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…
I just thought I’d add that the slowness of blog entries that’s been creeping in over the past few weeks is about to get a whole lot worse. I’m going to be leaving next week for a Christmas vacation on the East Coast and then on January 1st, I’m going to be leaving to spend a month in Africa! Needless to say, I won’t be blogging much between now and next February.
The Christmas trip is nothing out of the ordinary, just visiting family, but the Africa trip is shaping up to be pretty cool. My wife Andrea and I are going to be visiting Kenya and Tanzania during our stay on the continent. Andrea’s dad worked in the US foreign service during the 70’s, so she spent many of her formative years in Nairobi. She hasn’t had a chance to go back to visit since they moved back so we’re taking the opportunity to go back and see some of the places that she grew up. While we’re there we’re also going to be going on a safari in Tanzania – I believe it’s going to be migration season, so we should be able to see lots of animals out on the Serengeti. All in all, it’s going to be pretty exciting. The only downside has been that this is our third try at the trip – two previous attempts have had to be put off due to little geopolitical contremps like the Iraqi war. Hopefully, everything should be pretty quiet for our trip!
Anyway, the end result of all this is that I’ll probably post very little between now and the New Year and then nothing after that until February. Just so’s everyone knows where I am and don’t get to thinking that I just lost interest in blogging or something.
(In the event that we end up in places that have Internet cafes – highly unlikely – I may post a few “field reports.” We’ll just have to see.)
[Update: The original title for this entry was “Going dark,” which is a phrase that means “turning out the lights” or “shutting down.” The original title referred to the fact that my blog is going to “go dark” for a month and a half while I am gone because I won’t be able to update it. However, upon reflection I realized that the title may be misconstrued, so I’m changing it to “Going on vacation” for clarity.]
Scoble wrote yesterday about the fact that even though there are a growing number of MS people with external blogs (enough to force the move off of GDN), there hasn’t been a commensurate number of internal blogs. In fact, I’d have to say that pretty much most of the internal blogs that I’ve read are a dismal failure, and I’ve dropped every single one out of NewsGator. Robert speculates that the problem has to do with discoverability and linking, but I think the problem goes deeper than that. Specifically, I don’t think internal blogs work very well because:
I’m pretty skeptical whether internal blogs really will ever work. I’m more intrigued as to whether collaborative technologies like wikis can make a big difference. After I get back from some major vacation (more on that later), it’s something I’d like to explore inside of the VB team.