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Off scripts and onto my own machine

Patrick Hurst — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:31:05 +0000

For the past year or so, I’ve been hosting this blog on scripts, a free webhosting service provided by MIT’s Student Information Processing Board for MIT students and other account-holders. And it was good; I didn’t have any complaints with the performance and the reliability was excellent for what I paid for it ($0) and for what the maintainers were paid to maintain it ($0). But recently I managed to get together enough spare parts to assemble a server, and so I’ve decided to move off of scripts and onto my own hosting. The reliability might suffer a little; it’s just one machine sitting in my dorm room, not a cluster of machines in an actual machine room. But I feel like the experience of running my own webserver is a good one to have, and it’s not like this website is mission-critical to anything anyway. If all else fails I can always transfer it back.

Also, yes, I know I haven’t posted anything since late January. I’m going to try to fix that.

The end of Tonal Tuesday

Patrick Hurst — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:38:58 +0000

Tonal Tuesday was something that I decided to do when I was going through a creativity drought as a means of making sure that something would always get posted weekly in hopes of inspiring me; although it seems to have failed that, I am getting back into the swing of finding things to write about, so I’m not going to be doing it anymore. Plus it’s a little embarrassing seeing it being the largest category of posts on the site.

Lack of content

Patrick Hurst — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:48:13 +0000

Apologies for the lack of real content over the past couple of days; I’ve been sick with what I’m fairly sure was swine flu and then a severe case of procrastination on problem sets for college. Fortunately, both of those should be cleared up by Friday, so you’ll get that dose of Glenn Beck I know you crave then.

By the way, if you have a suggestion as to what book I should do next, feel free to leave it in a comment.

Slowness fixed!

Patrick Hurst — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:52:00 +0000

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.

Site slowness

Patrick Hurst — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:13:38 +0000

I noticed that the blog has been slow lately; since this only appears to be ffecting the blog and not raw pageloads, I think it’s an issue with wordpress. I’ll do what I can to fix it, but I’m busy at physics team so it’ll probably have to be tomorrow when I have some free time. In the meantime I have enabled supercaching; this seems to have fixed it for the most part for non-logged-in users (everyone but me). I’ll post again once I’ve made some progress.

Gone for a couple weeks

Patrick Hurst — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:09:17 +0000

I’m going to be away from computer access for the most part until the 27th, as I’ll be in Maryland for the AAPT physics team camp. I’ll still have my iPhone, so I can still write updates, but expect them to be shorter and without any sort of linkage (I’ll edit in links when I get access to a real computer).