I installed the Relevanssi plugin because the native WordPress search seemed almost useless. So far it seems to be vastly superior. Native search frequently returned zero results when there were relevant posts. So, enjoy.

I’ve been moderately perplexed by the recent spike in traffic on basically unrelated keywords. Apparently this site is currently the #5 result for “fedora 15 beta download” despite my having never written about Fedora 15. In an attempt to funnel people to a useful page I created the previous post with links to the FC 15 ISOs. I feel bad if people come here looking for an answer that’s not to be found.

In looking into this issue I searched Google for the keywords and saw this:

evanhoffman.com is blockable

There’s a “Block all evanhoffman.com results” link under my site, but there’s none under any of the other sites. What the hell? Does my site somehow qualify as a spammer or content farm? Why do I get this dubious distinction? Ugh.

Somehow this site became the top Google result for two different searches, “Shogun2.dll appcrash” and “fedora 14 gnome3″. My theory is that Google’s indexing the referring keywords listed in the widget on the right, causing a snowball effect. But the rise in traffic this year has been dramatic, especially for a site really about nothing.

Traffic 2011-02-01 to 2011-04-08

I’ve been hearing for years about paid bloggers. If people are getting paid to write their crap down in an ad-supported industry, it seemed like it might make sense to throw some ads up on this very site to see what happens. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for a few months now and the short answer is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s what the earnings look like since 1/1/2009 (my Adsense account is much older than this site; I put the banner ads up around Fall of 2009):

Basically, in a year I’ve “earned” under $20. That doesn’t even pay for domain registration & DNS for a year. And since Google doesn’t actually pay you until you have $100 in earnings, this is fake money anyway.

Now I didn’t have any illusions about making money from this site, I just put the ads up as an experiment to see if this is a realistic way to earn a dependable income. From what I can tell, it can be, but only in certain cases, basically coming down to how much traffic you can generate.

1. You’re already famous. If you’re already a “celebrity” in your field (whatever that field is) then people already probably want to hear what you say.
2. Your subject matter has mass appeal. If you write about discoveries in quantum physics, you may have a decent following, but it’s still only going to be the people who care about quantum physics. If you write about Jersey Shore you have a much larger pool of possible readers, because everybody loves watching a train wreck.
3. What you say actually matters. This is related to the first point. If Joe Shmoe (or Evan Hoffman) rants at the top of his lungs, it’s just some guy complaining. If Ben Bernanke makes an offhand comment about interest rates the stock market tanks.

I’m sure there are some other cases, but as far as I can tell a tech guy writing about things that annoy him doesn’t fit any of these criteria. I’m tempted to remove the ads altogether, but it’s too interesting seeing what ads Google puts up on some of these pages. The first few months, the ads were all for some rabbi’s circumcision service. Not sure what that was about.

I signed up with Pingdom to monitor my website. They have a free service if you just want to monitor a single site, and since I only have one site, this is perfect. Since this server gets knocked offline all the time (thanks LIPA) I figured this was a prudent step. However, Pingdom also offers response time stats, and the stats are not good. Average response time is around 4200 ms, and with the first test taking 5,472 ms to respond.

Oh well. It’s free. Maybe I should move it to wordpress.com.

Edit: Pingdom is so smart. They have banners so you can advertise your awesome (?) uptime!

I use Akismet to filter out spam comments here, and I’ve seen a few different strategies the spammers employ. There’s the “Cool post! You should Digg it” (in both English and Spanish – tengo que Digg), there’s the “this post helped me on my class project,” there’s the pure jibberish – “xajdjhesbjsb sjhsjhrhjshwru skjskjrijsjs.” But this is a new one I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks:

We gon party tonight

Stupid things like this crack me up, not sure why.

I never like typing a password into a non-SSL site, no matter how trivial it is. In order to give my own site this ability I simply used mod_rewrite to force requests to WordPress’s admin pages to go over SSL.

The .htaccess file for the site looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /evan/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /evan/index.php [L]
</ifModule>
 
# END WordPress

To force the admin pages to SSL, just add these lines under RewriteEngine On:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^wp-(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}      [R,L]

Edit – The above code screws up uploads (which go into the /wp-content directory). I replaced that with the following and it Worked As Intended.

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^wp-login(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}      [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^wp-admin(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}      [R,L]

That’s pretty much it. If your request starts with “wp-” it’ll redirect you to the same URL, but starting with https://. Problem solved. You do need to make sure you have an SSL VirtualHost pointing to your WordPress DocumentRoot so that https://yoursite.com goes to the same place as http://yoursite.com.

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

WordPress is doing something weird now. Yesterday the head of the site was not in all caps, and today it is.

Hmm.

Ok, I figured it out. I guess I must have installed some new font on this computer – “Trajan Pro” – and the header was showing in that font. I deleted it from the stylesheet and now it defaults to Lucida Sans Unicode, which is what I wanted.

Everybody else is doing it…

I guess I’ll try converting my old posts to this thing and ditch the old page.