In the past couple of months I've been trying out many Joomla! components, modules and plugins in order to make my site better. Problem is some of the components don't work together and I end up with broken links, debug code or error messages. People have complained and I have listened. Since I have my own server I've put up a virtual host and installed Joomla! on it as a sandbox. From now on I'll test all code on the sandbox until I think it's right and then roll it out on grantmcwilliams.com. It would be a lot easier if the components just did everything I wanted them to do (wouldn't that be nice!) but they don't. What's worse is the modules that I have to hack away on to make do what I want. There's no place on a production website for beta code so that too will be done in the sandbox.

I'll be moving the entire site off a dual Athlon MP 2600 server to a new dual dual core Xeon (that would be four 3 Ghz 64bit cores) rack server in the near future. PHP/MySQL/Apache and the OS will also be upgraded from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5.2 so everything will running in a confined SELinux domain. The RAID drives will be replaced by 1TB Samsung F1 drives on a 3ware 9550 PCI-X controller and RAM will be tripled so I'll be caching everything. I just need to complete the wiring and make sure it has adequate cooling before I move it. I have everything now but the TB drives which may wait until I'm back from holiday. I may move to FiOS as well which would get me a 15Mb/sec synchronous connection. Expect major speed increases from grantmcwilliams.com in the near future.

Also when I get back I'll be putting in a major effort coding the appropriate pieces of software for Joomla! that I need. Blogging/tagging needs to be better, the photo gallery needs a lot and the cookbook needs rewrote. Much to do...

Grant