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Battle of the Evil Server Goblin… There can Only be ONE!

Battle of the Evil Server Goblin… There can Only be ONE!

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I refuse to concede defeat against the evil server goblin that has been stalking me around cyberspace, using my server as a cudgel aimed directly at my un-offending (keep the guffaws to a minimum) skull. That green little bastard is GOING DOWN!

What green server goblin you ask? THIS ONE:

Server Goblin

What’s that you say? It’s merely a Photoshopped (Photopainted actually) photo of my daughter’s latest McD’s Happy Meal toy? NONSENSE! What you are looking at is a 100% pure mean green server piss off machine, and it’s out to get me.

All I have to say is thank God for my brother-in-law Elvio (owner of coolcommands.com and probably one of the smartest, no-nonsense grep-heads you could ever meet), and for the quick turn around times from the P2L coding talents of Nick and Jamie.

Here’s the latest scoop on what’s been happening… I left Server Seed awhile back due to another disappearing act and I have been through a rather spectacular list of service providers looking for someone to simply give me what Server Seed had in terms of performance, but with some degree to available support when things go wrong. Well up until recently, it seems like I just can’t get those two together in a single package unless I want to bend over and let Media Temple be my daddy. (MT has great shared hosting prices, but their true dedicated hardware pricing is nothing short of laughable). My latest setup is a box I purchases directly with Softlayer and I bought some management from a third-party provider.

Since then, I am getting great service, but loads on the box are VERY high compared to what I’m used to and performance, in my opinion, sucks. So I’ve been chasing this new management company about it and I’m basically getting nowhere. In a recent request, I asked that SSL be disabled along with imap and some other ports/services I didn’t need and were open for nothing. I won’t get too deep into the response, but I was told that Apache would have to be recompiled in order to shut off SSL. Ummm… no.

So, I asked Elvio, master of all things Unix, to snoop around on my box and check out the settings and see what’s what… I think it was the whole Apache recompile thing to shut off SSL that had him seriously worried about what my server looked like from the inside. Well needless to say, it was a dog’s breakfast, so my tutelage in Unix command prompt began. He basically had to rebuild the config, recompiled Apache and upgraded it to version 2 (yeah, Linux 1.3 on a multicore, multiprocessor box… that wasn’t a great idea) and upgrade PHP, plus clean out a bunch of other crap. That was finally done tonight actually.

Next up was to basically study the server’s performance and resource usage… and to accomplish this, he installed an AWESOME package called Cacti. This is a freeware based network graphing solution with a sweet user interface that even I can figure out in under 5 seconds. Check it out at www.cacti.net

cacti

By studying cacti’s reports and staring at the regular top processes and MySQL top processes, we started to identify coding related areas that could be improved to run more efficiently. Once again Elvio made some suggestions based on his analysis on the logs and Nick and Jamie went right to work kicking CPU ass! In fact, load was shaved right down by improving the caching system, combining includes into single files and tonight, Nick re-worked the Boolean search query as per Elvio’s search method and has cut down search times BIG TIME! For those of you with fast connection’s, you may remember the average search time for a tutorial was about 5 seconds or longer you were searching during a peak time. Well I’ve been search this evening with the box on an average load at results were coming back pretty much instantly!

So, things are definitely improving in terms of server performance and we hope people are enjoying the site as we look to speed things up and get the server back to being reliable and stable. That damn green goblin is GOING DOWN!

In summary, here’s what I’ve learned lately:

– Be wary of server management companies… they seem to go to pieces when things go beyond simply restart Apache.
– You don’t have to recompile Apache to disable SSL (Actually I knew this… I just can’t believe that’s what my management company tried to tell me)
– Disabling imap doesn’t affect POP (See previous note about management company)
– You don’t have to run DNS Server services to run your email properly (See previous note again)
– Top and MyTop are your friends
– Nagios is for monitoring, Cacti is for reporting (both rock)
– Multithreading is a feature added to Linux in version 2+
– Natural Boolean results already return results sorted with correct scoring… if you get query results back with 0 scores, your query is screwed. You should not have to re-sort them for correct score values. (Hey, I’m not a programmer, how the hell would I know?!)
– Elvio, Nick and Jamie are EXTREMELY patient… to the point of impossibility even.

