Kip Manley ([info]kiplet) wrote,
@ 2006-01-28 13:09:00
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So what happened to the pier?

Okay.

So I was using DreamHost for webhosting. Not a sausage of a problem for a good long while, but the first sign of trouble and they yanked my site without warning. Couldn’t even get at the thing to figure out what the problem was or how to fix it.

Such details as I have been able to glean are available here, if you are so inclined.

I’m in the process, today, I guess, of moving everything; I’ve got backups of the blog’s database in a variety of formats, so that, at least, is not to worry, knock wood. After some little examination and comparison, I’m currently leaning toward A Small Orange. Anybody know any better, please, feel free to speak up.

And heck, while I’m at it, let’s maybe add something else to the plate. I moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress for a variety of reasons, and it caused (or excused, yes) some of the interminable delays last year; I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around exactly where to start with building WordPress out the way I wanted. So I’m poking Textpattern to see what happens. It has fewer features, perhaps, but it thinks like I think, I think, and so it will be much easier to work with; the irony, of course, being I would have jumped to Textpattern last year had I not in an intemperate moment leaped on DreamHost’s outrageously cheap storage-and-bandwidth-and-easy-WordPress-install. —I just need to work out some permalink issues for the legacy stuff (attempt at which discussed here); I get that taken care of, and we’re off to the races.

So: the pier stuttered back to life for a few short weeks and is now being shuttered again. But for a brief spell! We hope. Watch this space.


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[info]medievalist
2006-01-28 09:27 pm UTC (link)
I wonder if there's something malicious in one of the comments? That is, something nasty in comment spam left by a bot. I don't know of this happening, but it's certainly feasible.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]kiplet
2006-01-28 09:43 pm UTC (link)
Don't think so. Unless that vet Tim on the body-armor thread was uploading malicious code—and he wasn't, unless it was hidden in plain sight somehow—every comment allowed through in the past couple of weeks was from someone I already knew.

Or someone who claimed to be someone I knew. Fess up!

—Anyway, Akismet blocked all comment spam, and did a bang-up job. Not that I know for sure how that works, but I don't think it allows malicious code in a blocked comment to execute anything that would spawn all those processes. Otherwise, boy, gaping security hole.

Heck, I have yet to find anyone who's had anything close to a similar problem. Mighty frustrating.

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[info]medievalist
2006-01-29 06:43 am UTC (link)
Ok.

I did a local install, even screwing around to get PHP working as a cgi (which is really sick-making and involved me calling on someone who, like knew what he was doing).

I even imported my MT posts and comments (which are far fewer than yours).

I installed the plug ins.

It's slow as molasses, but it works. Color me clueless. All I can think of is it's some local variable and they're either too busy or too incompetent to figure it out.

But if you look at DreamHost and CPU and WordPress references in Google or Technorati, you're very much not alone.

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[info]greyaenigma
2006-01-29 06:02 am UTC (link)
I wonder if it's something that could be avoided by just not using WordPress. Maybe not.

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[info]anildash
2006-01-31 08:18 am UTC (link)
just curious, because i work with the Movable Type (and LJ) teams... any reason you didn't want to use MT? I'd love to figure out what we could do to improve.

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[info]kiplet
2006-02-01 02:22 pm UTC (link)
Let's see: the blog ran on MT from November 2002 to March 2005. But the 3.0 imbroglio left a bad taste in my mouth, and I pretty much began actively looking for something else at that point: free, yes, but also more actively hackable and tinkerable, I guess. —Also, I wanted to move from the model of generating static HTML pages with every update to generating them on the fly. I know you could do that with MT at the time, but it was a little above my paygrade.

And I've always been a fan of Dean Allen, and Textpattern intrigued. But in a moment of weakness, looking for hosting solutions, I jumped on DreamHost, who offered free and easy installations of WordPress, so I went that way instead. And we've now seen what became of that.

I'm not familiar with MT beyond (I think) 2.67? —Anyway, after a brief adjustment period, I'm snug as a bug in Textpattern. It thinks like I do, or maybe I think like it does. The organization of my files is already miles closer to what I've always wanted, using sections, categories, and a custom field; the presentation is much closer to MT's model than WordPress, and MT's page templates and tags were always much easier to work with than WordPress's model, which I never managed to wrap my head around.

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[info]anildash
2006-02-01 08:37 pm UTC (link)
Thanks for the feedback. We've been friends with Dean for a long time, so I definitely think TextPattern is a cool tool, which works similarly to MT but with a more general CMS focus.

If you're interested, I'd love to show you the huge leaps and bounds we've made in MT since the 2.6 days (a lot's happened to the platform in the ~3 years since), but either way thanks for the explanation -- helps us get things right in the future. I *definitely* agree that using templates and tags is a much more sensible way to do presentation, I can't wrap my brain around the other stuff either.

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