Site News (34)
There's been a long drought of articles here at The Man, The Myth, The Legend and for that I apologize. The only thing I can say is life has gotten more complex and very busy. I started a new relationship and the school quarter is ending thus most of my time/energy/motivation has gone into those things. As I find balance I should be able to get back to posting more often.
A note to my readers though, looks like we'll push past 2 MILLION unique visitors this month. It took 4 years to get the first million and only since September to get the second. This is a huge milestone and I hope the increased traffic continues. I'd like to see more commenting of course though.
Another announcement is that I'll be pushing the Recession Chef articles out to a new website - recessionchef.com. Don't get too excited yet as I'm still working on it but you can wander over there and tell me what you think if you'd like. I'll still post general food blog posts here and I'll repost Recession Chef articles here (or at least promote them) but all articles having to do with "Eating well on a recession budget" will be posted there. That content will go toward the book. If you'd like to follow the Recession Chef on Google+ (where all the cool kids hang out - Oh my gosh, Facebook is sooo MySpace!) you can circle the Recession Chef Google+ page.
Last August I decided to get serious about SEO/SEF and getting rid of bottlenecks in my site. A fast site gets indexed and just now in January am I getting the site close to what I want it to do. The gallery's are still a mess and I have some other issues I need to deal with (disqus comments still don't attach to the old articles) but I'm working on them. The Disqus problem will get taken care of in the coming weeks. The Galleries I'm not sure what I'll do about. I'd really like to move away from embedded Gallery2 but haven't found a Joomla gallery that was anything more than a lightbox showing photos in a folder. I really don't think that will work for 6000 photos.
Anyway here's the results of the work I've been putting into this. Let it be known that it took four years to get to my first million hits. Now I'm doing 200k - 250k per month.
As I work through functional bugs I'm able to file them away on the site migration. Up until yesterday RSS feeds had stopped working. This had to do with some very aggressive caching I was doing. This has been fixed by turning the caching off.
What's still broken/sucks.
- Photo gallery theme still so ugly it's mother doesn't even appreciate it
- Disqus comments broken. Not sure if it's a bug in SP comments (it's sending a relative URL to Disqus) or a site misconfiguration
- Old Disqus comments are not mapped to the new URLs. I have the URL map in csv and now just need to write a script that dumps the new URLs from mysql, greps for the article name and rewrites the URL. This will then be uploaded to Disqus. Sort of moot since they don't work anyway.
- I need an old URL to new URL map for mod_rewrite so all links out there pointing to the old URLs still work
- My visitor counter either doesn't seem to be reporting the same statistics as the old one or Google is severely punishing me (perhaps the latter) for changing all the URLs it had cached. If it's the latter it will go away at some point.
- My visitor counter and who's online module don't agree. There will be 50 people online but the visitor counter says there's only been 8 people all day. How is that possible?
- Lots of CSS work still to be done. I'd like to have an automatic white space border around photos plus a nice charcoal gray line. Also the right hand column of links will probably be moved back to the left but I need to write the CSS for that. I'd also like to move the search bar down to the menu bar, re-enable breadcrumbs and work on the surrounding whitespace which I don't like. I'm also going to change the main body text from 12 points to 13 as soon as I figure out who's overriding whom in the CSS.
- Recipebook is completely offline. I'm building a new one with SobiPro. This also means I'll need to purchase some modules to get the same functionality that I had before.
- Restaurant Reviews are also offline for the reason stated in number 7.
- No file download manager to manage all downloadable scripts, templates etc..
After a month (count them, 30 days!) of working on the new site I've rolled it out. The amount of work involved in completely recreating a working production website that's been online for years is quite a lot. Below I've created a table to give you an idea of what was done.
| Old Site | New Site | |
| Host Operating System | CentOS 5.3 | Xen Cloud Platform 1.1 |
| Hypervisor | Xen 3.4.0 | Xen 3.4.2 |
| Virtualization Stack | OSS Xen | XAPI |
| Guest Operating System | CentOS 5.6 | CentOS 6.1 |
| Memory | 2 GB | 7 GB |
| Guest Operating System | CentOS 5.6 | CentOS 6.1 |
| Storage Subsystem | File based local disk | iSCSI SAN |
| Content Management System | Joomla! 1.5 Legacy mode | Joomla! 1.7 Native mode |
| Blogging component | Superblogger | K2 |
| Directory component | Sobi2 | Sobi Pro |
| Photo Gallery | Gallery 2.1 | Gallery 2.3 |
| Gallery Bridge | g2bridge | Jfusion |
| Gallery Theme | PGtheme | ? |
| Joomla Theme | Modified JA-Purity | Modified JA-Purity ii |
If you look at this chart it may not seem like it was that big of a deal however, it was.
Hardware:
I built new hardware based around AMD's Phenom II hexacore CPU. The old server has been awesome but just buying ram to upgrade it was getting difficult and expensive. Also since that server is a real server with real jet airplane speed fans it has to be in remote parts of the building otherwise you'd need new eardrums. Because of this the network connection was tunneled across a wifi link. Not ideal but it's always worked. In order to gain reliability the new server is wired directly into the ISPs connection. I'm looking into a dedicated connection and another speed increase.
Virtualization Stack:
Open source Xen has served me well for many years but as I move everything over to clouds I've been rolling out more Xen Cloud Platform installations. I could have cheated and just migrated the old disk image but I really wanted to take the time to create a new fresh disk image and also roll out CentOS 6.x. .While going through this process I created new XCP howtos on how to install CentOS 6.x on Xen Cloud Platform.
