Monthly Archives: March 2005

Playing with the database

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Mark posted over at WebLogTools that he noticed an issue with his blog slowing down, and he pondered whether it was due to spam-karma. Having an excuse to mess with the database was a gift I was not about to ignore.
You can see the site stats (1,133 posts and 2,619 comments ) and that amounted, with the other bits, to an sql size of 3.9meg. The plugins I am running are immaterial – they have not changed in what I then did:
- dropped a couple of tables that were hangovers from previous plugins
- removed all the comments that had been flagged as spam
- optimised all the tables.
That netted me a gain of .4meg sql space. While that space gained is of no consequence in itself, it does mean that there is .4 of a meg less information (junk information) for the queries to run through. Is my blog running faster ? No idea, but it was fun playing :) Maybe if your database appears to be running slow, it’s worth a look ‘under the bonnet’ ?
(Note: If you are going to do this, backup okay ?)

Easter Eggs

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P won 1st prize for this at school and it currently occupies the front window of her Opticians. There are a couple more pictures in the Gallery. All the work of herself and her sister :)

A late sunday

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Staying up very late, plus forgetting that the clocks change, plus J being off her feet today has all conspired to prevent me both getting to Borders and to the gym. Bugger. Instead I have dug out a small digital camera I have – one of those ‘almost fits on a keychain’ type things – and installed it into the machine. I have one of those flickr accounts, so I’ll play with it (all images will be tagged as noise) and see what I think. I’m not sold at all with all this ‘stick it online’ stuff, but hey, I’ll try it.
I do have a couple of nice Easter images though ……… they are on the other camera so I’ll go grab them and maybe upgrade my gallery pages.

It’s ugly so stop it

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*Why* do *so* many people *insist* on using the *asterisk* to *emphasise* text when we have perfectly good tags available for our use ? And what must a screen reader make of *junk* like *this*.
*F*F*S* stop it

(And no it’s not some failed use of markdown / textile / whatever. It’s laziness and stupidity).

3500m and then some

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That’s the furthest I’ve rowed at once – and it felt bloody marvellous. In fact the whole gym thing was great today, spent over 90mins there mainly on the cardio stuff as I was enjoying it and the music so damn much so now I’m rolling in endorphins. Damn good stuff I tell you :) I think I’ve got my visits there about right too – skip Monday and Friday but do every day otherwise.

Cleartype. Set my display ( Start > Control panel > Display > Appearance > Effects ) to use this option last night and although it’s improved some text, it’s not helped some other. I think it’s wierd as well because I am so used to the normal (Opaquetype ?) way of things looking. Odd.

Dr Who. Didn’t watch it. I am informed though that there were no Daleks, but there were some “bins”.

Roll on April 1st.

I need to get annoyed – then the post in my head about the USA will come out fully-formed. The situation over there in so many many many ways is so far off being rational.

Did you see me playing with a new theme earlier ? I think I’ll take development of that into my machine.

Tomorrow I go to Borders. I need books, lots of books ! (3 for 2 will do though)

Anyone in #bodyart ?

Meme: Books

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1. You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It. This book has saved countless arguments in this house. I’ve bought this for a couple of people when learning that they had become engaged too. The stuff in this book is essential for ANYONE. Really it is. We took this on holiday a few years ago just after getting it, and I was sitting there by the pool laughing not at what was in the book so much as at the way it depicted situations that happened daily in our house. (“The butter’s in the fridge” is a standard phrase used against me frequently). It really clued me in as to what the language of “woman-speak” was – and likewise the ladies in this house now accept that certain behaviours / actions / interpretations of mine are simply because I’m a bloke. Seriously – buy this book.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
In a book …. no. Magazines ? Yes ;)

3. The last book you bought is:
Designing with Web Standards ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

4. The last book you read:
Ghost Girl ~ Torey L. Hayden. When she leaves Jeremiah and co. for the last time … I nearly cried. One of those rare books that I read in 3 ‘goes’ as putting it down was very difficult indeed and I just know that it will easily bear a re-read. I must say a thank you to Stacy for sending me this.

5. What are you currently reading?
Nothing right now as a full time read – I am completely out of books. I usually get a few at a time to read, and this is drought time. That said, I love books and I become a fount of WordPress assistance to those that buy me them hint hint. That said I am re-dipping into Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff ~ Richard Carlson. No real reason behind the ‘dipping’ but it is certainly a fantastic book and one I would recommend to anyone.

6. Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Wouldn’t sand ruin them ? Okay … tricky this one.
– The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity ~ Roy Porter
- Mrs.Beeton’s Book of Cookery and Household Management
- The Stand ~ Stephen King
- The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
- And lastly, the Biggest Book of All :)

7. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
I’m not. Partly because I’m not sure who to send it to as there are a few people I know read here so it would be more than 3. Partly because those people may prefer to choose to do it rather than be asked, but mainly because why limit myself to 3 ? It’s a weekend – a long weekend – so there may be more people who choose to do this, and if they pinged here then we’d all have some bonus posts to read wouldn’t we ?

Removing Google

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The robots.txt for the domain now only allows bots to index the /wordpress directory and subdirs of that (and a couple of other minor dirs). Good bots are banned from accessing every other directory. Careful – if you go looking at the robots.txt and start poking around where you should not, you could set a trap off, and I will ban every IP that comes through. So why have I banned the bots ?
It’s got little to do with my current attitude to Google, and more to wondering just how my blog (and other directories) benefit the world at large. I don’t believe they do, so why clutter ? I have had the #1 search result for “Mark”, “WordPress help” “XML Parse Error” “Enabled parking” and several others and yes, it’s cool the first time you see your site as #1 (that is a result from within your site – we can all create stupid domain names then go WOW! KOOL! as we get #1 in a field of … 1) but what does it DO exactly ? Apart from bandwidth, very very little. I carry no ads on the hidden pages, I have nothing unique to offer and as I have yet to discover and continue to read a blog found through a search engine, why should I think that being in the G’s results will benefit me then ?
If comments are then considered, I can recall about 6 comments that have been made by what I would call random visitors. Each blog that I read tends to have it’s own circle of commentors and again, why does being on google help this ? I do not see that it does.
So there was this thing that was costing me, yet providing no tangible benefit. Doesn’t make sense to me, so I closed the door.