That was fun, but now it’s time to restore Pulpconnection back to its most recent look. For April 1st, Pulpconnection went retro thanks to the free Retro theme from Organic Themes. Talk about throwing it back to the old days of the Internet. Anyways back to the future…
Not sure why but the internal scheduler service that WordPress uses wasn’t working. No wonder why scheduled posts didn’t post accordingly. Also, all kinds of trackbacks and other links weren’t updated.
As a starting point, I disabled a bunch of WP plugins. Doing so appears to have cleared the backlog of scheduled tasks. Now to start re-evaluating the plugins to really see if I need them. Then activate them one by one to see if the scheduler problem reappears.
More testing to do…
Don’t mind things around here for a bit. Doing some maintenance to see if I can address a problem that I was unaware of previously.
Here’s what Pulpconnection looked like from the WordPress’ annual report for 2014. Most of the stats are personally underwhelming, but hey, it’s not about the bass, right?
See @abaggy, I told you the new BMW i3 stirs up controversy as it got the most comments on my blog this year. Oh, and thanks for being the most active Pulpconnection commenter. 😉
Check out Pulpconnection’s 2014 annual blogging report.
Notice anything different around here? Actually, Pulpconnection has been different since the end of August, but I just didn’t have the focus to summarize the changes. So on a quiet Sunday morning with a cup of Nespresso, I’m motivated to list the changes.
First and foremost, you’ll notice the new look of Pulpconnection. For years, I’ve used the Thesis theme then added the Chronicl look. This was a fun, playful combination.
While I’ve been a fan of the Thesis theme since 2009, I wanted a fresh new look. Thesis is still awesome, but I didn’t want to spend the time building my own look using Thesis 2. So while wandering around the web, I came across On Topic by WooThemes. What struck me about On Topics was its “bigness.” Everything looks so big and easy to see. This readability aspect was the biggest motivator to switch. I love my blogging bling, but all those widgets become distractions. I still have them, but they’re on the bottom of the page leaving you the readers a less cluttered view.
Along with widgets only in the footer, On Topic features a header that moves. On the home page, the “header” is vertical, but on posts and pages, the header goes horizontal, allowing for more space for content.
Customization of On Topic is available though much more limited that with Thesis. Thesis still provides way more options to customize aspects of your WordPress site. I’ll miss that about Thesis. WooThemes includes lots of Google fonts with On Topic though I’ve seen strange characters suddenly appear. Not sure what or why.
I also changed Pulpconnection’s home page to show excerpts of blog posts instead of full posts like before. I like the way On Topic displays its excerpts with the featured image. Sorry, you need to click on the Continue Reading button to see the full post.
I’ve changed up some of the menus since On Topic has less options for menus than Chronicl. I spent some time and filled out my Travels section including more trips from the past. I also started adding my annual Kicks Analysis series. The most interesting addition is in the Around Hawaii menu. Click on that to see a map of Hawaii along with geo-tagged Pulpconnection posts.
Yes, Pulpconnection now has one. See that 16×16 pixel image of oranges in your browser bar? That’s the favicon for Pulpconnection created with the Favicon Generator. The green limes weren’t recognizable in a favicon size so oranges it is.
Like I already mentioned, Pulpconnection is now using Dreamhost’s DreamPress managed service. For its price, I don’t how you can compete with a VPS. I could never afford the 1.5+ GB of memory consumed by this site.
To compound all the changes, WordPress 4 coincidentally released while all the above was going on. So why not make things harder? Yup, upgraded to WordPress 4.
As always, there are things to do. DreamPress includes Varnish, but I understand the simultaneous use of a caching plugin and Cloudflare is possible. Not sure if using all of these makes sense, so I’ll take this slow.
Lastly, I started looking into email subscription services. I haven’t made a choice yet since they’re different. WordPress’ JetPack includes an email subscription widget (which is in the footer) yet it doesn’t provide a simple URL link to sign up with. The venerable Feedburner has had email subscriptions forever and provides a link. Then there’s Tiny Letter. It’s like neither JetPack or Feedburner, allowing for email newsletters unrelated to blog posts. I’m gonna drag my feet on this one, trying to figure out the best pulpy answer.
And there we have all the changes making the new look of pulp.
There, it’s done. Pulpconnection is back, and this time it’s running on Dreamhost’s managed WordPress service called DreamPress. Over the years, I went from a shared server to a virtual private server (VPS) that gave me more control but meant that I had to exert more control. That’s good and bad. There were times when things went haywire, and I didn’t know why. Of course, craziness could still happen with DreamPress, but at least, there’s dedicated support and more importantly a scalable platform. Instead of me allocating more memory to servers, DreamPress does the magic. How I don’t know. Like I said, magic.
