Misc

So I once again got a high CPU warning on the site. I go and check the logs, and I find that just querying comments is slow. This is what they told me last week, and I optimized the tables then; I didn’t espect to have problems again so soon.

A quick Google led me to the Codex where I learned that all those comments I marked as spam (many of which are marked automatically) are all still stored.

This quickie step took care of fully 14MB worth of spam comments out of the 25MB comments DB:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘spam’

I guess this means that the blog can run another year before I need to upgrade hosting!

Just a quick bulleted list.

• I seem to have managed to ditch 300-400 feed subscribers in the upgrade somehow. Sorry, folks. If you’re one of those, resub. I don’t know why it’s not working for you now. Looks like the bulk of the losses are via Bloglines, but all of Bloglines’ feeds look healthy at this point. If you know someone who had a feed and might not anymore, spread the word that it’s OK to come back, the water’s fine.
• Amazingly, even with the downtime, the traffic to the site itself seems to be right on track. Not sure how we managed that one!
• I finally got around to putting up my CV and updating the bio on the Gaming front page. If you see any other egregiously out of date stuff, post here (except for the Timeline, I know about that one).
• Cafepress fixed the CD link after weeks of it not working — yes, I actually got emails about this one. (Crass self-promotion: So if you were craving more of the music on the blog, try that. It makes a nice Xmas present. *hint hint*. You can also try the book; Amazon says they’re just about out of it, but they’ll reorder more if you keep buying them.)
• Lastly, sorry to disappoint the folks over at RLMMO, but to my knowledge I am not working on a Firefly MMO. Badass idea, though!

Growing number of educators explore ‘Second Life’ online – CNN.com. It appears to be presented as part of the Welcome to the Future special CNN is doing.

Misleading stat watch:

Now some 1.3 million people around the world log on to live out their second lives.

There’s definitely a little bit of an SL backlash building up among the MMO folks at this point, in part because of perceived overhype and in part because of the use of the registered users metric… a bit of a shame that we can get distracted from SL’s very real achievements because of the surrounding stuff — some of which, no doubt is a bit of jealousy.

We’ve done a little bit of work to try getting the RSS feeds working properly. It would, however, be helpful to have more data. We have resynced, we have repinged it from Feedburner, and we fixed a warning that showed up on the feed validator (turns out that WP2.0 comes out of the box with an out of date bit of markup: wfw:commentRSS should be wfw:commentRss, and you fix it in wp-rss2.php).

If you got this post via RSS, what feed were you using? Atom, RSS 1, RSS 2, via Feedburner’s link or direct, and with what reader?

If you didn’t get this post via RSS and should have, same questions!

Edit: Well, for whatever reason, the URLs www.raphkoster.com/feed, /feed/atom, /feed/rss, and /feed/rss2 were non-functional, redirected to the front page. So readers of course saw that as malformed RSS. A bit of .htaccess voodoo seems to have fixed it, but I still don’t know why those URLs didn’t work by default, given that www.raphkoster.com/wp-rss.php and /wp-atom.php and /wp-rss2.php worked fine.

Anyway, all of those now redirect to FeedBurner as well, so everything should (cross your fingers) be working right.