It’s now over a year since I wrote about “Exchanging apache2-mpm-prefork for apache2-mpm-worker, and using php5-cgi on Debian to improve performance“. Since then I have re-evaluated my opinion about running apache2-mpm-worker and php5-cgi on a low memory machine, specifically a virtual machine running under Xen, running Debian.
Continue reading “A revised opinion on apache2-mpm-prefork and apache2-mpm-worker, and php5 and php5-cgi on Debian, regarding performance”
Getting indexed by Google, don’t repeat this mistake
A few days ago I was going to “deploy” a site I had been working on. It is using WordPress. When I set things up and wrote pages and made it do a bit of what I wanted, I had set it to be private, in the WordPress Settings->Privacy->I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors, because I wanted to make things somewhat ready before having Google and other search engines crawling it. I wanted to have things somewhat set up and ready before showing it to search engines, though one doesn’t get much for trying things with good intentions.. sometimes.
Continue reading “Getting indexed by Google, don’t repeat this mistake”
Moved to a real domain, pretty please, update your links, feeds and bookmarks
Like the title says, yesterday I bought beardy.se, and today I shifted over everything to it.
https://www.beardy.se/
..is the new URL to this site, please excuse me, and update your links, bookmarks and feeds.
http://www.gallery.beardy.se/ is the URL directly to my photo gallery, without going through WordPress.
The old address is now properly permanently redirected instead.
Exchanging apache2-mpm-prefork for apache2-mpm-worker, and using php5-cgi on Debian to improve performance
Running a webserver on a Xen guest with a limited amount of memory, and serve dynamic content, makes one wanting to optimize it, or switch to another webserver, like lighttpd. I was close to doing that, but I like my current apache setup, so I tried something else instead, which seems to have worked nicely for me. I switched to apache2-mpm-worker instead of apache-mpm-prefork, which is the default on Debian.
Imagetest
Had to test how an image would look here. So, here it is, a picture I took a few years ago, of a spruce’s branches, in a forest area near my parents house.
The uploader of images in WordPress seems to work ok, used the flash based one, but there seems to be an alternative one available (just to switch to by a click) too.
That was a nice day, when I took that picture, sun was shining, and I played around with the camera, taking pictures of plants and trees.
Update: Around 10 years later, today, 2018-10-01, I have updated this post to display the image in full width.
Kernel update and udev fiddling
I wanted to run a little more recent kernel on this machine (that this thing runs on), and I wanted to run a Debian kernel, to see how that works, on Xen. It went mostly ok, but, with the previous kernel, udev was not being used. When it then for the first time, generated the names for the ethernet interface, it for some reason detected 3 more (nonexistent) interfaces, so the real one ended up as eth4.
That wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, but my iptables specify the interface name, and therefor, it used eth0, and blocked everything, or rather, didn’t let anything in on eth4, of course. Oh well, after solving that (thanks Johannes, for all your help), I locked myself out because I forgot to edit my rules before bringing them back on again. But that was also fixed quickly.
Now then, I wonder if I should play with the fire, and try to make udev do what I want, do a reboot, which, if things doesn’t come back as they should, would mean things will be down until tomorrow, or if I should not.. Since I like to do things Right, and also experiment with things (which to me doesn’t exclude one another), I think I will do that.
What I’ll do is, edit /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules, have the interface be named eth0, have the iptables rules not installed on boot, and.. then not forget to edit them, then bring them up (using at(1) of course, to disable them after a few minutes in case it would lock me out, again). So, here we go.
Upgrade to 2.6.2
That didn’t take long, an upgrade already, upgrading wasn’t a problem (if this can be read, which I think you can). Didn’t take many minutes, and I also got a chance(push) to make a backup, which also was smoothly done since I already have a nice little backupscript dumping it all, and sending it off. I’ll put it up later, in case it can be useful for someone.
And oh, I noticed that Last.fm had nice widget code for WordPress, I tried it, and added it, looks quite nice I think.
Progress
Right now the Google bot was on, that was quite quick. (The machine that this runs on wasn’t happy, not sure if it was because of that, or because there were some visitors on another site running on the same machine, or other things.. it needs some more RAM that’s for sure.)
I’ve decided to go with this current theme, but change it a little bit more. And I’ve found some plugins that I like. However, as I said above, it runs quite heavily on this machine, especially the administrative interface. I’m trying the wp-super-cache to see if that improves things, and I like to think that it does.
I was told that the top header is taking up too much space, and I fully agree. Editing it involves a lot of pixels here and there, and wasn’t as easy as I first thought, but it’ll be fixed eventually/shortly. So far, testing how wordpress works and behaves, especially on this machine has been interesting.
Todays waste of time
Instead of writing something, or watching some movie or series, I browsed themes, plugins, and things for WordPress. I guess I can’t call it a waste of time, because now that is done, even if it’s not very useful.
I suppose one can have a worse Sunday.
However, the more themes one looks at, the harder it gets to decide what to use, or to use as a base, and edit. Oh well, I’ll let it have this one for now.. not like anyone will look at it anyway. 🙂
Installed
Yesterday I installed wordpress and set up some things. Gallery will also be put here, somewhere, haven’t decided how to organize things yet, as in putting it all under beardy.ath.cx/something, or set it up separately, as in something.beardy.ath.cx. We’ll see.
What I will do though, is to have two main categories here, English and Svenska (Swedish), and then subcategories.