Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress.com is rewriting my download links to point back to wordpress.com, even though these links point to a server off the wordpress.com website.

This is, naturally, very destructive.

Note: I’ve set up a provisionally temporary download page that won’t get adulterated by WordPress.com’s filters. It may become permanent, which isn’t the end of the world.

The only way around this is to right click on each link you want, copy the link, paste the link into your browser address bar, and edit the following:

http://files.spontaneousderivation.files.wordpress.com/B/Bramah_Ernest-Wallet_of_Kai_Lung.epub

I don’t know if WordPress.com will fix this bug of theirs, or if they’ll even consider it a bug, or if they’ll just ignore me. If they won’t fix the bug, I have a back-up plan, but I would prefer not to have to pay for multiple domains.

In the meanwhile, I’m curious.

This is the first non-repost I’ve made in a week. Things have settled down for the time being, and despite the certain missing features, I’m going to stay at WordPress.com for the time being. There are many things WordPress.com offers, not the least of which is an SSL connection, which I would have had to pay extra for on Dreamhost. All image files are uploaded to your own CDN address as well, which is pretty awesome; it’s a feature I’d love to see made available to self-hosted WordPress.org blogs, probably via Jetpack.

The feature I miss second-most (footnotes) I’ve overcome with a Ruby script that, in some ways, worked better than the various plugins. This method guarantees that with my next blog move, I’ll be able to keep the formatting constant (as well as keep the load light on my respective provider). The feature I miss first-most (a shortcode to list all posts for a certain category with a certain tag) I’ll just get on by with. It’ll require manual editing of various pages and keeping them up to date on a regular basis, but again, on my next move nothing will change. They were among the primary reasons I needed caching plugins on a non-WordPress.com platform, after all.

I also miss the ability to create a child theme of TwentyEleven that showed a sidebar with single posts. Otherwise, TwentyEleven is almost perfect as a theme, but I may need to resort to a TwentyEleven-styled Sandbox to get that capability. I quite like the front page of TwentyEleven as well, which is based on a page template which I won’t have access to if I move to Sandbox, but it may have limited value in the first place. And there is something about keeping a single post clean of sidebar clutter that feels attractive in a design sense. I’d have to pay extra for being able to alter a theme’s CSS anyways, which would wipe out the savings in not having to get my own SSL setup.

But one of the things I’ve learned from Magic the Gathering is that the more mana you spend on one area (tinkering with the blog), the less you get to spend in other areas (work, writing fiction as well as blog content, life in general).

I think I’m going to spend my mana on getting some landing pages for my better blog areas (PTSD/Bipolar needs its page updated, and landing pages need to be created for Sherlock Holmes and Writing. Even Tea may call for its own page). They’ll then go into the menu bar, which is displayed for every page and post. I’ve already created an Areas menu item with all major and minor areas in a sub-menu. This, I feel, will actually work better than sidebars in the end.

It’s come to my attention that the host move has stranded my CGI scripts, crippling the gaming tools pages.

I will be working on getting them restored later tonight. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Updated: The cgi scripts are back!

Earlier this month I made the move from Esosoft to Dreamhost. There were many reasons for this, among them:

• Esosoft didn’t give me control over my DNS registry. This leads to an amount of frustration after a certain point.

• Esosoft didn’t give me a shell account; I would have had to run a full private server to get one.

• Esosoft didn’t have the latest version of ruby; any app development I did was highly curtailed by this.

• Esosoft didn’t have basic ssh/sftp access, only FTP access.

• When there were outages, Esosoft did not issue any status updates.

• When there was scheduled maintenance, Esosoft did not issue any warnings.

After a MySQL database outage with no status updates, I decided to switch to Dreamhost. Maybe they aren’t the most ideal solution—back on Esosoft I could run without caching if I so desired—but they definitely are a step up in many practical features.

However, I soon discovered that WordPress is not very efficient when it comes to database queries. This was problematic on Dreamhost in ways that it was not on Esosoft, often causing “error making database connection” messages for WordPress and my various web stats installs.

Even with the page caching of W3 Total Cache on, I still saw problems.

That was when I remembered that (a) the worst DB query offender in WordPress is the widget bar, and (b) WP Widget Cache exists.

Why have a widget cache on top of another caching plugin? Apart from offering very fine control over when a widget is refreshed (different widgets can have different refresh times and triggers), WP Widget Cache also does what plugins like W3 Total Cache don’t: cut down on the queries that widgets generate.

Every time W3 Total Cache creates a page cache without WP Widget Cache, it runs every single widget query. But with WP Widget Cache on, W3 Total Cache may not even run those queries for hours on end (in my case, some of my widgets go for 24 hours cached). Suddenly a page that used to generate 15 extra queries for the widgets is cut down to no extra queries.

All my database connection errors went away after activating WP Widget Cache and tweaking each widget’s cache setting.

End result: I’m pretty happy on Dreamhost. Until, I assume, the next level of readership, in which case I’m going to need to shell out for a virtual private server—but that’s not likely to come for some time, if ever.

I dreamed about many things last night, all of it mundane—thank the gods—but there was one dream in which someone had written a book with a snarky swipe at my blog, commenting that I’d gone from writing deep articles about my PTSD, fantasy/science fiction book reviews, and essays about Sherlock Holmes, to frippery about Spiral Knights.

It was all just a dream, but it does encapsulate some of my insecurities. Spontaneous ∂erivation has always been eclectic, a blog with changing themes that range from the personal to the informative to the whimsical. Years ago, this blog used to be about meta-blogging, for instance, but those days are now so far in the past as to be, well, very rarely picked up by StumbleUpon.

Past themes, of course, can sometimes revisited. And I’ve not yet stopped any of the categories in the first paragraph; they are simply resting while I, well, work out my addiction to Spiral Knights into something a little bit calmer.

I’ve also been living in Normalville due to the Abilify, with some oddities here and there. It’s a relief, but it’s not going to last. I can already feel the world falling apart a little when I think about summer. More on that later.