Here’s a before and after shot:

I think it’s much better, definitely more modern and minimalist.

The new blog theme is basically a heavily modified version of the
wonderful and free Compositio WordPress theme –
you can check out a demo of Compositio here to see how different it is.

The only thing I kept from my old theme, which I affectionately called “Clover”, was the same clover logo. I did that with the shape tool in Photoshop – it’s a simple logo and no skill was required to create it, obviously!

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or one of those aggreggator-type sites, you can help me out by checking out the blog itself and giving me some good old constructive criticism.

If you belong to what I imagine must be now the microscopic population of loyal readers of my blog, please do hook up with me on FriendFeed or Twitter. I’ll follow you back if you’re a reader!

What exactly went wrong with Typo and Mephisto? Well, Typo was beating the crap out of my VPS, among other reasons. Mephisto was fine until the Mongrel processes running it started dying after a few hours – the 192MB or RAM that I have on the VPS was 100% used and the Rimuhosting guys have wrote me more than once suggesting a memory upgrade as I was causing way too much disk swappage on the host machine. I put the high memory usage down to comment spammers, but hell I wonder how everyone else manages to keep their Mephisto or Typo blogs up assuming not everyone has the luxury of an excess of 192MB of RAM to play with. If you’re running a Typo, Mephisto, or any other Rails-based blogging application under low memory conditions successfully, I want to know!

Another reason I had for abandoning Mephisto was the difficulties I had with its templating system. I could generally live with the lack of an easy way to display stuff like monthly archives unless I was following the trunk, but it was the lack of pagination (such as paged monthly archives) that really annoyed me. Rick Olson has stated that pagination probably won’t go into the Mephisto core and I disagree on its lack of usefulness (but this is another matter). I lacked the perserverance to finish up a pagination plugin when I realized that I had to work off the trunk which was already very much changed from the point release I was using.

Rails is such a wonderful framework, but throwing (another) templating layer into the mix (Mephisto uses Liquid) is a mixed blessing. The whole exercise felt very much like jumping through hoops when there’s already a clear path to goal – nevertheless, I’ll have to give the benefit of the doubt to the lack of documentation and the fast-moving development on Mephisto trunk. I’m probably geting too old for living on the edge where blogging software is concerned.

Anyway, I’m glad to come back to WordPress and less downtime, I hope.

So, I took some time to clear the backlog of unread articles in my 289 feed subscriptions at Bloglines recently so I can “start over” at Google Reader and not have to read the same unread articles twice. Export Bloglines to OPML, import into Google Reader… It went painlessly and I noticed that Bloglines “folders” got converted into “Tags” in Google Reader – mmm, taaaags. But oh wait, what’s this when I try to “manage my subscriptions” – tags, folders and labels. I’m getting confused.

Just to make sure that they really are the same thing, I created some test tags/labels/folders, and yes they are actually the same thing (meaning if you add a new folder, it becomes available as a label and tag). I’m sure the terms used will be made consistent as Google Reader moves out of beta (or rather, gets further along as a beta).

If you noticed how unorganized my Bloglines subscriptions are, that’s because organizing feeds was a pain on Bloglines back in the day (it was clumsy to organize feeds into folders, you had to select a feed, scroll to the dropdown, and select the action to move it into a folder), but that’s not really a problem now with the new drag and drop interface for managing subscriptions that Bloglines pushed out recently (I think). Thankfully, Google Reader makes managing subscriptions easy as well with the familiar Gmail-like labeling.

Anyhoo, I started using Google Reader for a bit to read new articles in my feeds, and it wasn’t long before I just found my killer feature: ‘mark items as read when you scroll past them’.

This preference will tell Google Reader to only mark those items you have scrolled across as read. I hated it in Bloglines where clicking on a feed would mark all its articles as read, especially for those prolific blogs or those for which I have a backlog (200 entries is usually a little too much for one sitting for good blogs). I have to say it again, this is the killer functionality for me. I’ve been bitten by interruptions and crashed browsers once too many times. I always click on feeds (in Bloglines) with more than 50 unread articles with no small amount of trepidation, fearing that I won’t be able to read them all or that I’d do something to crash Firefox (which is surprisingly common when you’re working with large datasets in JavaScript). This often results in my reluctance to click on feeds with more than 50 unread posts, and with the vicious cycle 50 becomes 200 (the Bloglines limit for unread posts) and the feed rarely gets read (happens with blogs like Scoble or news websites like The Register).

