The Geek’s Blog

If you happened to stop by the site before reading this in your RSS reader, you've already seen the new design.

There's been a lot of changes already, but there are a whole lot more changes planned. My primary goal with this redesign was to unite the codebases… we're using WordPress 2.x for the main how-to articles section, bbPress for the forum, and WordPress MU to power the blogs. The only integration to this point was integration between the user databases… so you are logged in everywhere with the same username.

The problem was that each theme was completely different, with it's own template, stylesheet and images, which meant that making any change to the site required going into multiple different places to make the same change… and since the forum wasn't using the same YUI grids CSS as the rest of the site, nothing ever seemed to match anywhere.

So now there's one single common header, footer, and sidebar file, and one common CSS file for the whole site. There's an additional CSS for the forum, since there's a lot of elements that don't need to be included in the rest of the site. Now I can make a change to the header or footer, or even the fonts and colors, and they will be applied across the entire site.

There's still a lot of cleanup to do, and I'll be adding new features to the site over the next few weeks.

As many of you might already know, we migrated the site last weekend to a brand new server with much better specs:

• Old Server: Dedicated Virtual from MediaTemple with 1GB RAM
• New Server: Quad Core Xeon, 4GB RAM, 2×250GB HDD from The Planet

I've had good luck with MediaTemple over the last year, but a virtual server can only scale so far before it starts to have issues, and they don't have any other upgrade path, so I had to look elsewhere.

I plan to use this server for a long while, and expect it to scale to a great deal of traffic in the next year, so I also switched from Apache to LiteSpeed, which is a commercial web server that is supposed to scale a lot better on a single server, but is also much faster in general.

From their benchmarks page:

They also have an administration panel so you can easily make changes on the fly… there's a "graceful restart" feature that allows you to restart the server without kicking anybody off.

One of the features that's just really cool (and kinda strange) is that you can actually Compile PHP from within their web-based admin panel. You can even include an opcode cache like APC or xcache, just by checking a button. Sure, it's not entirely useful for those of us used to compiling, but it's a rather nifty feature since it saves your last configure options and allows you to apply those to a new PHP version with the click of a button.

Now that I have a great deal more memory I can finally start to do some interesting things with memcached. (more on that in the future).

Very big changes coming…

I just noticed that we finally passed the 1 million uniques in 30 days mark… we've been hovering right below the mark for a long while, but finally went above.

Growth has been pretty solid, especially considering how little I've posted in the last month.

I've never considered the idea of having dinner while floating in the sky, but it looks like somebody did… my friend Pratik sent this link over to me, where you can rent out the floating table for an event.

It looks like they have locations around the world, and if you are wondering the table is actually held up by a crane. Technical specs:

• Total weight of the table: 5.000 kg
• Weight of the crane: 90 tonnes or 160 tonnes
• Measurements table (not assembled): 6 x 2, 50 m
• Measurements table (assembled): 9 x 5 m
• Rotation angle of the seats: 180°
• Maximum height: 40 or 50 metres
• Number of dinner guests seated (four-point seat belts): 22
• Minimum ground space : 35 x 15 m

So what happens if you get sick from the food?

Dinner in the Sky

I'm not sure if this will stick, it could just be one of those Google ups and downs, but as of right now we're ranking #3 for the keyword "geek".

Sweet!

http://www.google.com/search?q=geek

Update

Looks like Google is having some fun… it went up to #1, then #5, then #10… who knows where it will end up. I suspect that they test out moving sites around to get metrics. I just hope it stays on the front page.

I'm not entirely certain that this is going to work in WordPress MU, but you never know.

But maybe it won't work?

Looks like Democracy polls are working!

This is yet another "prototype" idea for a really cool looking computer, but it's not actually available yet. (Or ever, who knows).

It's just a screen, 3″ thick and 42″ wide. Kinda cool, but none of these cool tech devices ever see the light of day…

http://www.lumenlab.com/

Yeah, very depressing. Do we really have to wait a whole hour?

Although I have to say that the giant spike was from a crazy 2-day stumbling… but it's still a milestone.

I suspect the next milestone will take quite a bit longer than this one did.

The graph is looking a little flat… I'm guessing we're due for another bump soon.

Just judging from the current trends, we'll hit 1.5mil in less than two weeks, and should easily hit 10mil for 2007.

I've really been slacking off lately… only 1-2 posts per day, which is kinda sad. Time to kick it up a notch.