The transition to .Text has gone very smoothly, with one exception – my bandwidth usage has gone way, way up since I switched. Since I host my own blog and pay for my own bandwidth, this is not an academic issue. I investigated my logs a bit and my percentage of “304 Not Modified” responses for my RSS feed plummeted since I went over to .Text. A little further probing indicated that the conditional GET mechanism that .Text implements for its RSS feeds is somewhat broken at best. It ignores entity tags and can’t agree with itself about which time it should use for If-Modified-Since.

To try and help out my pocketbook, I went in and (I hope) fixed the conditional GET mechanism to work properly now. Because I’m anal-retentive that way, I also cleaned up the code a bit. Anyway, my hope is that my bandwidth usage will drop now that I’ve implemented the changes on the blog. On the other hand, please let me know if your aggregator suddenly stops fetching my entries or something. (I’ll try and post some on Monday to verify this.) I’ve also sent some mail to ScottW to figure out how to contribute fixes to the source code, so .96 can benefit.

As an interesting side note, because .Text is written in C#, I also had to do the most sustained C# programming that I’ve had to do in a while. Boy do I ever, ever, ever miss background compilations (even given the problems with it) and case insensitivity. Like night and day, at least to me…

OK, so the conversion is done. Everything looks OK, but let me know if something isn’t working right. I added a redirect handler to redirect old links to their new location, so let me know if you’re getting broken links, too.

The one thing that .Text doesn’t seem to have is a RSS feed for recent comments. I can work on adding that back in, but it’ll be a low priority unless anyone screams and says that it’s important. There didn’t seem to be that many people subscribed, so…

Those of you who are trying to leave a comment this weekend may notice that you can’t. This is because I’m making a change around here – I’m getting out of the blog software business. It’s been a fun 9 months of ASP.NET/VB hacking, but truth be told, I’m getting tired of having to debug everything myself. So I’m giving in and switching over to .Text. The first step in this process is going to be making the data read only, so I can do all the transformations I need to. Then the blog will be offline for a little while and then it’ll be back, better than before.

See you soon!

So after updating the software, I thought I’d go through and just remove some of the bogus Trackback entries that .Text apperars to be dropping in my comments lately. So I pull up a query of comments and start deleting entries. Then I start getting an error about “the row has already been deleted.” Huh? Oh, yeah, my query included a join into the table of blog entries, so when I deleted the comment, I deleted the entry it was commenting on! Which cascaded into the comments table, etc.

The worst part? This is the second time I’ve done something stupid like this.

Thankfully, I have regular backups and everything appears to be restored. But this is definitely one of those “learn it the hard way” kind of things…

Just an FYI, I believe I fixed the problem with comments not remembering people even though they clicked “remember me.” Let me know if you’ve still got problems with it.

…and in this case, since I’m the developer, what does that say about me? I just discovered that when I wrote the code to produce the comments feed for my blog, I screwed up. Rather than giving the past x days of comments, my comments RSS feed was giving all the comments for the past x days of entries. So if you commented on an entry that was more than x days (I think it’s something like 10 or 14) old, then it wouldn’t ever show up in the feed. I noticed this by accident when cross-linking to my old IsNot post, and now I think I’ve got it fixed.

So if you’ve submitted some comments and I totally ignored you, it might be because I was relying on a broken comments feed. Then again, it could be because I’m a lazy bastard… You’ll just have to guess!

(I will be going back through all my comments to find ones that I might have missed…)

I realize the last entry veers close to Chris Brumme territory in terms of its Brobdingnagian length, but it was something that I occasionally get requests for internally and thought people might find interesting. Definintely represents a previous chapter in my life…

Just in case anything goes wrong: I made a slight update to the site today. Mostly cosmetic changes such as cleaning up my blogroll and trimming it down to blogs that I actually read rather than just browse. The biggest change is introducing caching for all the dynamic pages (i.e. the entire site) rather than just the RSS feed. I’ve been getting hit with a lot of bandwidth caused, I think, by people’s ISA servers fetching and refetching pages. Caching should help while I continue to investigate what’s going on.

Oh, and I banned my first IP address… Somebody’s running some kind of aggregator that has no host string and ignores caching. After pinging me every 8 minutes for the past week or so and eating up something like 125 meg all on their own, I figure that’s enough…

I noticed this morning that starting somewhere around Dec. 20th, the bandwidth being consumed by my blog made a huge spike. A quick browse of my server log suggests some culprits. It looks like someone(s) or something(s) have been making automated sweeps of my blog from all kinds of different IP addresses. It’s not a search engine like Google or anything — just periodically all the front page links of my blog will be hit.

I don’t have time to track this down before I leave, but I am taking a few minor steps to try and limit the amount of bandwidth this is consuming. Forthwith, the month view and category view of my blog will only show titles rather than the entire entries. (I also fixed a bug that resulted in the category view not being sorted by date/time, which indicates to me most people aren’t using that view anyway.) I also reined in the number of entries that are returned by a category RSS feed — I was returning 50 items, which appears to be some number left over from the original BlogX codebase. I lowered it to a much more reasonable 10 items, which is what you get on the main RSS feed.

Anyway, hopefully nobody will notice nothing. When I get back I’ll delve further into the mystery of who’s scanning my site so regularly…