Chatfield, There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today
March 25th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
(Self Writ, Computing)
We have some local difficulties.
Serene Falcon has not much traffic — nor was designed to: without either modesty or superciliousness one may assume it to be caviare to the general — so, running on a standard Wordpress install with a number of common plugins upon shared hosting, one should assume that it’s customary slowness in rendering is due to the limitations of the last and the heavy image content. However, a new foe has arisen, and some posts opened as themselves show as 404s — which is a considerable improvement over the position that began sometime after the last post when everything, including the administration, opened as 500s. Due to the lack of readers or previous issues I can’t blame usage or resources being squandered by this blog.
Being in general unkeen on asking advice, unmeliorated by internet responses ranging from the unhelpful; the incapable of reading even cursorily; those who issue recommendations one should do what one specifically said one wished to avoid doing; the resentful ‘Why don’t you like xxx ?’ when xxx is a product one prefers to avoid; the incomprehensible; the droning nerdspeaker who breathes endless code to be typed in to achieve a small result; and the unexpectedly angry — how dare you not have implemented such and such — as befell the misfortunate Mr. Scoble once he had been hacked, I can’t really turn to any help other than that dispensed by the wholly inadequate Google.
A week or so before I had emplaced a new improved .htaccess, as described here and here, it worked well and seemed to increase speed — so I’m absolutely certain this had nothing to do with the later problems. When on the 22nd I could not enter the site due to the 500 pages, I began flashing new trial .htaccess’s in and out as if confetti and updating the settings on the Dreamhost Web Panel ( ‘Edit Site’, simply updating without altering settings ) which restored it to semi-normality; although I was getting Dreamhost 404s whenever the .htaccess was improper. I was then able to uninstall supercache in the recommended way, and for good measure through ftp deleted all recent plugins. This now came back to serene falcon-specific 404s. Which I still get if the browser is busy, yet if undelayed the admin panel shows. From here any linked page or url shown in that panel sometimes works, but usually resolves into a 404. Should I hit the Update Permalinks button — which is mandated after any change — the whole thing starts over and requires the previous Dreamhost Settings to be hit again.
Now, it might be a Pretty Permalinks issue, or recent upgrades, or plugins, but my inclination is that it’s probably the server going mad. On the other hand the damage to the install may remain after. So apart from mind-glazing reading on .htaccesses and on permalinks and on Wordpress issues, I’ve not only considered moving it — it alone : Dreamhost are good hosts, but have slow speeds — but converting it from Wordpress to another system. Therefore reading and comparing Dragonfly, Symphony, Drupal, WolfCMS, Textpattern, ExpressionEngine, Elgg, Movable Type etc. etc., which are more CMS than blogging software. Some are not php-based, some seemed unupdated for two years and none seem promising as yet. Apart from the few plugins that are essential — although a vast re-editing of all past posts referencing a plugin to adapt to a new system would be unwelcome — the continuance of the theme seems the sticking point.
The trouble with servers and computing generally is that nothing just works. We had it instilled into us that all error is down to input or design, Garbage In : Garbage Out; yet it takes small experience to realise that small events have vast repercussions and that software just suddenly screws for no reason. A spade will work until it is worn out; a gun will simply work — yes, it may misfire, jam or explode, but under the laws of physics if nothing is wrong then it will continue as made — but with computing, weird things happen.