That’s it for now guys! 1AM and I’m tired. Battling green server goblins is tough work… gnite!

Dan

Great Web 2.0 Article and the Silly Trends Involved

Great Web 2.0 Article and the Silly Trends Involved

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There’s a lot of good from the Web 2.0 movement, but also some pretty silly trends, especially “Beta” sites. That has to be the sorriest and laziest way to explain releasing a bug infested website I have ever seen. If your website has bugs when you release, it’s because you didn’t test it properly, end of story. When we released the latest upgrade of the P2L website, it had bugs. It was our goof, our screw-up and our issue. We took responsibility for the issues and fixed them and that was that… well now webmasters can explain those bugs away just by adding a Beta tag to their site logo! It’s basically a slight step up from having fancy “under construction” logos all over the place.

Anyhow, check out this hilarious article at terminally-incoherent.com.

Dan

v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

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Man, where do I start?

It has been a VERY stressing week since the last time I posted, and it really hasn’t died down very much. I’ve been REALLY bothered by the negative feedback I’ve received on the new layout at Pixel2life, but those with some experience with large sites getting revamped have told me it’s completely natural and something akin to growing pains. I’ve obviously received more positive feedback than negative, but I can’t help but agree that I’m slowly losing my fondness for the new layout. This was a design that was heavily influenced from beyond my personal tastes, and I think I regret it. NG is now working on creating an updated version of the old version 2 layout to suit the new features found within v3, and we’ll be releasing sometime before the end of the weekend if all goes well. I know this is a pain in the ass for everyone, but that and the fact that ad conversion is HORRIBLE on this new version forces the decision.

Either way, I’m sure people will like this layout and will get used to it very quickly. We’ve wasted a lot of time with this layout juggling, but hopefully this will be the last of it for the next couple of years. I seriously think I will hand any future version design and implementation to a design company if I can afford it… I’m just not equipped for all this stress lol!

Anyhow, I’ve been really kind of focused and obsessed on all this lately and it’s been taking over my life in the last couple of weeks… I haven’t been sleeping well, my daughter was mad at me etc… so it was time to get things back into perspective and start enjoying myself a bit again. So, today I took my little girl out for her first try at bowling! I wasn’t so sure she was strong enough yet, but low and behold, she manages to get the ball pushed down the lane hard enough to knock over at least a few pins at the front. The shrieks of delight when those 2 or 3 pins fell over made it all worth it… she was having the time of her life and would come running over for a hug each time she threw the ball down the lane (I taught her the granny style shot).

Here’s a pic of the two pro bowlers after 3 sets of frames:

Bowling Champs!

It was just great to go out and get my mind off of things.

In other news, it’s really sad to see people circulating rumors and completely ridiculous stories about the old programmer and my friend Jay from P2L who now runs my-tuts. Today I spoke to someone that had so many strange ideas, I’m surprised he didn’t reveal that I eat babies or something. Guys, if you’re going to build up this opinion of myself or Jay before you’ve even so much as had a single conversation with us, confirm your stories and facts with us before you start shit throwing in the community. It’s EXTREMELY obvious that a few people have this stupid need to try and fuel a non-existent feud between Jay and I, and it’s too bad because despite Jay and I moving on with our respective projects, these drama whores just can’t. Get over it for God’s sakes. Jay and I do send each other emails and will probably always stay in touch to a certain degree… I know that sucks for the schoolyard kids that wanted a fight in the alley, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Anyhow, it’s 2AM and I need some sleep… I’ve been alone with Corina for a few days so it’s been long nights working on P2L and early mornings being with my daughter. I’ve actually become quite proficient in snoozing on the couch while she sits next to me holding my hand and watching Barney or Caillou.

Good night and talk to you all soon!

Dan

Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

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My deepest apologies for the complete lack of updates on my blog folks, but the hammertime development has simply stolen ALL my free time and I am working non-stop on this with Chaos and NG on a daily and nightly basis. In fact, I am just taking a break now from hammertime to post this update, then I’m back at it for a couple more hours tonight before bed.

