errors but it is best to provide as little work as possible to index your site and display all of your content the way it is meant to be displayed.

Technorati also indexes your feed to retrieve additional information and discern document structure. Feed Validator will help you verify the markup of your site’s syndication feeds and identify possible points of improvement.

I decided to check out the both the Feed Validator and the W3C Markup Validation Service pages to see whether or not the problem may have been coming from my end. As it turns out, it may just be.

From the W3C Markup Validation Service I got this result for Gnorb.NET’s home page. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Needless to say, but “ouch!” Talk about screwing up a perfectly good Web page. The results from Feed Validator weren’t any better. Heck, the tool couldn’t even recognize my RSS feed as a feed! Talk about something that’ll ruin your chances!

Although that first issue is mostly my fault (looks like there are a lot of Amazon partner issues I can’t really do much about), the second looks to be a problem with WordPress directly. Maybe it’s time I find an Atom feed plugin that’ll produce nice, clean code.

Looks like I have a lot of work this weekend. Between that, SEF’ing the URLs, creating sub-domains, and moving all content from all other system blogs to this one and only blog (big task, but worth it, I think, especially since my other stuff isn’t really being spidered), plus fixing phpBB — yeah, a lot of stuff to get done.

That’s the reaction I’m getting from Technorati right about now. Nothing I tag my blog with is showing up, and it’s starting to cheese me off. Interestingly, my bBlog posts seem to be rather prominents in Technorati’s pages.

Daing it, why can’t anything work exactly like I want it to without any problems whatsoever? Is that too much to ask? I install the BunnyTags plugin, configure it just like they say, and what do I get? The big goose egg.

Damn you, Murphy, and damn your stupid laws!

Edit:
Although I’ve finally been able to add the site to Technorati (it finally picked up my claim), Technorati still isn’t picking up any of my posts. Maybe I should start blogging on my archives and see if that works. *urgh*

The more I use WordPress, the more I become aware of just how much I was missing out on with bBlog. I don’t want to bad-mouth it, but man, bBlog’s features are almost nothing compared to WordPress. Then again, the last version I really used was 0.7.2. Installed in my old blog site is bBlog 0.7.6, which had made some marked improvements over the 0.7.2. I won’t get into details since I don’t plan to become a bBlog expert (at least not anymore, since I don’t have to in order to do what I want), but if you’re looking to try blogging software and don’t want to use WordPress for some reason, I might recommend bBlog. (Then again, I might also recommend Blogger, since it’s so easy to use. Like anything, it all depends what you want to do with it at the end.)

Like I predicted in a previous post, I started to become very familiar with WordPress’ theme editing functionality. What you see right now (as of 31 July 2005) is almost entirely a product of that tool. I was able to edit the PHP files that made up the theme and the stylesheet, as well. (Although I didn’t notice whether there was an Internet Explorer-specific stylesheet or not.) Except for the images, everything was done via that tool, and the images only because I didn’t want to have to redefine a few variables in the header.php file.

What I did to get the template looking like this
To turn the Random Images template from what it was to what I have here, I did the following:

First, I wanted multiple columns across all pages. That’s because I like for navigation to be available on all pages of the site. To do that, I simply coppied all the files from the All Columns Kubrick theme (also by Michael Heilmann) to the Random Images directly, except header.php and style.css. (Or the images, of course.) That gave me what I wanted. In addition, I also got a little bit of a bonus from that, since the page navigation buttons are part of header.php, and defined in style.css. (Yae!)

After that, I edited the sidebar to my liking, switching the position of the Categories and Archives, adding a Google AdSense box (click on a link… right… now!), and doing the whole “About Me” thing. (Really, does anone care about that?)

Then came time for the big change. I wanted to see what the site would look like without images so I yanked all the image file information from the header.php file. (It’s a very well documented file, so if you happen to be using Kubrick, take some time to read through it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.) The result wan’t half bad. I wanted a different color scheme, so I looked around for imspiration. It wasn’t long before I found John Hesch’s blog, sporting one of the most unexpectedly nice color schemes I’ve seen. His site is simple and clean, which is exactly what I wanted here.

Now, in real life, I’m the type that likes really strange and somewhat annoying color combinations and styles. If anything, my tastes are anything but simple. But for the website, I wanted something that looked professional, but not something too boring. Something that looked good, but wouldn’t cause seizures. I found that at Hesch’s blog.

I tried my best to copy his style, but I was — and still am — having massive problems with the CSS code to make the page nav bar do what his does. (He uses a table there, I believe, which makes the job a lot easier. I’m trying to do all this without tables, so that’s not an option I want to consider.) Instead of spending a zillion hours tyring to figure that out, I decided to put the header image code back into the header.php file. I put the “body” and “#header” code back in (and nothing else), and decided to start using my own images.

