Just a quick note to say that I have gone and got myself a Twitter account, and added a wee little Twitter feed to my site (over on the right, there), and that there Twitter feed will have not only my Tweets, but will also have new posts from NousEssece, so if you don't want to RSS, you can follow mah Tweets :)

Today finds this site Gravatar enabled. What is Gravatar you ask? From the site: "A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on blogs?" So this is a good thing. Keeping identities unified across several different sites can be a tough job, OpenID helps with that with the login (which is why I run an albeit seldom used id server using Clamshell, and here's my OpenID endpoint), and gravatar comes in to help with the image.

Soooooo I migrated servers over the last few days. I got me a fairly inexpensive box, threw Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on it, and migrated all of my assets over to it. There should not have been any down time, the actual switch over should have taken about 2 seconds even though the process ended up taking about 16 hours longer than I thought it would. Why did I do this? a few reasons:

1) Experience! I am always trying to tinker in new ways on my Linux system(s)/networks. I enjoy the growth of knowledge in gaining experience, and it's pretty darn satisfying in the end! I have never migrated servers, so that was interesting, and also I wanted more experience with a headless installation (I was hosting on my desktop machine before).

2) An excuse to install Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. It was recently released, and now I have at least one instance of it running. I wanted to be able to install it to my desktop as well, but while it was hosting my site, I could not do that; now I can.

3) The ability to tinker on my desktop hardware. Now I can tinker away with some noise-reduction techniques I have been reading about, I can do things like reboot without killing my hosted site/services. This also means I plan on doing some Drupal testing/module porting and getting my name active in the drupal community, yippie!

4) Share the load! Yes, now my desktop is just a tiny bit less stressed out. That's a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

Performance note: there seems to be some issue with my new Gallery2 installation, please be patient while I iron out some bugs.

So in keeping with the spirit of documentation, and documenting everything major I do here, I'll be posting my notes. The series of steps I took will be posted in one or more posts detailing the harrowing journey.

Just a quick note to commemorate the addition of a nifty new feature from the module Comment Notify. Now you can receive email notifications when someone adds a comment to a post that you have commented on...and the best parts: 1. You don't need an account to sign up for these notifications, 2. you can remain anonymous, and 3. you can unsubscribe at any time. Just a nice feature for that mysterious time when my blog-site actually gets readers who comment!

SPAM! Why should I have to worry about spam, right? This is a pretty low traffic site (sigh) and who's going to spam on me? I had a post a bit ago about passing a spam right of passage and enabling a bit of security to get around it. Well, the spam dude was not done with me yet! No sir, I kept getting hit, kept having traffic eaten by spam-spewing robo-jerks, and it was getting pretty tiring having to isolate every ip, and then ban them one...at...a...time. So, I overhauled my security and thought I would actually spell out here exactly how I set it up...