The cost too of DreamPress is hard to argue. Right now, DreamPress is discounted to $20 a month. Try squeezing in enough memory allocation on a VPS for $20 a month. Doesn’t get you much. So by switching to DreamPress, I can reduce my VPS resources significantly for my other projects, more than $20 a month.
There’s more to learn about DreamPress, but overall I think there’s less to know like fine tuning WP installs and optimizing WP. The biggest learning curve for DreamPress is actually getting DreamPress to work for Pulpconnection. Dreamhost has an automated feature that converts existing “one-click” WordPress installs to DreamPress. Unfortunately for me, Pulpconnection wasn’t a one-click install or maybe it was back in the day but doesn’t now qualify as “one-click.” So what does that mean? A manual transfer to DreamPress.
For this Mac user, working via the command line is a frightening endeavor. Fortunately, there are good instructions, specifically this Migrating to DreamPress post. Read it and reread it. It’s all there. Okay, I noticed one or two minor changes, but they weren’t show stoppers. The scp secure copy created an extra subdirectory for the copied files but that was fixed with the Move to Parent feature in Panic’s Transmit.
The other scare was importing the Pulpconnection SQL database backup. From PHPMyAdmin, I found the Import tool, but the database was simply too large for the max import size. Dreamhost chat tech support came through by directing me to import through the shell. I had to literally write out the command line on paper to make sure I had all the parameters correct. Less than a minute later, the SQL import was silently done.
So here we are. Hopefully, less technical headaches and notifications that Pulpconnection servers had to restart for whatever reason. And definitely less stress for me. 🙂
And to make tinkering even more fun challenging, I learned that WordPress 4 just released along with a bunch of updates for WP plugins.
Not sure why but Pulpconnection has been extremely slow recently. Parts of it work fine but other parts just fail to load. Gotta tinker around to see what’s going on. Unloading and uninstalling stuff to make things simpler then we’ll see how it goes.
With the advent of more top level domains, I’m changing up Pulpconnnection’s custom domain used for shortening links. In the past, I’ve used pulp.ly and pulpc.in, but now, I’m using pulp.ninja. Yes, .ninja is a valid domain.
Yeah, yeah, this vanity domain is actually longer so it defeats the purpose of shortening links. But I had to do it because ninja. I mean really, ninja! And my other domain registrations are coming to an end so might as well switch and embrace the new domains out there. Keep an eye out for pulp.ninja in your Twitter feed!
Keep an eye out for babes on Pulpconnection. After reading this article about “Around the Web” recommendations and the mention of Outbrain.com, I got curious. I use Outbrain’s recommendations on Pulpconnection but had its scope limited to content only on my blog. For the time being, I expanded Outbrain’s recommendations to include other sites just to see if I experience what the Verge’s article mentions.
Although I think I already saw a precursor of what’s to come. Remember when I compared Outbrain, the Similar Posts plugin, and JetPack Related Posts? Outbrain had a penchant for recommending off-the-wall suggestions, typically dealing with Club 939. So just a warning that there may be babes ahead.
Over the end of December and beginning of January 2014, Pulpconnection has been getting hit hard. Not sure how or why but server resource allocation skyrocketed and stayed there for long periods of time. Because of this, Pulpconnection would be unavailable for periods of time. Even after server reboots, resources would be consumed once again in a matter of minutes.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach this problem but followed several helpful guides from Dreamhost. I reviewed their WordPress optimization tips but had most of these already implemented. I did some of the WordPress fine tuning suggestions. Lastly, I looked at server troubleshooting and optimization. From what I could tell, there was a ton of traffic from other countries. While I love my international audience, I figured most of my content isn’t necessarily world renowned so I blocked entire countries. Yep, using CloudFlare, blocking entire countries is pretty easy.
Along with this mass blocking, I cleaned out unused WordPress themes and plugins, trying to minimize my WordPress footprint. I also tripled the memory allocation to my servers which made things dreamy but too costly.
The server load has been consistent and steady for the past few days so I’m hoping things are stable once again. But having said this, I bet I just jinxed myself. 🙁
With an on-going Cult of Mac deal for two Themify WordPress themes for the mere price of $19, I had to check it out. Normally priced at $60, this deal for two themes is hard to pass up at under 20 bucks.
And Themify has some impressive looking themes. I’ve never used their themes before and am not sure how the backend interface is. For my two themes, I might go with Magazine that so much potential though I’m sure customizing it will take some time. Parallax is really cool but doesn’t fit my needs. Responz looks fun and clean but in general, I’m not a fan of “z” words.
In either case, if these themes don’t work out, $19 is a minimal investment. Go ahead and check out the deal that’s expiring on October 20, 2013.