znurt hosting, bugs, code

I migrated the packages website to a new server this weekend, and so far I’m really glad with the setup. I originally planned on having the whole thing setup in a short time, but I went with a different web server setup this time around. Instead of using lighttpd for the server, I went back to apache, but this time with mod_fastcgi to run PHP. From what I’ve read, PHP doesn’t like threading too much, so running at as CGI instead should avoid any possible headaches. We’ll see. So far, the site is far more responsive than everything else I’ve tried, so I’m happy.

I feel bad about how things have gone so terrible since the initial launch of the site. I really was not ready for the massive load, and my interim solutions were just slow and clunky. Hopefully things should be much happier now.

There’s still a lot of silly bugs in the code that I need to fix. I just found another one this morning where the caching is breaking if you change your architecture selection around. Oy. I’d like to get to them, but I’ve been pretty swamped for time lately, between starting a new job this month and dividing my remaining time doing consulting work for two other companies.

Having a break from it though has been kind of good. I’ve already thought of a few optimizations that I can throw in there that are kind of like, “well, duh” type stuff I can’t believe I didn’t think of. For example, one way that I check to see if an ebuild is new is to see if the file mtime has changed. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to just read the Manifest file and see if any of the hash sums have changed. That’d save me a lot of time.

I’ve been poked a few times about getting the code in a live repo somewhere, too. I guess that’s coming soon, assuming I can get around to it. Personally, I don’t like the idea of doing it when I *know* my code is in some ugly stages, but whatever. I need to learn how to setup a git repo anyway.

Oh yes, that reminds me. I also moved all the Planet Larry stuff onto the same server. Everytime I poke at the site, all I can think about is how much of an overhaul the whole thing needs. I’m totally embarrassed that I haven’t even switched over to using Gravatar yet.

My goal is to ditch the planet software and write my own software to pull in the feeds, drop them in a database, and have the whole thing searchable. Then build a user admin section as well so users can manage their feeds themselves, and stop waiting on me. I’m planning on making that my next project, once Znurt gets to a better stage of stability.

Right now, though, I just did some minor tweaks. I got rid of the subdomains, and all the other projects on the site that I let atrophy, so planet is just available now at http://larrythecow.org/