With this feature in Google Reader, I can click on “All items” even if it says there are 1 gazillion unread posts and still feel safe about not losing my place. Those of you using non-web feed reader applications may scoff at this (I’m really not sure, I haven’t used one in a long time so I only assume something like this is common in applications like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon), but I’ve yet to see this done in a web application. Offline feed readers are not really an option for me unless they integrate to an online (i.e central) source (let me know if one exists!). For this feature alone, I decided to make a switch to Google Reader from Bloglines.

Google Reader can get a little slow though, but then I only have 512MB of RAM right now so it probably isn’t indicative of anything (the new Bloglines is slow on the Macbook Pro as well I noticed). Hopefully all this will be moot when I get the 2GB RAM upgrade that’s waiting at the store. Other than that, Google Reader seems faster to respond network-wise (which I’m not surprised at, considering that it’s Google (and their distribution channels)), and it’s also prettier. Yeah, looking good matters to some people, like me (not that Google Reader is fantastic aesthetically, but it’s far less staid than Bloglines).

Now all that’s left is to keep those fingers crossed for some sexy Gmail integration – I’m thinking something like RssFwd, a wonderfully useful creation by Choon Keat. I use RssFwd to track some important blogs and to track the latest releases of TV show torrents (Choon Keat is not gonna be happy about that though heh).

• For some reason, Typo is very unstable for me on my VPS with 160MB RAM. I deploy Typo on a mongrel_cluster of 2 mongrels, fronting it with Apache 2.2 + mod_proxy_balancer, and all 160MB RAM and 192MB of swap is used up whenever I post an article or sweep the cache. Comments also take noticeably longer to post on my blog than on other Typo blogs. I’m not sure what exactly I’ve done wrong.
• I often get an obscure NilClass error that screws up the front page whenever pages are regenerated (often caused by someone posting a comment or an article).
• Changing the blog’s design requires one to create or edit an existing Typo theme – I kinda missed WordPress’s Web-based template editing. This was a significant roadblock to me ever changing the look and feel of my Typo blog.

Coincidentally, my urge to swap to Mephisto coincided with the release of mephisto 0.6 (Immortus) just today, and after some minor hiccups, I managed to get Mephisto up and running with my articles imported from Typo. (Still couldn’t get Capistrano to play well though, which I’m guessing is due to Rails version conflicts – I guess I’ll just have to do with the release version.)

Documentation is rather sparse at the moment, especially on how to convert from Typo to Mephisto (I updated that wiki page while I was there). I dug around in Mephisto 0.6’s source and found the converters in vendor/plugins/mephisto_converter. Not sure if there is a web interface to this – either way, things worked almost perfectly just running this command:

script/runner "Mephisto.convert_from :typo" -e production

You need to create a typo entry in database.yml that points to your existing Typo database. Also, the conversion will fail if any of your Typo users and email addresses are the same as the default Mephisto user admin. To avoid this just change the Mephisto user(s) login and email to something else.

So there’s that, hopefully some time this year I’ll update the look and feel.

Respected Webmaster,

I found your page on Yahoo! when I was searching for Free Cartoon Porn (this topic is related to my site). You are running a great website and I would be happy to place your link on my site. If you would like to exchange text links with me, please submit your website on deleted link

I’m sure you know that links exchange will help both of us to get better positions on search engines and have more visitors to our websites.

I went to Yahoo! and searched for “free cartoon porn redemption” and sure enough, that link was up there. A bunch of comment spam qualified my site for a link exchange, yippee! I was pretty amused.

Before you start lecturing me on running just Mongrel, let me just say that now isn’t right time to get a proper setup – I’ll get it done over the weekend. There’re so many choices (combinations of Apache, lighttpd, pound, pen, mongrel, mongrel_cluster), I think I’m due for some reading before making a choice.

If you see any bugs, let me know! Of course, any deployment-related advice will be appreciated.

Well, Dreamhost has been good to me – I got so many referral credits from them that they paid for my subscription many times over after I posted about their $0.77/month offer. Unfortunately, Typo seems to be quite a monster (compared to WordPress), and database access is purportedly (and observably) slow on Dreamhost. Still, Dreamhost is a great host for shared hosting, I’m sticking with them for delivering more static content. A VPS just makes sense now that I’ve been tinkering more with Ruby on Rails, plus which geek wouldn’t admit it just feels more right to be in full control of your server (well, it’s root on a virtual machine, but still root).

