Mokka mit Schlag » Blogging

I’ve been avoiding comment on the whole Sierra/Locke/etc. dust-up lately. Most of the commentary seems pretty on-the-mark, but a few usually sensible people are starting to overreact and call for self-censorship. Once the mainstream media gets hold of this next week, expect the customary cast of Congressional idiots to elevate that to calls for government mandated censorship. However the problem has been blown way out of proportion. There’s one thing that I think needs to be said that hasn’t been said yet to put this whole sordid mess in its proper perspective:

Death threats are no big deal.
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I know this site is more than a little slow on occasion. I also know that the static site www.xom.nu which is hosted on the exact same server runs like a bat out of hell, so it’s likely not the server hardware (Mac Mini) or network connection (Speakeasy DSL) that’s at fault. The remaining candidates are:

• PHP (Very likely)
• WordPress (Maybe, but unlikely except in so far as it’s written in PHP)
• Traffic volume (especially comment spammers)
• MySQL (Possible, but I tend to doubt it.)

I’ve got a lot of suggestions for improving performance, and I plan to start trying some of them. I don’t, however, have any good measurements of where this server is spending its time. I’d appreciate it if anyone could share knowledge and experience as to how to determine where the server is taking it’s time, and how to find out what’s making it so slow. Thanks.
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I just did a quick check with LogValidator on the pages at this site for Refactoring HTML. Besides telling you where the markup is screwed up, LogValidator also figures out which pages are the most popular. The results were not what I would have guessed. After throwing away index pages, favicon.ico’s, Atom feeds and the like it turns out the most popular story of the last year is:
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A lot of old fogies are getting bent out of shape over the idea that 20 or 30 years from now today’s teenagers are going to get hammered by random screeds and bad dating habits they posted on blogs or MySpace. Can I chime in and say I really don’t think it’s all that big a deal? By the time any of this becomes relevant, the electorate will have matured enough that they really don’t care about this.
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Apparently it’s now all about Robert. When someone links to the New York Times instead of him, it’s a direct personal assault, not that we happen to read the New York Times more than Scoble so we never even noticed his original piece, or that we prefer a well-written text piece to a long streaming video.

P.S. Scoble was more interesting when he was blogging from inside Microsoft. That at least gave him a perspective most people did not have. Now he’s just one of dozens of independent bloggers.

I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0.7 to close various security holes (though I very much doubt this release closes the last of them. WordPress is still breaking one of the most fundamental rules of HTTP: Thou shalt not use GET for unsafe operations.) Holler if you notice anything funky.