Just to recommend Jerome’s Query Diagnostics plugin for Wordpress, which once enabled spits out a list of all the database queries used by a page, along with the time they took to complete. This afternoon I found that one plugin was doubling the processing time, and removing that has made the whole site snappier.  I was trying to do this by looking at mysql logs, but it seems such things don’t really exist on a per-user basis, so anybody sharing a server with x number of others is going to struggle to diagnose connection problems. People recommend other plugins, but JQD was the only one that worked for me.

I notice that adding a comment doesn’t work properly any more. The comment actually gets posted after you hit ‘Submit’, but the page doesn’t refresh with the promised strawberries. I offer my humblest apologies for the disappointment that must have ensued. I’ll try to get it fixed up.

In a pleasing coincidence, yesterday I posted my 2000th blog post, as well as the 2000th photo upload to flickr. I shall therefore spend an introspective few paragraphs…

Well, maybe not. Well, maybe a little.

Since installing the mint stats collector just under a year ago, the most popular posts have been on HDR photography, 75 Bands and life coaching. Most ‘interesting‘ images are an HDR shot of a London market, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas and Pink Floyd at Live 8.

Busy few days ahead. I’m off to see a Richard Dawkins talk this evening - I’m taking my copy of The Blind Watchmaker on the off chance he’s available for book signings - then tomorrow I’m going to St. Annes for a dancing weekend. I’m supposed to get a deluxe room after an email exchange with the hotel owner over the use of some photographs I took last year, which should be pleasant! It’s half an hour’s walk from Blackpool, and I’m hoping to ride the Manic Rollercoaster of Death during the day. I also have a 2200 word entry for a writing competition with a 1500 word limit, which will probably drive me nuts for the greater part of next week.

wongaBlog is three years old today. Yay! Only 17 months until its light cone of causality reaches Alpha Centaurai, which will have undoubtedly have profound astrological implications.

It’s 31 days until NaNoWriMo. *waves arms frantically while running in circles*

I just upgraded to the new version of the Democracy plugin that powers the poll in the sidebar, and in the process lost all existing votes. No problem, I thought - I’ve two separate daily database backups, so extract the sql and re-insert it manually.

Or, you know, not.

My first port of call was BackupMyBlog.com, which I set up in May. In theory, it uses locally hosted .php files to backup the mysql database every night. They say that locally storing the .php files means they never have access to the database passwords. I don’t have enough php knowledge to know whether that’s true, but it seemed useful and trustworthy enough to be worth the risk. I checked a couple of weeks after setting it up and it seemed to be working fine, even if it never actually sent the promised weekly email reports, nor formatted the RSS feed properly. But, when I went to download the latest file just now I was shown a message saying:

Backup of your account has been disabled because the backup client was not found on your blog server.

Damn! It hadn’t backed up since June, nor emailed to let me know, which sucks. The php files were actually still in place, so I reset their settings and it’s still not working, so I guess the whole site is broken.

Not to worry: I’ve another system. Used in conjunction with wp-cron, the built-in (or not) wp-backup plugin is set to automatically email a zip file to my gmail account every night. Except it seems that it inexplicably stopped working at the end of July, after chugging merrily along for months. I’d gotten so used to not even thinking about the emails that I didn’t notice them stop. This *might* coincide with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.4, thinking about it.

At least this happened with something relatively minor, and not a complete database loss. It still sucks utterly, however. I know it’s up to me to check that backups work properly, but I don’t think I was particularly lax in this case! I’ll post again when I’ve found another solution.

My site was kinda down since midnight. Something confused a mysql database table and the Wordpress admin pages fell over. On my own computer Firefox gave me blank pages while IE displayed them fine; not sure what was happening for other users. I don’t really understand what happened, but it’s all fixed now. Textdrive support reminded me that there’s a ‘repair table’ option in the mysql admin, which did the trick.

