jim80.net » Administrative

New Theme

jim — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:33:54 +0000

So, blog.jim80.net has a new theme installed. It’s called Open Sourcerer 1.4 by Alan Lord, and it’s got one thing iNove 1.4.5 by mg12 didn’t, flexible width columns. Well, technically, iNove could be made to adjust according to screen resolution, but the resultant view on a widescreen wasn’t very pretty. if anything it just looked silly. Thus, I present Open Sourcerer. It’s easier on the eyes, if it is a bit plain. Frankly, the column width bit is a necessity for a post I’m working on. Hard coded to the previous size, it would have been a nightmare to read. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.

e-Mail

jim — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:15:24 +0000

If you don’t have to host your own email server, why do it? In fact, if any web facing application on your site can be hosted by dedicated specialists with no real appreciable loss to availability, confidentiality, integrity, or other factor, don’t fall victim of the do-it-just-because-you-can mentality. The chief services I advise folks to outsource are e-mail (IMAP/POP/SMTP), and DNS. These critical services are often in better hands with the likes of Google Apps, with your registrar, or OpenDNS (not necessarily an endorsement as these names are just on the top of my head). These folks can dedicate a lot more fault-tolerant capacity than most, taking charge of security and systems management. On top of that, they sell it mostly likely because they’re good at it (there are no doubt exceptions, but not with the above two links). With configuration and maintenance out of your scope of responsibility, you don’t have to spend countless hours tracing emails or checking DNS proliferation. Get a quote and do an analysis. If the amount of time you save by outsourcing some services is worth the price you pay to do so, then it’s a no-brainer, really.

Note: Speaking of checking all that stuff: some neat online tools: MX Toolbox, DNSStuff, and IPTools are some handy websites in regards to mail or DNS.

Upgrading to 2.8 [UPDATE: make that 2.9]

jim — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:43:21 +0000

UPDATE: 090617 – So at roughly 10PM, the site is back on it’s production box. When you see this message depends mostly on how quickly your ISP refreshes it’s DNS records.
For some time in the after noon, you might have noticed some fishy things around the site, funky PHP errors about missing include files and what not. Generally, the errors were mostly with the admin pages, but sometimes did affect the header. None of the content was affected, fortunately, but it did wreck havok with me trying to manage unruly plugins that decided to break with the upgrade. Admin-ssl did a bit of damage, but others contributed to the error-generating frenzy as well. I had to uninstall some of these plugins, so you might notice a bit of reduced functionality (non-automatic https logins, chiefly) until they are updated.
In the end, the production server and the backup server were upgraded to WordPress 2.9, a non-stable build. Generally speaking, I’m super happy with it’s features, namely not having to manually scp over new plugins, and it’s new UI for widget management. I’m not sure if the plugin management upgrade is a 2.9 thing or a 2.8 thing, but the widget UI is listed as a 2.8 feature for sure, and it’s much prettier. =P

Original Post follows:
OK, so WordPress doesn’t like my particular configuration, lol. I’m gonna listen to my own advice and do it on a fail-over server first. =P

Hello world!

jim — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:59:58 +0000

Over the coming articles, I hope to collect, and post, a decent collection of articles for the latest and/or the greatest in IT innovation. If you’re not a “computer guy” then at the very least, I’m assuming you’re a geek. And y’all are welcome too.

Cheers,

Jim