Recently in blogging Category

I had a little bit of an accident over the weekend when I accidentally started to restore an old back-up of the database that runs this blog. I noticed what I what I was doing pretty quickly and stopped it before too much damage was done.

But I lost the last few days entries and comments. Luckily I hadn't rebuilt the site, so I still had the missing stuff in the HTML files. I've restored the entries and I've got copies of the comments which I'll put back when I have command-line access to the database this evening.

Sorry about that.

Regular readers will know that this blog has experienced some problems over the last few months. Since I last moved to new hardware this blog has been running really slowly and more often than not any attempt to publish content (whether a blog entry or a comment) has ended with a server error. This has made me less likely to write here and has made you far less likely to comment. Which is sad.

When the problem first arose I prodded at it a bit, but nothing I did made any difference. So I decided to ignore the problem in the hope that a Movable Type upgrade would fix it at some point in the future.

Over the last couple of weeks, that strategy has been causing me large amounts of grief. The problem is that any of the programs that publish content to this site are taking such a long time to complete that the connection times out. So what should take a few seconds is actually taking two or three minutes. Over the last few weeks the amount of comment spam I get has risen to new levels. And even though none of that spam ever gets published, each request runs the MT comment program. For about two or three minutes.

As a result, when I come under a comment spam attack (which is happening several times a day) I get dozens of copies of the comment program running simultaneously (because they aren't finishing quickly enough). The load on the server goes right up and all of the sites on this server stop responding. I've been having to reboot the server on an almost daily basis. Sorry if you've experienced problems with any of my sites being unresponsive.

On a separate front, I decided to move hardware (again). This was prompted by the fact that the people who I rent my colo box from have started to support Centos as well as Fedora (they have Ubuntu too, but I'm far happier in rpm-world). Centos is a far better distribution for servers than Fedora so I'm in the process of moving.

Last night I started to move my blog on the hope that the new hardware and new operating system might somehow fix the performance problems. As part of the process I needed to dump the database that runs the blog on the old server. Some way into the dump process, MySQL told me that it couldn't dump the mt_log table as it was corrupt. I logged in to the database server and ran "fix table mt_log". The dump then ran successfully.

Then it struck me. Any time you publish content on an MT site, you write to the mt_log table.  And the symptom I was seeing was that a process would complete all of its work and then hang. And presumably all of the logging goes on at the end of the process.

So, hopefully fixing the mt_log table has fixed the performance problems. I was able to successfully rebuild the whole site in thirty minutes last night. Previously it would have taken hours and had a good chance of failing somewhere along the line.

We're running on the new hardware and operating system too, Which, all in all, should mean that the performance problems are no more. I'll start blogging a bit more and hopefully you'll start commenting a bit more too.

And here's a good tip for fixing MT performance problems. Use the MySQL "check table" and "fix table" commands regularly. I'll certainly be looking to schedule an automatic job to do that.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Regular service has (hopefully) been restored.

Made some progress on restoring the old blog entries yesterday. I managed to get the old web server working long enough to export the blog data and I've successfully imported it into this installation. Over the next few hours I'll try to get the pages rebuilt.

At the same time (never let it be said that I'm not ambitious) I've upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type and switched to using the new Open Source version. All of which means that there might be a few issues to iron out over the next few days (James has already spotted one).

I've also spotted that my usage of categories, keywords and tags has been... er... inconsistent over the five years or so that I've been writing this blog with the result that the tag cloud and list of categories on the front page have both become unmanageable. So I need to do some tidying there.

But, all in all, it's looking good. Nice to have the old entries back.

These kinds of things are always very dubious, but top 100 lists are always fun to discuss. Blogstorm have published a list of the top 100 British blogs. The list is calculated from some combination of Technorati and Alexa ratings.

Good to see a few friends and colleagues on there.

Bloggerheads will return soon, but in the meantime Tim Ireland has set up a temporary blog in order to talk about what happened at the end of last week.