Now, in the Random Image theme, there’s a part of the theme near the top where a variable, num is defined as rand(0,9). (This means that wherever the variable num was called by PHP, a random number between 0 and 9 would take its place.) I changed that to (0.2) and put in my own images, kubrickheader0, kubrickheader1, and kubrickheader2. Once the images were in place, the theme was set to go.

That said, I’ve fnished revamping the look and feel of the site for now. I’ll try to get that dark yellow banner think working, and I’ll probably tweak the CSS a bit more, just for looks, but overall I think I’m done with this for the moment. (The rest of the stuff I can do during my lunch breaks at work. Now that I don’t need an FTP client to work with the code, I can do what I need to do when I can actually do it.)

If you have any questions regarding this “theme”, feel free to conact me here. Once I get it just how I like it, I’ll probably turn it into a full-blown, installable theme and share it with the WordPress community. Until then, it’s play time.

(Actually, it’s sleep time. It’s 5:30am right now and I should really be in bed. I have church tomorrowin a few hours.)

Edit:
I got the yellow bar working! For information on HOW I did it, just take a look at the stylesheet and find #pages and #pages a.

Right now it’s about 5am. Tired? Yes. Happy? Believe it. Asking why Johnny Depp was chosed for the role of Willy Wonka over, say, Marilyn Manson or Robin Williams? Not really, but it does make you wonder, why Depp? Creepy as he can make himself to be at times, I think it has more to do with who directed the film than who may have been the best man for the job. (The director for the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie is Tim Burton, the same guy that brought you Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, and the first two Batman movies.) Turns out that Depp and Burton have worked together on a number of projects and —

Wait, why the heck do I care? I’ve just been having a showdown at the SSH corral with a bunch of weird issues I ran into regarding permissions.

But, enough of that. I’m tired, and though I’m starting to look like Stephen Hawking, I’m becoming as dumb as Mike Tyson. Time to get to bed. I’ve still got to do a ton of work at the site, but for now, this’ll do.

By the way, here’s a tip: unless you have write-access to mod_url in Apache, using the Permalinks functionality of WordPress kind of destroys the site. To fix the problem, you’ll need to go to your .htaccess file and delete about 849 lines of code WP puts in.

Finally, if you want to see what my test-bed was for WP, check out my test blog. Also, if you’re looking for old content (which I’m planning to port here), check out my older-stuff site. Doesn’t look as nice as it did before, but honestly, who cares, right?

Ok, starting to hallucinate. Time for bed.

Well, after much research, I’ve decided to move this blog over to WordPress, instead of keeping it on bBlog. Although bBlog offers some great functionality, ease of use, and great cleanliness of code, WordPress offers me features which allow for better control of the system.

A large part of my decission was based on the SEO-friendly aspects of both WordPress and bBlog. Although bBlog is supposed to be SEO friendly from the ground up, WordPress’ overall maturity (in regards to features and plugins) puts it on par with bBlog. bBlog has a definite advantage here, and unless you’re looking to do some serious work on the site, its features work just fine. As for myself — what can I say, I’m a power user. I spent hours looking through the bBlog code in order to optmize. Thing is that many of the optimizations I was looking to do here, I can do with WordPress without looking at the code. For all the heavy-dutty stuff, I had to look inside the code of both. In both cases, many of he optimizations require work with PHP, so to that end there isn’t much difference. Smarty makes templated BEAUTIFULLY easy, but when looking at the code, I realized that to plug something into the code, I had to know both PHP and Smarty. With WordPress, I only have to know (or in my case, learn) PHP.

With that said, I will begin my work this weeked, transitioning this site from a bBlog-powered site to a WordPress powered site. I will keep all this site as is, but all this will be moved to a sub-directory.

I look forward to blog by email, getting random headers to work, using w.bloggar, pinging sites without the help of ping-o-matic, and more information than before. I will, however, continue to work with the bBlog community (http://www.bBlog.com/forum.php — Forums page). Whenever I can offer assistance with such topics as documentation and page design, I will, I will also discuss SEO techniques they can use, if called to do so.

But in fact, that was one of my problems with bBlog.

Although I love communities, right now, the program needs some work, and a community has to be built up. Although I love working under those conditions, I also realize that life right now is not condusive to that type of work. I want to blog, not to do tech work, which is what I do all day anyway. And although I enjoy it, I also enjoy writing about other things to — no one. If someone reads this, great. If they don’t, great. The only people this is really being written for is me and anyone else who decides they’re interested in reading what they’re reading.

No one else.

(By the way, the bBlog dev team is packed with people that know their stuff. If you’ve ever wanted to help out on a project, they could definitelly use it.)

With that said, I’ll probably stay silent over the next week or so and will be back up and running full throttle shortly. In the meantime, entertain yourselves by reading all the testing post crap I’ve written in my WordPress test blog (http://www.gnorb.net/wp/). None of that, except for the JPop list will make it to the new site, so enjoy it while you can, and, hell, post whatever you want to there. The more features I can test, the better.