Content Management System:
Once I had that done and the bugs worked out I created I migrated Joomla! 1.5 to Joomla 1.7. This is NOT an upgrade, it's an entire migration. There are some scripts that help you bit in reality what they do is move your articles over and not much more. Because ALL of my components, modules and plugins stopped working on Joomla 1.7 I had to find replacements. The big one was Superblogger which doesn't have a Joomla 1.7 version.
After a great deal of research I went with K2 made by the same folks as Superblogger. K2 isn't an exact replacement since Superblogger is made for blogging and includes trackbacks, Disqus comments and some theming. K2 is really a component that replaces a lot of Joomla! Ironically a lot of it doesn't need to be replaced and I hope in the future we'll see a newer leaner K2. For instance K2 provides nested categories and access control lists, two features not included in Joomla 1.5. However, Joomla! 1.7 has both so K2 doesn't really need them anymore. Using K2 is really an all or nothing proposal since it takes over all of Joomla! categories/articles, access control and some theming. It does NOT include Disqus commenting but there is an extra plugin for that... which unfortunately doesn't work on Joomla! 1.7 (common theme here) so I went with SP Comments.
I used Sobi2 for my restaurant reviews and recipes which as you may have guess also didn't work. The folks that make Sobi have come out with Sobi Pro which won't import Sobi2 data. Sobi Pro looks pretty good and will allow me to get around the hack I had to use to run two copies of Sobi2 in one instance of Joomla!. Most of Sobi Pro's additional functionality though is commercial so it looks like I'll be paying out some money. One example is a tie in with Google maps. It would be nice to do a restaurant review with address and have a Google map appear automatically.
My old photo gallery was Gallery2 embedded in Joomla! 1.5 using the g2bridge component which as you may have guessed isn't available for Joomla 1.7. I found a replacement in Jfusion which not only will bridge Gallery2 but PHPbb and a bunch of other software. However, I can't figure out how to provide a menu item that links to a specific gallery. I could do this with g2bridge. I also used g2image so I could insert Gallery2 images in articles. I don't have an equivalent with JFusion. I used the PGtheme theme for my embedded Gallery2 which (wait for it....) doesn't work with the downloadable version of Gallery2! Gallery3 is out but JFusion doesn't support it so the latest version of Gallery2 is what I will use. I haven't even begun writing a new theme for it so it's currently pretty ugly.
My old Joomla 1.5 theme was JA-Purity which I've always liked. I hacked it up pretty good and it eventually started having problems. JA-Purity doesn't work on Joomla 1.7 (why would it???) but the folks that developed it came up with JA-Purity ii for Joomla! 1.7 which I've also spent quite a lot of time hacking on to get it near where I want it.
In addition, my contact module had to be replaced, my visitor counter had to be replaced, all articles tagged for the new Tag Cloud (which is nice) and more. I've spent so much time on this migration that I don't even remember what I've done anymore. I wished now that I'd documented it all.
What's left?
- Keep working on the Joomla 1.7 theme. There's a ton of cleaning up and redesigning I want to do.
- Get serious about SEO. I have SEF working as well as I can so my URLs are better.
- Crate a Gallery2 theme
- Create the entire directory structure in Sobi Pro so I can get back to writing reviews and putting recipes up
- Find a way to link to specific Gallery2 gallery.
- Create metadata for everything
- Finish tagging the last 100 articles for the tag cloud
- Find a downloads component that works with Joomla 1.7
- Find a way to handle weblinks in K2 instead of Joomla! articles
- Get an autotweet/facebook plugin
- Install tracking/analytics component of some sort
- Experiment with putting Varnish between the webserver and the ISP (which is why there's no login form on the front page)
- Create a URL map of my old comments mapped to the new URLs for Disqus. Until then old comments won't link properly
- Experiment with a server side PHP accelerator
- Perhaps look into Adwords/Referrals
- Create content!
That's it! It's been a lot of work to get a new site that does exactly what the old one accomplished and it's still not quite there.
I use the SuperBlogger plugin to add blogging features to Joomla! In the past I had article star ratings, links to bookmark the article, digg it, add it to del.icio.us and to post it on Facebook.
As time goes on some of these services have dropped away or have been replaced by others. I'm really starting to use Google+ more so while adding +1 buttons to my template I cleaned it up a bit too. Anymore the big three in social networking is Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The latter arguably may replace both of the former. WIth this in mind I've slimmed down the template to only include Tweet this!, +1 and post on Facebook. There is still a link to Disqus comments as well as I want to encourage commenting. Also the Twitter and Google+ links are both on the main article listing page as well as the individual article page. This allows you to tweet the article without having to click on it's header first. A lot of times I'll post the entire article without a Read More link so people may never see the Twitter, Google+ and Facebook links.
I hope you like the new cleaner look. The old links for PDF, Print and Email are still present as I use them myself. Enjoy
I've been using Google+ quite a bit lately and have come to the conclusion that it's just about everything Facebook and Twitter are combined plus Picassa, Youtube and Chat included. Because of circles you can follow people and they don't have to follow you back ala. Twitter. You can also post publically like a personal blog or Twitter and people can follow you. If you have something private to say you can post it just to the groups (cough.. circles) or individuals you want. It's both a public blog/notification service and private social networking combined!
However Google doesn't currently have a URL shortener so people can pass around user identities. Yes, you can put a link on your site but it won't be anything you'll put on a business card so a service called plus.to popped up and you can link a Nickname to your Google+ profile.
Here's mine if you want to follow my rants and inciteful thoughts there. I'll continue to post full articles and Howtos here but status updates and thoughts over there.
http://gplus.to/grantmcwilliams
Thanks for your support..
Grant