As you may have heard, the response by UK bloggers to this issue has been amazing. Over 250 blogs are now following the story. Here's the current list (which is almost certainly out of date by the time you read this).

Curious Hamster, Pickled Politics, Harry's Place, Tim Worstall, Dizzy, Iain Dale, Ten Percent, Blairwatch, Davide Simonetti, Earthquake Cove, Turbulent Cleric (who suggests dropping a line to the FA about Mr Usmanov), Mike Power, Jailhouse Lawyer, Suesam, Devil's Kitchen, The Cartoonist, Falco, Casualty Monitor, Forever Expat, Arseblog, Drink-soaked Trots (and another), Pitch Invasion, Wonko's World, Roll A Monkey, Caroline Hunt, Westminster Wisdom, Chris K, Anorak, Mediawatchwatch, Norfolk Blogger, Chris Paul, Indymedia (with a list of Craig Murray's articles that are currently unavailable), Obsolete, Tom Watson, Cynical Chatter, Reactionary Snob, Mr Eugenides, Matthew Sinclair, The Select Society, Liberal England, Davblog, Peter Gasston Pitch Perfect, Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe, Lunartalks, Tygerland, The Crossed Pond, Our Kingdom, Big Daddy Merk, Daily Mail Watch, Graeme's, Random Thoughts, Nosemonkey, Matt Wardman, Politics in the Zeros, Love and Garbage, The Huntsman, Conservative Party Reptile, Ellee Seymour, Sabretache, Not A Sheep, Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, The People's Republic Of Newport, Life, the Universe & Everything, Arsenal Transfer Rumour Mill, The Green Ribbon, Blood & Treasure, The Last Ditch, Areopagitica, Football in Finland, An Englishman's Castle, Freeborn John, Eursoc, The Back Four, Rebellion Suck!, Ministry of Truth, ModernityBlog, Beau Bo D'Or, Scots and Independent, The Splund, Bill Cameron, Podnosh, Dodgeblogium, Moving Target, Serious Golmal, Goonerholic, The Spine, Zero Point Nine, Lenin's Tomb, The Durruti Column, The Bristol Blogger, ArseNews, David Lindsay, Quaequam Blog!, On A Quiet Day..., Kathz's Blog, England Expects, Theo Spark, Duncan Borrowman, Senn's Blog, Katykins, Jewcy, Kevin Maguire, Stumbling and Mumbling, Famous for 15 megapixels, Ordovicius, Tom Morris, AOL Fanhouse, Doctor Vee, The Curmudgeonly, The Poor Mouth, 1820, Hangbitch, Crooked Timber, ArseNole, Identity Unknown, Liberty Alone, Amused Cynicism, Clairwil, The Lone Voice, Tampon Teabag, Unoriginalname38, Special/Blown It, The Remittance Man, 18 Doughty Street, Laban Tall, Martin Bright, Spy Blog The Exile, poons, Jangliss, Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?, Imagined Community, A Pint of Unionist Lite, Poldraw, Disillusioned And Bored, Error Gorilla, Indigo Jo, Swiss Metablog, Kate Garnwen Truemors, Asn14, D-Notice, The Judge, Political Penguin, Miserable Old Fart, Jottings, fridgemagnet, Blah Blah Flowers, J. Arthur MacNumpty, Tony Hatfield, Grendel, Charlie Whitaker, Matt Buck, The Waendel Journal, Marginalized Action Dinosaur, SoccerLens, Toblog, John Brissenden East Lower, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Black AM, Boing Boing, BLTP, Gunnerblog, LFB UK, Liberal Revolution, Wombles, Focus on Sodbury..., Follow The Money, Freedom and Whisky, Melting Man, PoliticalHackUK, Simon Says..., Daily EM, From The Barrel of a Gun, The Fourth Place, The Armchair News Blog, Journalist und Optimist, Bristol Indymedia, Dave Weeden, Up North John, Gizmonaut, Spin and Spinners, Marginalia, Arnique, Heather Yaxley, The Whiskey Priest, On The Beat, Paul Canning, Martin Stabe, Mat Bowles, Pigdogfucker, Rachel North, B3TA board, Naqniq, Yorkshire Ranter, The Home Of Football, UFO Breakfast Recipients, Moninski , Kerching, e-clectig, Mediocracy, Sicily Scene, Samizdata, I blog, they blog, weblog, Colcam, Some Random Thoughts, Bel is thinking, Vino S, Simply Jews, Atlantic Free Press, Registan, Filasteen, Britblog Roundup #136, Scientific Misconduct Blog, Adam Bowie, Duncan at Abcol, Camera Anguish, A Very British Dude, Whatever, Central News, Green Gathering, Leighton Cooke (224), , Skuds' Sister's Brother, Contrast News, Poliblog Perspective, Parish Pump, El Gales, Noodle, Curly's Corner Shop, Freunde der offenen Gesellschaft, otromundoesposible, Richard Stacy, Looking For A Voice, News Dissector, Kateshomeblog, Writes Like She Talks, Extra! Extra!, Committee To Protect Bloggers, Liberty's Requiem, American Samizdat, The Thunder Dragon, Cybersoc, Achievable Life, Paperholic, Creative-i, Raedwald, Nobody's Friend, Lobster Blogster, Panchromatica (251).

