Browsing the "Infrastructure" category...
We're Back
If it’s not broken, then don’t fix it.
The thing is, I really didn’t think that anything was broken. Until it went down for the better part of two days. So I applied for my golden ticket and Take the First Step is on a shiny, new shared accelerator.
It may be my imagination, but the response seems snappier than before.
Housekeeping
I’ve completed some general housekeeping here at Take the First Step. If I’ve done it correctly, then there will be fewer 404 – Not Found errors around here.
The first step for the budding webmaster is to register your site at Google Webmaster Tools. That will you a window into how Google sees your site. I like to check once a week to make sure that the Googlebot can find everything that it is looking for.
The next step is to learn how to interpret your web server log files. Your mileage may vary, but here’s how I look for 404 errors:
$ zgrep -w 404 access_log.20080512.gz | cut -d ' ' -f7,11 | uniq -c 1 /blog/2004/09/27.html "-" 2 /blog/topic/software/2003/08/18.html "-" 1 /id/1319/jms-providers/ "-" 1 /id/1318/leopard-part-4/ "-" 1 /id/1317/brief-history/ "-" 1 /id/1316/march-drabness/ "-" 1 /id/1315/march-madness-08/ "-"where:
"zgrep -w 404" retrieves lines with the word 404 from my compressed access logs "cut -d ' ' -f7,11" defines a space as field delimiter and retrieves the 7th and 11th fields from those lines "uniq -c" shows the unique lines preceded by the instance count
Here we see some failing radio userland links and a mis-behaving client that is adding a trailing '/' to my page links. A little htaccess magic and the 404's are cured.
New Toy
I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I signed up for a lifetime accelerator account. It will certainly look good in my hosting garage, right next to my current 20GB disk and 60GB bandwidth capacity.
It occurs to me that one of the reasons Joyent can afford to provide these lifetime deals is people like me. I went in as number 188 of the VC200. I backed my bet with the Mixed Grill. And now I’ve added a small accelerator. Making my lonely little weblog one of the most severely over-infrastructured around.
MyBlogLog
When I joined MyBlogLog back in August, I was interested in real time statistics rather than community. I thought that the widgets were just a gimmick.
But recently, LinkedIn helped me reconnect with an old colleague and pick up some product knowledge for work. And Fred Wilson posted on the growth of MyBlogLog.
I never really bought into the social networking phenomenon. But I never really gave it a chance either. So I have added the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget, and we’ll see how things go from here.
Online Backup Redux
I signed up for a year of Carbonite Online Backup. It isn’t my ideal laptop backup solution, but it seems to be better than any of my alternatives.
Pros:
- It just works. It doesn’t require manual intervention and I don’t need access to the corporate network.
- Only $50/year.
Cons:
- They don’t support Macs.
- It doesn’t let me review which files are awaiting backup.
- It uses the now standard license that let’s them change the terms any time they wish.
Online Backup
There are two types of computer users in the world – those who backup their data and those who wish they had.
I’d like to think that I belong to the first group rather than the second. But that may be wishful thinking on my part – my ultimate work product is kept in Subversion respositories, but all of the intermediaries only get backed up once a week. And the home laptops only get backed up every month or so.
One of my colleagues at work had a hard drive crash. After hearing that we spent close to two grand on hard disk recovery I thought that I take another look at my backup procedure.
The problem with a laptop is that there isn’t a good way to backup – no second internal drive and usually not connected to a network drive for an automated overnight backup. So the work laptop gets a weekly backup and the home laptops get a backup when I get around to attaching an external USB drive.
Which is why I’m currently about 2 GB into a Carbonite Online Backup trial. Carbonite allows me to securely mirror designated portions of my hard drive to their servers. If it works as advertised, then I’ll have access to a one day old snapshot of my system. Easily worth the $50 annual fee. And if it doesn’t work, then I’ll be posting about one of their competitors in a couple of weeks.
3 Dec: Online Backup Redux
Google Analytics
Gene’s post on MyBlogLog reminded me that I’ve been without a good analytics package since TextDrive broke up with Urchin. So I signed up for Google Analytics to see what I’ve been missing.
Wow. Google Analytics is dramatically better than the Urchin 5 that used to be available from TextDrive. The data presentation is improved and there is more data collected to boot. I wish that I had a goal page with a funnel just so I can see how it works.
I don’t think that I needed to know that 49% of my page reads are from IE, that 89% of my page reads are from MS Windows, or that that 75% of my page reads are broadband.
But it is interesting to know that only 4% of my page reads are seen on a 800×600 screen or smaller. My style sheet is set up for a width of 780. I don’t think that I want to stretch out the width of my main body, but it seems that I have the real estate to add another column on the right.
Update: I should also mention that I purchased 12 month’s of MyBlogLog Pro. Google Analytics crunches its data once a night, while MyBlogLog Pro satisfies my thirst for real-time statistics.