Let’s not mince words. This blog runs on total junk. Literally.
The domain scaredpoet.com itself was conceived of way back in my college years, back in the days when geocities.com pages ruled the ‘net and people thought horrid things like under construction icons, clashing yellow and blue color schemes, animated e-mail gifs, frames and other horrid design cues were tres cool. So my first attempts at html were, to be blunt, pretty nasty lookin’, but in my defense, so were everyone else’s web pages at the time. I set it up, splashed a bunch of links all over the page (because really I had no content of my own to contribute… I just wanted a web site because that was the geeky college-student thing to do), threw it on a web server, and forgot about it for several years.
Time goes by, and years later people discovered that you really can make a web page with good visual cues if you try hard enough. I stumble onto my own web site long after I forgot I had ever done such a thing… it was still up and running, broken links, outdated info and all, and I was in total shock to discover that people were still visiting the damn thing (and I assume, gawking at it). How the page managed to escape the clutches of somethingawful.com, I’ll never know. But it was bad enough to think that people were in fact seeing this thing, and thought that was the best I could do.
The last straw was when a co-worker googled my name and exclaimed “Oh! You have a website! *CLICK!*” while I looked on in silent horror.
That same day, the sorry sadsack that I once tried to pass off as web site in the halcyon days of Geocities was removed. Forcibly.
Sadly, there are archived copies of it that still exist in deep, seedy recesses of the ‘net ghetto, the access to which I have no control over. Of course, I will never tell anyone where this nightmare still resides.
Anyway! The site languished with little more than a blank screen for over a year, until I decided it was time to actually justify the fact that I kept renewing the domain. Because a lot of the projects developed where I work deal with MySQL, PHP and metadata through XML, I felt it might a good idea to set up a server of my own that would allow me to explore these applications. Lo and behold, blogging software, namely wordpress, made use of all three.
Since I was really the only person who I expected would have any interest at all in what I had to say, I didn’t really bother to take scalability into account. So, a small server was cobbled together using spare parts that I had laying around. And what a sorry sight it was: A celeron 466MHz processor with 192Mb of RAM, and a cheap CompUSA special no-name 20 GB drive (only $5 after rebate!). And I expected it to run Windows XP, Apache, MySQL and PHP, with an ftp server on the side to I could easily update files when I needed to.
Yeah, you can stop laughing now.
The scary thing is, it actually worked. Very slowly, but it worked.
Even scarier: people actually started to VISIT the site again.
Why you people find my writings interesting, I’ll never know. Maybe you’re all gawking again, who knows? But nonetheless, about 700 unique people visit the site every month, generating 3,000 hits, give or take. About 200 other people regularly subscribe to the RSS feed. Are people really this bored? Apparently so.
These stats are, of course, small potatoes. But they were far more than I had anticipated, and the “server” that I had set up for all of this was not happy. It chokes when the terrible phenomenon of having more than one user view the blog at the same time occurs. The search function worked fine back when I had all of 8 or so articles in the database… now that we’re firmly into the triple digits, a sort ends up being a tad pokey (try, at least a minute). And over the Christmas holiday weekend, it took me five minutes to log into my own site to make an update.
So, yeah. It’s time for a new server.
The new machine is already up and running and waiting for the database and other content to be sent over, and I hope to transition this site over the coming weekend. If all goes well, the changeover will complete on Monday, January 10, 2005. This ol’ jalopy will run concurrently with the new machine for a week after that, after which it will get it’s long overdue sendoff, into the river.
If anyone has another suggestion for what to do with this pathetic tin can, please feel free to let me know. 🙂