This time around, I chose Rimuhosting, a New Zealand-based hosting company (servers are US-based, of course), and here’s why (I did some research once again on WebHostingTalk and asked some people their experiences with their webhosts):

Pros:

• Fairly affordable prices – I got their cheapest MiroVPS1 plan, which goes for $19.95/month and get 30GB of transfer and 96MB of RAM (which could be a problem, but upgrading seems easy enough anyway from what they say on their site). Comparing to several other VPS hosts like unixshell, Tektonic.net, ServerAxis, their plans are somewhat mid-range.
• Their reputation is great. Yup, I’ve heard and read only good things about them, something that’s quite hard to find in the world of web hosting. We use them at work to setup servers sometimes too.
• Seems to be run by competent people – they have a bliki (blog + wiki) with some nice posts. The one that really caught my eye is the one on their Ruby on Rails hosting stack. Not that I’d use it since I’m on Ubuntu, but it shows that the folks at Rimuhosting are up-to-date.
• They run Xen, which Deepak, among others, tells me is the most efficient server virtualization software. Yeah, whatever, score one for statistics (and lies).
• Support is reasonably fast – got replies to my pre-sales queries reasonably fast (more than a few hours, but it wasn’t during working hours anyway). Of course, I’ll have to see how it goes now that I’m a real customer.
• A simple web-based control panel where I can reboot the VPS. It’s no Virtuozzo Power Panels, but it’s enough. JVDS didn’t have one and it started to get old sending support tickets to do a reboot.
  

  
  

Cons:

• They don’t support Gentoo, my Linux distro of choice. Only RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora Core are supported. I went with Ubuntu, not having much experience with it (excluding a brief affair with Debian). I was wary of this at first, but my fears of bungling around with an unfamiliar distro have vanished after I saw how easy it is to install stuff with apt-get, and things are not placed in weird places in the filesystem hierarchy. I think I could get used to it, this “not compiling everything that moves” idea ;).
• ServerAxis supports Gentoo, and offers much better “value for money”, except that their lowest priced plan is much higher ($30). But you get 512MB RAM, 200GB RAM, and 5 IP addresses… Too bad I’d rather pay out of my PayPal funds.

Well, less blogging, more server migration. Actually the application installs are mostly done. I’ve never had apt-get play so nice back when I was experimenting with Debian – just
apt-get install [package] and things are installed quite cleanly (keyword: “cleanly”). I think this may grow on me (yeah yeah laugh and point at the Ubuntu noob) – perhaps you don’t need to compile everything (gasp, I said it!).

The install went straightforward enough, though I didn’t get to try out the new installer gem. I didn’t bother because I’m on a Dreamhost shared hosting account, though installing the gem without root privileges seems like it should work. I simply followed this guide to getting Typo 4 running on Dreamhost. Ran into some trouble running the WordPress import script (found in /db/converters/wordpress2.rb), but Google turned up the solution (basically a patch to the Articles model that tries to send pings when importing posts). This should already be fixed in Typo SVN, but it’s not in release 4.0.

Anyhow, Typo seems spiffy, though I am still getting the occasional “Application Error”, but that’s most likely a Dreamhost thing. Liking the near-minimalist theme as well – I’m already missing the green clover though heh.

Things I’m already liking:

• Sidebar modules that you can add to your blog – for example, getting the del.icio.us links I have at the side to show is just a matter of dragging the del.icio.us sidebar item to the “Active” list and pointing it to my del.icio.us feed. There’re sidebar items for Flickr, tags, 43things, Amazon, and even the categories and archives are sidebar items.
  

  
  

• A Blacklist section where you can enter blacklisted words and regexes! Take that texas holdem poker!
• Live preview of your posts as you type – can get a little sluggish though.
• The ability to search and delete all comments – WordPress was missing that and running SQL statements in phpmyadmin stopped being fun.
• The nice Scribbish theme that comes with the Typo package.

Things that I don’t like:

• Linking to uploaded files was confusing. I like the whole “Attachments” idea, but I didn’t know how to link to them until I browsed to the Resources section and copied the link to the image I just uploaded (by saving the post I was making – there wasn’t a way to upload an attachment while writing the post).
  

  
  

  I’m probably doing things the wrong way though, seeing as this is way too obtuse. Would be nice to see improvements (such as, upload file as you write your post, click on uploaded file to include into post, all on the same page with AJAX).

• Um, nothing further!

Need to use it more to decide whether I’ll like this or not.

Excuses, all. I’m horrified that I’ve actually allowed my blog to fall into a state of disuse and disrepair. I’m back and I hope to stay back. But first I’ve to clean up all this crud that’s on my blog (comment spam, Trackback spam, etc.).

Public Service Announcement
I lost a post entitled “Ooh look at this old website I dug up”. I believe I offered something to the person who guessed correctly, but I only have Jed Brown’s comment in my email. Whoever guessed first before Jed did, please do send me an email (chuyeow at gmail dot com).

