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It’s Time

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I’m spending this morning backing up stuff off my laptop for a complete reinstall.  Back in April I had some issues while at the jet boat races.  Well Windows Live Writer has taken a trip south now as well so I figured it’s time to reinstall.

Especially given in a week Joe’s going to be here and I must say, next Sunday looks like it’s going to be fun.  I have to agree that the timing for this worked out decently well.  It’s doubly interesting because at the last match, there was a pile of new shooters, many who had never shot USPSA before, and even very little outside of that.

There shall be numerous data points, my classification from USPSA just came in and I am not enthused with remaining there.  Upshot of that though is whether or not I make the “gold standard”.

Now why do I need my laptop though if Joe’s going to be here, I have my nice desktop at home.  Well after the match we’ve got a few other things before we depart my place headed to Reno for GBR-VII.  I think my laptop should probably be functional for that.

Goodbye Disqus

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I got an email tonight from a reader.  He’s been trying to post comments and it has been failing.  This is not something that inspires me to happiness.

I spent a lot of time during the migration fiddling with Disqus.  Even now I’m sure not all the comments were imported successfully but I’m just tired of it after this last screw up.

So I did another sync between Disqus and WordPress tonight and then switched it back over to the internal commenting system.  If anyone has trouble please let me know.

Welcome to the Darkside…

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So last week A Girl made a comment about something going wrong with blogger.  I made a comment which resulted in an email.

The email basically said, I would love help.  Not that she really wanted to completely blow this popsicle stand, but well there have been some issues with Google as of late.  I promptly said, I’ll just get it all set up and surprise her.  Well about an hour of my time and I had it relatively ready.  Then all we needed to do was port everything over from Blogger and redirect the traffic headed to blogger.

This morning she finished the last step which was a redirect.  She has herself a new shiny blog that even still has the new blog smell.  That’s not to say that any of the content is gone it’s all there.

She thought she may have messed something up when blogger all the sudden started sending everyone to blogspot, but nope, it’s working just as intended.  She now has freedom and power at her disposal.

So go give her a nice house-warming.  We’re still unpacking, but she’s enjoying the new place.

Welcome to the Dark Side A Girl, we have cookies, they’re on the counter!

*If you would like to ditch blogger, I am more than happy to help.  At this point though I do not want to be buying everyone and their mother a domain name.  If you have a domain and want to move, contact me, we can hash something out.  I’m not going to do everyone’s for free, hours of time do add up.  That said, this weekend I’m going to kick off a site for gun bloggers that will behave much like blogger.  You get a sub-domain and I will help your migration if necessary.  That keeps my costs to purely time, and a minimal amount at that.

If you want full hosting though, please do contact me, we can probably work something out.

 

CloudFlare Review

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So a friend of mine ended up having his site offline last night after a DoS attack took his web hosting offline.

About 3 months ago I decided to give CloudFlare a shot.  After 3 months I thought I would give a quick overview of how it went and what differences I have actually seen.

Page load speeds, there was a noticeable difference when I migrated the site.  I left a archived version of the site available for tracking down broken links and the like.  So this was equivalent of me flipping the off switch.  Using the archived site is unbelievably slower than what it was prior to migration to Word Press.

Bandwidth usage proves this.

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I did the change over in the beginning of April.  Sitemeter and Google Analytics both have shown at least a steady and slightly increasing traffic over those months, with January being the largest.  So I could say that effectively CloudFlare has cut my bandwidth down by 1/3.  CloudFlare’s analytics are accurate as well and provide some extra differentiation.

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One downside though is as you can see above, AWstats is no longer accurate.  You can see the number of Unique visitors is no longer accurate, however you can see that the number of visits does reflect that number.

When I first did the change over I did have some weirdness and problems.  Mainly that my hosting provider was reacting to CloudFlare like it was a DoS attack.  The majority of the requests are forwarded through their network for speed reasons.  So the number of high hits from their services made them look suspect.  I got the issues straightened out and things have been much more stable since.

When my hosting provider did have a hiccup, the site content remained available.  While I couldn’t post new content, I wasn’t loosing viewership which was a huge plus.

