Member Of The Month: March

One more month and here we are again! It was a quite busy month, better than February to be exact. I had a theme change and i wrote a few interesting posts too. I crossed the barrier of 200 posts and over a thousand comments. I wrote about some hosting variables one must take care of, and i had a nice experiment on web crawling and email picking. All in all it was a nice ride as well. As always, you, my loyal readers kept coming in and commenting on my posts. I had more comments this month, but the top commenter, the “Member Of The Month” is Raju with 27 comments!

I would like to thank you all for coming back and invite you here for another month of fun and knowledge. Stay tuned!

The 200th post!

Yay! This is all i can say… It’s been over a year now, since i started this blog, and almost eight months since the 100th post.  This is another milestone reached. It all started back in February 2008 as a “what if” and then i just installed WordPress and started writing. Since then a lot have happened. I moved from a shared hosting to a VPS, i changed about five themes till now, i made a lot of friends, and generaly, i had a lot of fun. To be honest i am having as much fun as i had back in day one. When i don’t feel like it i don’t blog. I rest a while and come back with more inspiration. In this year or so this is the 200th post and a bit over a thousand comments! I know that half of them must be mine in reply to others’ but i like replying to me readers. This is what i want when i comment on another blog and this is the way to connect with my readers, you guys. I just seized the opportunity to post this and tell everybody a big, fat thanks for coming back here, reading and commenting. It’s been a blast and i am sure the ride will be even better in the days to come… Thank you all!

The new theme

I think it’s quite obvious for my readers that the site has, once more, changed a theme! It’s been quite some time since the last one (June 2008) so i started getting bored of the old one. Also, i decided i needed more from my theme. And when i say more i mean being it simpler, cleaner and more professional looking. I think this theme achieves all these goals. The major change, besides the theme i mean, is that i added the lifestream thingy on the top. It kinda came with the theme but i could have disabled it. Though, i think it’s not that heavy for the server so i decided to keep it. It’s a bit glitchy for now but i will figure out why soon.

So, how do you like the change guys? Did you find any problems? Do you see something you don’t like or, in your opinnion, needs to be changed? I’d love to get your feedback!

Member Of The Month: February

This is what it took, twenty eight days! Yup, February is now over and we are on our way to spring (at least where i live). It was one slow month for me, blog-wise i mean. I was here and absent and then here again. I guess everybody has his ups and downs. But, still, you guys kept coming back. Am i lucky to have loyal readers or what? Even when i didn’t comment on your blogs you still came and posted a few words. I think this is what makes this small blog powerful and fun to work with.

Without further due though, i shall introduce the new MOTM. That is my dear, Ausie friend, Sire with 16 comments! We had quite a few conversations this past month and that was the reason he hit the top. Thanks for keep coming back man and posting all the useful comments (and bugs ). I would also like to thank every other reader though for commenting. I really appreciate it all!

Now, i hope this month i will be more active and post more things. Already, i have a couple of posts on a draft pending a final review, among them a webhosting tutorial for all of you guys out there feeling lost when it comes to choosing a webhost. So, stay tuned!

When things get extremely wrong

As many of you must have noticed, either by visitng or by my desperate tweets, my sites have been down yesterday for almost 12 hours. This is due to what i’d like to call a mistake of mythical proportions. But why am i writing this post now? Well, for starters i want to let you guys know what happened yesterday and, secondly, because my mistake can help you out and warn you, so you won’t have to deal with the same problems i had. As they say: “It’s a very good thing to learn from your mistakes but even better to learn from others’“. So, here is my story.

All my sites, details of which you can find on my sites index here, are hosted on what we call a Virtual Private Server (VPS) – more on VPS’s here. Yesterday was cleaning day. I opened a console to the machine and started tiding up things here and there, cleaning logs, unneeded backups, folders etc. When i was done i wanted to update my machine to the latest software available. The OS that hosts my sites is a Debian Linux distribution so, all needed, was a simple command “apt-get upgrade“. What this does actually is very simple. It checks online to see what versions are available, crosschecks them with the ones already installed and decides which need update. This way everything is done automatically. When i did that, it told me that some packages shouldn’t be updated. That puzzled me a little and i thought “well if i am to update i shall update” so i forced a total update. Process went smooth. All was done. Literally. When the update ended i wanted to check out that all was fine, and guess what, it wasn’t! My web server was unresponsive, it wouldn’t bring up my virtual hosts (thus my sites where all down) and generally it had a mind of it’s own. I started trying to revive Apache but he was still refusing any help. On the process i discovered that it all started by a serious misconfiguration the update caused to the very basic files of the virtual hosting. The damage was irreversible. All was left was a clean install. Fortunately my hosting company offers a very easy re-install process of the OS. The big thing though was backing up, restoring and reconfiguring the server. I had the opportunity to take all the backup i wanted but since time was pressuring i didn’t have a clear mind to remember everything i wanted plus some of the things i did want were too big to backup at the moment so i decided to sacrifice them. All in all it was a very long process that took almost 7 hours to partly complete. The sites are up, just a few administration tasks are there left to complete.

Now, what is this all worth mentioning? Well one big thing for me. Create a backup plan well before you need it. Because when you do, even if you are given an opportunity to take it (like my case), you are going to have loses. That is because on the time of a crisis you don’t have a clear mind to decide and remember what you need to keep and what doesn’t matter. Backup plans are a product of mature thinking and everyday tasks rather than panic reactions. So, my advice, think that your site or server is going down now, what do you want to save? Thanks for sticking around all!