I noticed Thursday evening, while working on the two mixes, that this site was loading very slowly. I removed some plugins and dynamically generated content to compensate but that only made things tolerable instead of actually peppy.

This morning the page load timed out just trying to get to the WordPress “dashboard,” so I dug in deeper and researched the problem. Restarting Apache (something I should’ve done Thursday night as soon as I noticed the problem) made a night-and-day difference in performance. Based on my research I’ve also tuned Apache’s configuration to better utilize timeout values and keep-alives. As a brute-force measure I’m also restarting Apache every week; that should clear out a lot of cruft and clutter in processes and memory that accumulates and bogs the system down.

A server admin’s work is never done… and that’s just the way I like it. Good for you, eh?

Thanks to Gravatar’s new support for Shamus Young’s Wavatars, and thanks to the Easy Gravatar plugin, not only are Gravatars back but each commentator gets an auto-generated Wavatar (which they can, of course, replace by registering a user icon choice with Gravatar).

I should whip up a colophon page listing all of the neat bits from hither and yon that go into making this journal work. Some day. Yep.

In other news, the tags have all gone away because I got sick and tired of fiddling with them. I didn’t actually delete them but, other than in the handful of postings in which I used them, they won’t appear anywhere at all. (Even in those posts they’re barely noticeable.) (EDIT: Oh look, there’s a mass delete function for tags built into WordPress 2.5! They’re gone for good now!) It’s for the best, really: I went batty at times with trying to figure out what existing tags fit a given post and having to create new tags all the time because none of the existing tags fit. Forget it. If tags are what the cool kids are doing, I’m okay being uncool. The last thing I need is something else slowing down my posting output!

Of course, crossposts to LJ continue to be automatically tagged… with the category from WordPress. Go figure.

I just acquired the keys, virtually speaking, to the next home for this site and the others I host. I expect to spend a significant portion of my weekend migrating content from one machine to another, testing, tweaking, and occasionally cursing my lack of geek-fu. (Hey, it happens.)

Don’t expect further posting from me until we’re online again, post-migration. Hopefully nothing will actually “go dark” in the meantime… but we’re all familiar with my kind of luck, aren’t we?

So wish me luck. Just, you know, not my own luck.

I’m getting better at this webserver migration stuff. (Note to Universe At Large: This is not a hint that I want more practice!) I only forgot three things, and they were all easily corrected:

1. Feed on Feeds: Lil’s & Kyla’s website feed readers didn’t make the transition very gracefully at first. It turns out that a MySQL export dump from version 3.x may not import very well into a 4.1 system. (Of course, the WordPress exports & imports worked just fine. Make of this what you will.) Luckily I was able to simply copy the directories from /var/lib/mysql on the old server to the appropriate directory on the new server. In related news, the guy who wrote “FoF” has made noises about a new release.
2. My files: There’s an entire subdirectory called “files” on this site which contains various and sundry images, videos, sounds and other miscellany. These files tend to be large enough to make the weekly site archive a bit cumbersome, so I deliberately exclude that subdirectory. Imagine my horror when I realized that I’d failed to migrate that subdirectory, and I’d asked Infinity Internet to dial down the old box hours beforehand! Luckily they hadn’t gotten to it yet, and I retrieved all of the files. Whew!
3. My son’s email: His account gets a fair bit of spam for some reason, so I set him up with the same mail filtering rig that I use on mine. This was all well and good until, as I set things up on the new server, I simply copied my mail filter configuration file into his home directory… without editing it appropriately. Yes, the mail server has been trying to filter his email into my mailbox for the last few days. (Due to file permissions, this is generally impossible.) This is now resolved, and mail is being delivered as I write this. Sorry, Spud!

It could’ve been a lot worse. Now I just need to finish adding things to the backups (like email, which I wasn’t doing before for some reason, but is now part of the nightly process) and automating the off-site backup process. Then, maybe, I can relax a bit.

I hope.