mattlary's weblog

I’ve migrated my server to a different machine; the new server is named Brahms. I’m really just posting to make sure everything is setup and working

Randy scolded me for not sharing google reader items, so I added a port for it on the right and I’ll try to share more stuff- unfortunately I decided to start this after I went through all of my entries, so there’s not a lot there yet- stay tuned though, I’m sure there’ll be lots of stuff there soon. If you use RSS, then you can subscribe directly to my shared items. Go here to see the entries themselves and to find the corresponding feed.

Randy also said I need to post more photos; well here you go- yes it’s me from way back in High School; I had a friend who worked at the Mohawk PD who took my mugshot and gave it to me; fun times.

(more…)

So it appears that my site was down for a couple weeks because my IP address was incorrect- I found out today that my server was trying to tell my dynamic DNS service that my IP was 192.168.1.8; so of course everything worked fine from home and I just assumed work was blocking my site.  Everything should be better now.  I’ll post something with substance soon.

After many years of faithful service, I’m retiring my server beethoven.  I got Beethoven back in 1998 and used it as my desktop system until 2001.  In 2001, I turned beethoven into a server and used it to host my website and some other sites/services.  It also served well as a router/dhcp server until recently.  Now, after almost ten years of service, I’m getting ready to lay it to rest.  For the time being I’m going to keep the system running, but only until everything is verified to be working on the new system.  After that, I’ll probably shut it down and keep it around as a backup server.

Keeping with the composer theme, my new server is named handel, and is a lot newer and faster (System Specs here).  I got the machine for a real bargain at a United Way garage sale at work and set it up with Ubuntu linux.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited- I’m hoping to be able to do a lot more with this system.

I’ve been having some issues with spam comments, but I’ve had some mechanisms in place to shield everyone from them. I started by just moderating every comment that came through, and then I added the image verification to help filter out more. The image verification wasn’t working at all for some reason, so I’ve replaced it with a system that will try to guess if a comment is spam or not. So far it’s been working well, but we’ll see what happens. If it proves to work exceptionally well, then I’ll turn off the moderation for most cases.

On a related note, the counter climbed to around 80 hits today; all but maybe 4 of them were from the spammers or other bots, so I just removed it altogether. Oh well.

That’s about it for today; nothing terribly exciting; still doesn’t feel like Christmas.

I spent more time tweaking the blog software; I got the counter working, and I was able to tweak the date displays and some other things. This stuff probably doesn’t matter to anyone, but I wanted to mention it because I felt accomplished For those who read who care about blogging software, Wordpress rocks- check it out if you haven’t already- it’s very flexible, and is written in PHP and uses a MySQL backend.

Today was a good day btw; it still doesn’t feel like Christmas yet though.

I’ve missed the connections theme, so it’s back.  Let me know if you like it (or dislike it).

I was getting a lot of Spam comments held for moderation, so I installed something to help deter robots.  When you leave a comment, you will be required to enter some text presented in an image.

Let me know if it causes any problems!

I’ve been searching for a way for people to subscribe to my site and get updates via email; I finally got a plugin installed that will allow people to subscribe directly from the site! To get e-mail updates, click here and fill out the form. It will send you a confirmation, and then you should recieve updates as I post to the site!

If you want to take it a bit further, visit bloglines. Bloglines aggregates all of the sites you keep up on on one page- I use it to watch all sorts of stuff. To see what I subscribe to, look here.

Check back soon; I’ll be posting big news tomorrow!

I decided to change blogging software (again). I think I’ll stick with this one for a while though; it’s PHP based, and has all the options I wanted. I’m not going to bother importing my entries from livejournal, but I’ll be adding a link to it soon.

More to come; I think this will work out a lot better than livejournal, and if not I can always go back to it (again).