If you’re reading this, then the DNS entries have updated and I’ve finally made the move from SliceHost to BlueHost. SliceHost had been a good home, but I can’t justify the cost of running my website there any longer. It was cool to have complete control over a whole virtual machine, but I really haven’t done anything that custom with it….. I’ll just experiment with that stuff on my home server. BlueHost has a good reputation. I’ve suggested it to my friends for their websites. Now I’ve taken my own advice.

The move took a lot longer than I’d hoped. I guess that’s what happens when you try and migrate 1248 photos, 10 years of Wiki edits and 3 years of blogs over. Was great to have SSH access once I requested it, and it was set up almost immediately too. I don’t think I’d have got things working if I was still struggling with just FTP and the Web File Explorer interface.

I know the site is running a bit slower, but apart from that I hope everything is OK. I want to move the Wiki from CGI to FastCGI, but will do that later. Please leave a comment if you see anything that is broken.

It’s been almost 10 months since I moved my website here and I’ve been looking at the stats. It beats tidying up the flat which I should be doing.

Unique site visits (which I think is the most useful metric) seemed to peak in May at 7000 sites and since then has been around 6000 sites per month. How does this compare with other people’s websites?

My top search terms are pretty consistently for the C++ containers, iterators and strings cheat sheets I wrote years ago. I should restyle them but I don’t want to break the links people have made. There’s no hits on anything wacky like wisdom teeth self extraction and my hyperlinked C++ grammar has never got the notice it deserved. I have had a few hits for wm_delete_window, Thinstation and invalid module format though (Google for them if they interest you).

Oh and that big spike in KBytes this month is an image of Ubuntu I hosted here when I couldn’t work out an easier way to get it to a customer.

The SliceHost virtual machine has served this all up smoothly and reliably. I did upgrade to more RAM (512B) as I was thrashing the 256B slice, but since then I’ve had no problems and have been very happy with them.

Here’s to the next 10 months of LinuxSoftware.co.nz!

The banner photos are all from various tramps I have done. I try and find a nice photo which isn’t too busy and then use the Gimp to take a 1680×180 slice out of it. The problem is finding a feature wide enough. Normally I go to the hi-res image, take a crop from there, resize it down to 1680 and then crop off the excess top and bottom to give the 180 height. I’ve tried stretching and repeating images, but that doesn’t work well. I do create a repeating background image to go behind the banner, and when I get that right I achieve the cool infinitely wide banner which looks good if you have a monitor which displays more that 1680 pixels of my web page.

I used to use the Random Image Selector by Keith Murray to display the banner, since then I’ve coded it into my WordPress and MoinMoin themes. It’s pretty simple code, but Keith’s plugin is an easy way to test if you like the idea on your blog. One day I must get my themes packaged nicely so I can share them.

Click on the images below to see the original photos they were cropped from

Jackson Peaks, across Lake Te Anau, Fiordland, Feb 2006.

West Ruggedy Beach, Stewart Island, Feb 2006.

West Ruggedy Beach, Stewart Island, Feb 2006.

Long Harry Bay, Stewart Island, Feb 2006.

Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu from Mt Taranaki, Feb 2007.

Waiaua Gorge, Taranaki, Feb 2007.

Lake Ada, Milford Track, Fiordland, May 2007.

Rangitoto, New Years Eve, Dec 2007.

Rangitoto, New Years Eve, Dec 2007.

Dart River, Mount Aspiring National Park, Feb 2008.

WordPress 2.5.1 showed up in the Fedora Yum repository, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. Went pretty smoothly. I upgraded WPG2 to 2.3.0.5 while I was at it. The G2 button wasn’t showing up in the editor, but a cache clear has fixed that. I was worried about the theme, but it looks like it is all compatible. Still getting used to the new WordPress Dashboard, I guess it grows on you?

I also installed Finch on my server (rata). Finch is the text UI equivalent of Pidgin. Having a TUI messaging client is great, because I can use it over SSH.

How can you be really confident of your backups? My cunning plan is to mirror my whole website back onto my home box so I can see that I have all the data safely duplicated. When I say “my plan” I really mean I stole the idea off Ralph who has had his web site served both from ihug and from his home box for ~4 years.

The content on mysite is in the MySQL database and various files. The files are easy to mirror with rsync. Getting the database mirrored has been a lot more fun.

I use a SSH tunnel to securely connect the database on the webserver with its mirror on my home box. MySQL can support SSL connections, but using a tunnel seemed easier. I didn’t want to enslave the main MySQL server on my home box so instead I run a new MySQL server with a custom socket and port. I then set this up to connect to the master server on the webserver. The commands for this are in localdbsetup.sh.

Every half an hour I have a cron job run localsync.sh which rsyncs the files across and checks that the MySQL replication is still running. I can check my data is ok just by looking at the mirrored website. Then each night localbkup.sh runs to dump the data from the mirror and tarball it up.

Seems to be working pretty well. Yes, it is massive overkill just for a simple website backup, but it was an interesting project for the long weekend.