I finally managed to fix the slowness plaguing my site by switching hosts to NearlyFreeSpeech; this should also save me a considerable amount of money, since if I’m still doing this thing in 9 months when I have to renew hosting on Dreamhost I don’t want to have to pay $100. In contrast, NFS charges only based on what I actually use; I pay literally a penny a day for a MySQL process, and that’s it. I put a dollar into my account and after the processing fee, it’ll last me about 3 months. I don’t know how reliable they are or how much bandwidth I can actually use, and they’re not quite as full-featured, but they’re definitely worth using if you just have a small site like this.

Oh, and migrating WordPress is a pain in the ass if you don’t know what you’re doing, and probably even if you do know what you’re doing. Especially because NFS forcibly enables PHP’s safe mode, which means that installing plugins requires some command-line witchery.

PS: The next Constructing the Reals should be up sometime Thursday evening, and the last one should go up Friday. After that, I might do a series on surreal numbers and games, which are another alternate method of constructing real numbers that also lead to some very weird things.