I haven't mentioned this before, but over on Bloggerheads Tim Ireland has been shining a lot of light on the activities of Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov. It seems that the light was getting a little too bright as the people who host Tim's web site have had legal threats from libel lawyers representing Mr. Usmanov. The hosting company have responded by turning Tim's server off.

Having Bloggerheads taken off the web is bad enough. But Tim's server also hosted a number of other sites including those of Craig Murray (former British Ambassador in Uzbekistan who knows more about Mr. Usmanov than Mr. Usmanov is comfortable with) and Boris Johnson. These sites will also be missing until a solution is found.

I got this news from Chicken Yoghurt. There are plenty of other links from that post if you want to get yourself up to speed on the issue.

You'll have noticed (I hope) that blogging has been pretty light round these parts recently. I've got things I want to write but I don't seem to have much enthusiasm for it. I think that at least part of the problem is the new version of Movable Type. Oh, it all looks very lovely, but for some reason it's running incredibly slow on my server. For example, when I rebuilt all of the pages a week or so ago, it took over 24 hours. I have a lot of entries (over five years' worth) but it shouldn't take that long.

I'm currently running the blog as CGI programs. It would get a lot faster if I used FastCGI instead. I'll be moving the site to my new server over the weekend so I'll do a bit more investigation then. Hopefully I'll have it all fixed in the next few days.

But in the meantime, sorry if it's all a bit dull (and broken) here.

Oh, and Matt Hickford pointed out to me yesterday that some of the permalink URLs are broken. MT seems to be confused as to whether spaces in entry titles should be converted to hyphens or underscores. I'll get that fixed too.

I've updated this blog to use Movable Type version 4. So far it all looks rather nice.

You'll notice that the design has changed. I've reverted to using the default MT templates. I'll add back some of the other bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and I've (finally!) switched to using a slightly more sensible URL scheme for the blog posts[1]. The old URLs should still work courtesy of Apache redirections and some advice from Paul Makepeace.

There may, of course, still be some teething problems. If you see anything weird then please let me know.

[1] Oh, ok, I admit it. It was the default for the new version of MT and I didn't notice until after I'd regenerated the site.

I've been a bit quiet for the last few days. It's my first week working with a new client and there's a lot to pick up so I haven't really had time for blogging.

I'm sure things will get back to normal before too long. In the meantime, good news about Alan Johnston, innit?

There's a new London Weblogger Meetup group that sprang into existence over the weekend. Their first meeting is in Kensington in a couple of weeks.

Only two people have replied so far (and one of those is me) but if it takes off, then I'll certainly go along and have a look.