Software upgrade miscellanea
A little bit of background on this server may be helpful to start off with. I bought this server in 2003 for $200. That’s not a typo. It was the lowest model of a line of bargain basement Linux PCs offered by Wal-Mart. Other than adding a spare 256MB RAM DIMM I had laying around (the computer only came with 128 MB!), I haven’t made any other upgrades. That means it’s still running on the same slow 20GB hard drive and the slow AMD Duron 1200+ bargain processor. Note that the only reason I call it a server is because that is the functionality it fulfills; other than in name, it’s really just a crappy, over-the-hill desktop.
Soon after I bought this server I ended up using it to host a site called terpy.net. It ran on Slashcode (the engine that drives Slashdot). It was aimed at University of Maryland students. I eventually killed off the site due to a lack of interest on my part in updating it, and I only revived this server two months ago to host this site.
Since the server is under-powered, it has a little bit of trouble handling even these modest webserving tasks. So I just finished up with two modifications that should make the server run a little bit faster. For one, I changed DNS servers. There were some sort of DNS resolution issues with the router, so I changed the DNS servers this server is configured to connect to (strictly speaking this doesn’t have anything to do with the speed of the server). I also installed eAccelerator, which caches compiled PHP scripts. I can already feel the increased responsiveness of the server. In particular, the connection won’t seem to hang as long after the post comment button is clicked (SpamKarma2 is fairly computationally expensive). Incidentally, if anyone wants to know how to install eAccelerator on Ubuntu Linux, this is a good tutorial.
As for the blog itself, I’m already up to several thousand visits, which is a very good number considering this blog is less than a month old. That is very fast growth. However, that growth can mainly be attributed to a scam advertisement in Popular Science. I scanned in that terrible ad and sent an email off to PZ Myers, who I know from back when we both used to use talk.origins a lot. He found it intriguing and posted it on his blog Pharyngula, which gave me over one thousand visits within a day. From there, the ad was apparently intriguing enough to spread through the blogosphere like ripples through a pond. It hit Punk Ass Blog, which was responsible for about a hundred visits, and also spread like wildfire through the NetStumbler social bookmarking/browsing site, which brought in even more visits than Pharyngula. So I think it’s safe to say that without that one blog entry there would be many fewer visitors to this site. Hopefully enough of those people actually stuck around long enough to check out some of the other content. Just judging by continuous hits on the RSS feed and the number of visits to the scam ad blog entry that didn’t also depart from that page, I will make a conservative guess that I have around a dozen regular-ish readers so far. That’s not bad. It could grow bigger, certainly, but for just starting out, it’s not bad at all.