There are also numerous apps that can be installed with CloudFlare to aid in thinks like link tracking and malware detection.  There is also a service to help monitor for people scraping content, including people hot linking images.

Overall I have found the service worth the setup time which actually was amazingly simple.  I’m not quite big enough to find their pro services worth it, however I do see how they might be beneficial if I had considerably more traffic.

The only setup required is to point your root DNS entry to CloudFlare and enter your DNS info that your hosting provider has into CloudFlare.  If you have a full website and you’ve had downtime from service issues, CloudFlare can help mitigate that.

Independence Day 2012 Part II

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So Sebastian said the following on Monday.

I think it’s the right of every American to celebrate our nation’s independence by blowing up a small chunk of it.

At which point I started laughing because honestly not everyone can effectively blow up a chunk of America.  The good news is, I am capable and have resources to do exactly that.  Not only do I have resources though, but the method of detonation provides a method of celebration endorsed by John Adams himself.

However, it must be said, please do not attempt to recreate any of this.  I am trained and experienced in mixing and handling explosives.  Just watch Caleb’s PSA.  Where ever he says “Gun”, replace it with “Guns or Explosives”.  

So without further ado, I give you the 4th of July, Boomershoot style.

I’m sure Mr. Adams would have approved.

As a note, it seems Sebastian knows this, but I still think my graphical display helps spread the joy.

*Sorry for the delayed post, Murphy hates me.  YouTube was constantly quitting mid-download.  I finally achieved success using IE.  I left to go to a BBQ and my computer went to sleep.  Thus it finally went up a day late.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program…

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So we had a minor hiccup with field day.  Our station is currently off-line and we are sitting in the trailer chit chatting.

Now why would we all move inside?  Well this doesn’t fully show what’s wrong but probably gives you a solid idea of what’s wrong.

It was making loud noises and flashing through the sky.  It just recently stopped hailing.  We disconnected everything and lowered the stepper antenna for safety.  We’re just now slowly starting the system back up.

So this interruption was brought to you by mother nature and we are now returning back to our regularly scheduled program.

CQ Field Day

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I’m spending the day doing field day with the local ham radio club.  We actually have a hydrogen fuel cell that we’re running all our radios off of.  We spent a chunk of the morning hooking and setting up antennas including a nice Stepper IR that was donated for use during field day.

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It took us a lot longer than expected to set that bad boy up.  We were having SWR problems and we’ve been trying to debug the issue.  First up was checking all the connections and we discovered this in one of the connections.

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That however wasn’t the problem.  The SWR was still way above 3.  What else could be the problem.  Well we bypassed the 80m tuning coil and bang, SWR dropped to 1.  I think we found the problem.  At that point it was time to grab some lunch and now I’m working on logging while my compatriot runs the radio.

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I’ll be busy until late tonight.  If you’re a fellow ham and you hear KD7PH, feel free to send a shout out. We’re going to start running some of the digital modes here in a bit but were running phone now.

It is nice being able to run that Stepper IR thought anywhere between 40m and 10m.  We haven’t tried running 80m since we pulled the coil but so far if we can hear them we can work them.  All running just measly 100 watts.

We just bumped to 15 meters to see how things will run for now.  I have to say I would like to get one of those for my house, the thought of the cost though doesn’t have me running to buy one

It is nice being able to do all this in an air-conditioned trailer.  Even though storms rolled in, the heat’s still pretty high and the humidity has gone up.  It’s going to be a fun day.

For those of you using Google reader…

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I apologize.  I don’t know what the hell just happened but for some reason Google reader appears to have “reposted” a bunch of older content.  This may be because I finished at least getting temporary categories in everything tonight so clean URLs was turned back on.

I checked both the raw feed and feedburner, neither has all the “new” posts in it.  So I’m sorry if this threw you off or was a disappointment.  Hopefully as I continue getting the bugs squashed in this new toy things will be more stable.  Overall I’m liking WordPress considerably more.  Doubly so with the much better integration with Live Writer.

If you see weird behavior though, please let me know so I am at least aware to look out for it and I might be able to fix it.  This migration has caused some weird issues.