As I was saying, I don’t read every feed I subscribe to nowadays. (By the way, Bloglines only keeps 200 entries per feed before it stops keeping track of new ones.) What I do now is go through the list from top to bottom and check out the ones that I seem to be more interested in. It’s interesting to see a pattern. I tend to give feeds with too many unread items a miss, resulting in a vicious cycle of them never getting read. Feeds with 30 new items a day, these I also tend to not read. I also read too many Mozilla-related blogs. Here’s my list of “To Read” blogs (arranged in no particular order) whenever I’m short on time or just too plain lazy to read everything:

• Jon Hicks’ hicksdesign
  One of my favorite designers who also happens to be a mean programmer (at least from what I can tell from Jon’s hacking of Textpattern, which powers his blog and portfolio).
• Bernie Zimmermann
  Mozilla blogger and Firefox GrayModern Theme author
• Chris Pederick
  Chris Pederick is the author of the Web Developer Tools Firefox extension, among other cool projects.
• Forever Geek
  Which I contribute to, but I’m on hiatus now.
• Gadgetopia
  Lots of neat posts and links on technology
• Gentoo Linux News
  Not a blog, but I love Gentoo!
• Gravatar blog
  I think Gravatars are pretty sweet, this keeps me in the loop of what Tom Werner’s up to.
• Life At Ngee Ann
  This is a fellow Singaporean’s blog, quite humorous. “Ngee Ann” refers to Ngee Ann polytechnic, a local academic institution.
• life in mono
  Fellow Singaporean Adrianna‘s a cool techie Mac evangelist.
• adot’s notblog*
  Asa Dotzler’s blog. Mozilla stuff is always interesting.
• cheeaunblog
  Author of the famous Phoenity theme, who happens to live in Penang where I some relatives stay. Maybe we can meet up when I go there, huh, Chee Aun?
• Neil’s World
  Neil Turner blogs stuff that I would blog myself if I could. Well, mostly. Mozilla and tech blog.
• Photo Matt
  Matthew Mullenweg’s the lead developer of WordPress, and turned 21 not long ago.
• philwilson.org
  Phil Wilson blogs mostly on Firefox and the Semantic Web.
• vantan.org: The Daily Weblog
  Fellow Singaporean Vanessa Tan is a “devoted Netizen” who works in an environment unfriendly to Firefox.
• The Burning Edge
  Used to follow this religiously, but a little less now because of more infrequent posts and also because much of the work now is bug fixing since the Aviary branch landing.

Not too many A-list bloggers in that list, but that’s probably because people like Simon Willison and Doug Bowman have been posting less of late. Give these blogs/sites a visit or two and let me know if you know of any related blog that I can add to my feed aggregator (yes, I’m still interested in more despite an unread list of hundreds).

December 2004 was a record month for this blog, with record highs in visits, pages and bandwidth. I exceeded my monthly transfer limit of 20GB by just a little bit as well.

Getting an average of 4.7K visits per day, or 10K pages per day.

Thanks to the “Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing” post, transfer spiked to almost 3GB on Dec 15.

Top referrers included SpreadFirefox.com and Bloglines. There was a referrer spammer (brushed out in the screenshot) which made it to the top 10 before I caught it and blocked it.

Here’s how referrers are blocked (with .htaccess), for those who are still looking for a solution. What these 2 rewrite rules do is to, respectively, rewrite the listed IP addresses, and rewrite the referrers with the following strings in them, back to the client’s IP. This works extremely well, and I know because I’ve had my server (a VPS) brought to its knees from constant referrer spamming. The hit rates from these spammers were so high that it practically became a DOS attack. Since I’ve implemented these rewrite rules, all has been peaceful and I can finally see uptimes of more than 3 days (believe it or not, the VPS did go down that often).

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.26 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^195.175.37.24
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} texasholdem [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example\.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} example2\.com
RewriteRule ^.* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/ [L]

The referrer spammers are still going at it (though they don’t appear in AWStats) – I can see them hitting me when I check my server-status page (see the mod_status module).

I don’t think I’ll need to upgrade my hosting plan yet, since the bandwidth spike was a one time thing caused by the crazy Homer Simpson entry.

And here’s the top 10 browsers as requested. Unsurprising that Firefox tops the list.

Well, here’s to a better year ahead for everyone. For myself, I look forward to having a good time at my new job, (finally) getting published, finding religion, and finally getting a move on in life. I’m not one for “Happy New Year”s and new year resolutions though. So blah, have fun.

Look me up in the Cenarius server if any of you are playing World of Warcraft – my main character’s Lucita (gnome rogue).