chrismetcalf.net » localhost

Moving to Dreamhost

Chris Metcalf — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:02:41 +0000

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I just don’t have the time or energy to manage my own dedicated host. I don’t necessarily feel like fighting Apache when I get home after a long day of fighting it at work. And if you’ve noticed, the site has also been down a half dozen times this month.

So I’m moving my domains over to Dreamhost. I’ll be trying them out for the next couple of months (they have a 97 day moneyback guarantee), and if I’m happy, I’ll stick around.

Update: Most of my domains are now moved over to Dreamhost. So far, the experience has been very positive. There were some issues with my initial setup, but support fixed them within 15 minutes of my filing a ticket about it, which is incredible for a Saturday afternoon.

Site Updates

Chris Metcalf — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:42:16 +0000

I couldn’t sleep tonight so I made a bunch of improvements to my blog:

Switched from using Ultimate Tag Warrior for tags to just using Wordpress’ built in categories as tags. UTW broke with Wordpress 2.2. Now my /tag/* links work properly and things are a lot cleaner.
A tag cloud widget in the right-hand column that actually works now.
Digg integration
Some new plugins in the back-end you won’t see.

Also of note is that I’m posting this from the Blogging Bundle for my new favorite text editor, TextMate. Very cool.

Hiccup!

chris — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 03:55:22 +0000

I’m upgrading to Wordpress 2.1, so there may be some issues in the meantime. Stick with me…

Update: I’ve fixed the permalink redirection. Thanks for the heads-up Stuart.

Comments Fixed

chris — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:24:09 +0000

So it seems I broke my Wordpress template awhile ago and didn’t realize how easy it would be to fix it. I’d been putting it off but I fixed it earlier today.

It turned out I didn’t have a “single.php” file for formatting the display of individual posts, so it was using the main template instead. And that template was missing a single critical tag (that I didn’t know I needed to have) that plugs in the comment form.

So now you really can tell me how much I suck.

Converting UltimateTagWarrior Tags to Lowercase

chris — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:17:38 +0000

Just installed UltimateTagWarrior? Converted all your categories to tags? Dissappointed that your imported categories are capitalized and capitalized tags look stupid? Fear not! Fire up your favorite MySQL client and use this simple SQL query on your Wordpress database:

UPDATE tags SET tag = LOWER(tag);

I found it handy so maybe somebody else will.

Spit Polish

chris — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 07:09:00 +0000

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.4 tonight and decided that at the same time I might as well give my blog a bit of an “overhaul”. So if things look strange or suddenly stop working, its because I’m replacing the gerbils that run the internals of my site.

550 “Sender verify failed” error with Monit and Exim4

chris — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 08:14:31 +0000

Maybe this will save somebody else some time, because I just spend about 3 hours banging my head against the wall on it.

If you’re getting a “550-Sender verify failed” error when Monit starts because its trying to send you an email via SMTP to let you know it’s started (or if you’re getting that error for just about any other reason), make sure that the email address that the message is being sent “from” actually exists.

If “monit@yourhostname.com” doesn’t exist, your SMTP server will likely reject the message and cause you all sorts of trouble.

It might surprise you, but I’m not a professional sysadmin

chris — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 06:17:36 +0000

Yeah, that hurt. Well, everything seems to be working again…

Move to New Host (Almost) Complete

chris — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 01:59:04 +0000

Almost there… DNS seems to be updated ok, my databases and Apache configurations are migrated, and my email servers are almost fixed. The rough part is over though.

Not Dead / Moving to New Host

Chris Metcalf — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:48:05 +0000

Post-regatta Beer

Yep, I’m not dead.

JVDS is pissing me off so I think I’ll be attempting to move to a new host later this week. Hopefully it won’t be too bumpy.