My website hits went through the roof on Tuesday:

I have no idea why this happened. Technorati isn’t suggesting I was linked to by anybody with major traffic, all the hits were to the front page rather than any specific article, and I didn’t actually post anything during the day. Given that hits on my feed went up by a similar percentage I’m guessing it was some kind of insane bot, although the disparity between unique and total visitors doesn’t really tie up with that. Dunno.

This evening somebody asked me for details on the wongaMonkey in the blog banner. I realised I had no clue, which was shameful. I turned to Lil, who immediately identified it as some kind of gibbon. Two minutes later she came back with the type - it’s a Moloch Gibbon. This is the original shot of the wongaGibbon, taken at Twycross Zoo suring summer 2001:

A seriously cool gibbon, I think you’ll agree. More exciting, though, is this:

S/he was still going strong as of last August! However, wongaGibbon looks sad, and this makes me feel bad. I think a return visit is called for, to check up on him/her.

A couple of Wordpress plugins I’ve found very useful recently:

The Flickr Album plugin creates a very attractive page displaying photos from a Flickr account, but I actually think its additional feature of adding photos to the Write page for easy insertion into posts is more impressive. It offers you the full range of Flickr’s resized images, too. I’m forever swapping between Flickr’s photo pages and blog entries, copying and pasting the relevant HTML, and this saves a fair bit of time.

Also, Edit n Place allows editing of posts directly from the blog, skipping the admin interface. It actually works without making a horrible mess, unlike similar plugins I’ve used before. It interrupts the layout slightly for logged-in administrators, but this can be tweaked by editing the plugin directly (you may also take this opportunity to replace ‘n’ with ‘in’, if you’re anal like me ). The only problem I’ve found is that the hidden-to-non-administrators-link seems to be added to trackbacks, but for me its usefulness outweighs that issue. It’s rare that nothing needs fixing / changing after I’ve hit ‘Publish’.

Not often that I go for this long without blogging - apologies. As you may have guessed, I’m pretty busy! It’s a fun kind of busy, however, and exciting too. Must dash - more later, hopefully.

I was playing around with fonts earlier, and found that for my eyes Verdana is much more readable than Arial, so I’ve changed the website typeface. What do you think? It seems to take up more space…

Yes, this is the kind of thing I spend my time doing

Just trying to upgrade the underlying code-base to use the latest version of K2. I’ll probably break something; bear with me…

Update: Comments broke - they do actually work, but weird stuff happens after you click ’submit’. Trying to figure it out…

Update 2: Dammit - it was working for a few minutes, and then I don’t know what happened
Update 3: Phew. Five hours later, and it’s complete. I’ve no idea how it took so long, but there are a few upgrades. Including, finally, strawberries. As ever, please let me know if anything’s amiss.

del.icio.us has many cool features, but they’re so well hidden in the bowels of the site that I often don’t discover them until months after everybody else. For any bloggers out there who don’t know about the del.icio.us linkrolls, I feel I should point them out. To generate the links on the right-hand side (front page only) I previously used a wordpress plugin that checked my ‘wongablog’ tag every half hour, generated some html and cached the output. Now del.icio.us have some clever javascript that does the same thing, but on a real-time basis. Swish. I hear that there’s also some kind of flash-based media player that can be used to insert mp3s etc. into post content - must check that out at some point.

Update: and as soon as I post, it promptly stops working…
Update 2: Nope, that was my fault

If I knew why, I’d fix it. I’ve updated the relevant plugin, and hopefully it’s a problem with feedburner, now…I’ll give it a few hours and see whether it solves itself.

Update: It appears to be a problem with the feedburner plugin and an apparent bug in the Wordpress redirects. I think it’s fixed now. Rather than change settings that would break links, I’ve disabled the plugin entirely and used the instructions from here to get it working again, although it’ll need patching up once a proper fix is announced.

Well, that went fairly smoothly. Other than a slow FTP program, I haven’t come across any major issues. There was one display problem which was easily solved. Woo! Please let me know if you notice any problems. It’s certainly swish behind the scenes.