First up in tonight’s post is a very happy but somewhat confused update on the Google incident (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3). We seem to be back in action! Last Tuesday I did my usual daily checks of the Google system, and suddenly our info and cache pages are working AND we are now coming back up in search results with terms we normally placed quite high on. So I’m very pleased with this recent turn of events, but at this point, I have no idea why were were removed in the first place, nor do I know how we were re-included in the index. I’m always one to say it’s the end result that matters, but this little lesson in search engine drama has me more than a little nervous because I didn’t learn anything from it other than perhaps Google is a tad twitchy. I’ll continue to search into why this happened, but as it stands, things seem to be returning to normal.

Next up, I recently had the pleasure of dusting off my fishing tackle after a 12+ year angler absence and took my 3 year old daughter for her first fishing trip! For those that don’t know, I am a stay at home dad when not working on P2L or web business in general, so Corina and I spend LOTS of time together and I thought she’d get a kick out of fishing. There’s a spot that’s about a 10 minute walk from my house that’s perfect for kids, so it’s easy to get out there for an hour or two before lunch and see if the fish are nibbling. She loved it and we’ve been out a few times to try our luck and she’s managed to haul out a couple of decent Bass, a 7 pound Pike (I had to help out with that one) and some Sunfish. Here’s her first catch that broke the 1 pound mark:

Corina Fishing

She was damn proud of that fish! It’s been tough to find time to be with my daughter with all this hammertime dev lately, but she sure loves the fishing time we squeeze in!

The 1 week countdown for hammertime has begun as we are now 7 days away from our August 1st release date (yeah, I’m shittin kittens at this point) and I am extremely excited and nervous to finally get this out the door. We’re now tearing through it all adding the finishing touches and looking for bugs both in terms of functionality and cross browser performance, so it’s a race against the clock for us now. Chaos and NG assure me that our Aug 1st deadline isn’t a problem, so I’m just trying to stay out of the road and not sound too dumb when I make a suggestion that is about as achievable as sending a Coke can to Mars.

Hey how about a sneak peek for you guys that bother to check out my blog? It isn’t much, but here’s a little snippet of what’s coming in a week:

Hammertime Sneak Peek

Now didn’t that make visiting my blog site completely worth it? Good, I thought so too! 🙂

That’s about it… I’d better get back before the programmers realize I’m gone. Hope everyone tunes in August 1st for our big release!

Dan

Google Update – The faceless email syndrome

Google Update – The faceless email syndrome

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Another update regarding the Google issue at pixel2life seeing as today marks 3 weeks since this started. If you’re just joining in the fun, Google has dropped the main P2L page from their listing for unknown reasons. There is speculation this is a glitch, but no one from Google is able to confirm it. You can read THIS POST to catch up on what I initially reported, then THIS POST as a followup with more details of what I had found so far.

At this point, I can’t get anything but a generic copy/paste style email from Google… here is what I keep receiving:

Thank you for your reply. We strongly encourage you to review our Webmaster Guidelines at www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769. If you make changes to your site to comply with these guidelines, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

The sad part of all this is that if someone from Google would take literally 5 minutes to look at my site’s status in their index and tell me if it’s been tagged for penalization or if this is simply a technical error, this would be solved, or I’d at least know what the problem is. As it stands, I have been contacting anyone I can and yet I am still groping in the dark on this.

I recently was referred to Matt Cutts as a possible avenue to getting some assistance, but this guy is probably so busy, it’s extremely unlikely (although I WISH) that I will hear from him. I left a comment on his latest blog post about what’s happening (there is ZERO contact info on his site) and I think I left him a voice-mail at work, so we’ll see what happens. I’m sure he can tell me what the heck is going on, or at least point me in the right direction, so I’m prayin! I’m also still sending emails to Google helpdesk in hopes someone gives me some hint of what’s happening.

The pisser is now we have idiots capitalizing on this issue. Open up google.com and search pixel2life… check out the second result. How’s that for bottom dwelling scum sucking idiocy? THESE people get listed on Google no problem, and here I am fighting to save this site and get back into the index.

As for Hammertime, NG is back from vacation and Chaos is back on Sunday, so we’re still going to push onwards and we’re hoping to launch soon… hopefully Google doesn’t decide to reject this product too.

I also just checked my stats and I have less traffic from Google so far this month than I would normally get in an afternoon. Ouchies.

That’s about it from here guys… now to go approve today’s tutorials!

Dan