mahiwaga

So apparently it was all Dreamhost’s fault. Both Mephisto and Movable Type are working at reasonable speeds. I still stand by the notion that Dreamhost really can’t handle Ruby on Rails very well. I’m looking into switching to (or at least adding on) a different shared host. Site5 looks promising.

I’m not blaming Dreamhost for the connectivity snafu today. It is, after all, shared hosting, and I’m not exactly running anything mission critical here. (And I luckily had the foresight to have Google handle my e-mail. Privacy, smivacy, the NSA is looking at all this crap anyway.) But I do want to play around with Ruby on Rails some more, and Dreamhost just doesn’t seem like the place to go in that regard.

I do, however, blame the spammers. I’m certain that they’re responsible for the network slowness. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just Dreamhost that was affected. A lot of other sites seemed to respond sluggishly this morning as well. My apache log files are saturated with apparent attempts to post spam comments and spam trackbacks.

I wish they could relax the law so that spammers were fair prey for vigilante justice. I would so take an aluminum bat to the head of a spammer. Seriously. I’m not usually a violent man, but these scum ruin the Internet for everyone.

D’oh! Another thing I realized is that I just nuked my Mephisto database. The only thing still sitting on the server are some random archives and the index, and luckily, the Atom feed. I have my Wordpress install backed up, and my database for Typo is still around, so the only thing I’m probably missing are a few posts between the last time I used Typo and the oldest entry I posted from Mephisto that is still in the Atom file. Hopefully I can import all this stuff without too much headache.

Pardon my French, but it’s hotter than a motherfucker out there. This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if I actually had air-conditioning. I’m actually contemplating the idea of renting a hotel room just so I can turn the thermostat to 55 degrees and chill. Literally.

So it looks like I have all the posts I wrote with Typo and Mephisto in one form or the other scattered across three computers. Now all I need is an XSLT stylesheet to convert Atom to WXR (Wordpress Extended RSS, which is an XMLish dump of a Wordpress database.) Unfortunately, Movable Type only knows how to read its native non-XML flatfile format and WXR. This is definitely a shortcoming. That said, I may just not have looked hard enough for a plug-in that will let me import Atom.

But so far, I’m digging Movable Type. I haven’t taken a gander at the code yet, and I know that Movable Type has been around for a long time, making it susceptible to cruftiness. (For an example of cruftiness, just look at Wordpress.) But there’s something to be said about tried-and-true.