Folks,
Looks like something happened to a bunch of widgets and ads in the sidebar. As in, “poof, they’ve gone into the aether”. Enjoy the mostly-ad-free current state as I’ll be restoring those soon.
iPad users, rejoice: I’m working with the Mobile site vendor to get the @#$*&^$@ issue solved. Once that’s done, I expect M4 and I will get the pie filter re-enabled.
There are a number of other things going on in the background that will make things better soon. I’ll be updating the core theme version (finally!) and that should improve performance. I’ve got some tweaks to apply to the caching system and then will get the #$($&^ CDN working correctly. That will greatly reduce the download time and server load, making things groovy for all readers. I curse the CDN because both times I enabled it, many users (including myself!) had trouble getting the site, instead getting bad gateway and/or CloudFlare errors. Since there were other core issues to improve, I put that on the back burner and so later this week, things will improve. Between now and then it may be a bit bumpy, but we’ll get to a better place, tout de suite.
Open thread and since I’m working on back-end issues, this is not so much a bitch about the site thread. I’ve detailed what I’m working on, and once we get this stuff nailed down and things settle for a week or three, there will be one or two threads seeking suggestions for improvements. A redesign/update is in order.
Don’t forget that you can always use the Contact a Front Pager form to report tech issues to me, or bad-behaving ads to me or John. For such ads, please let us know which advertiser it was as that’s the crucial information needed to suppress them.
I will be updating the WordPress version and a plugin or two in a bit, and I’m downloading some large db files, so the site may slow down a bit over the next couple of hours.
Have a great Sunday, everyone.
schrodingers_cat
OT WP question.
What book or any other resource is your go to for WP questions?
NotMax
Now that’s comedy. Never has worked in any capacity other than freezing up the entire tab at this end.
;)
Yarrow
Thanks for your hard work, Alain. Hope your back has improved.
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: I tried to send Alain some pictures of my citizenship ceremony and the form was not working. That was about a month ago around July 4th.
Nicole
How does one send photographs via contact a front pager? Whenever I go to it there’s a box for a text message but I don’t see any option to attach a photo.
Alain the site fixer
@schrodingers_cat: Book, not so much. I use a number of resources, primarily from good searching on Google. I tend to trust WordPress.org content, but I don’t usually find answers there. stackoverflow is a great source for finding already-asked questions, specific plugin or theme questions I go to their support areas (plugins are often on WordPress.org’s page for the plugin).
I know you’ve got some questions, drop me a line, I’d be happy to see what I can do.
schrodingers_cat
@Alain the site fixer: Thanks a lot. I will take you up on it. I am working on two of my websites.
NotMax
Convinced Mom that after 3 courses of dramas we needed to suffuse with a lighter taste of theater as dessert. So we’re heading off soon for a matinee of Avenue Q.
She’s never seen it, I’ve only seen snippets. Current revival has most of the original cast, albeit they are IRL 15 years older.
germy
why do I keep getting these certificate warnings? “Safari can’t identify etc.. the certificate for this website is invalid….”
lurker dean
scott hechinger posted some great videos for undocumented people to learn their rights. please share, we need people at risk to see these.
all 4 of the videos can be found at:
https://www.wehaverights.us/
Alain the site fixer
@Nicole: That’s the On the Road form they’re talking about. Which is down right now. Part of the upcoming redesign will improve such things as well as finding them.
@NotMax: We’ll see what we can do on the Contact Form front as well. Didn’t know it was an issue; I suspect it might be the Google verification being goofy for you. The form plugin we’re using is a resource issue so I’m researching alternatives.
@Yarrow: Much, thank you. It’s still not back to normal, but it’s not nearly as bad. This is the 8th day now where I feel normal and not injured. I still have pain and weakness but I’ve also been trying to do normal things like carry (light!) groceries, etc. to build things back up. I must pat myself on the back for getting heated seats in my 4runner. I suspected it might be helpful therapeutically, and I was correct.
And with that, I’m off to update the WordPress version and plugins.
debbie
Thanks, Alain. I know this is a thankless task. Hope your back is mending!
satby
@Nicole: easier to just copy and paste their email into a regular email and attach the puctures.
satby
Fuuuuuck! Pictures
Alain the site fixer
Oh yeah, I’ll also be taking a look at the Edit Comments feature. That plugin has gone downright goofy and doesn’t seem to work anywhere now. Thanks for pointing it out, satby! :)
Mike J
@schrodingers_cat: Use the source, Luke.
If you’re writing plugins or otherwise hacking on it, the source is the best documentation.
TaMara (HFG)
@schrodingers_cat: You can send them to me at whats4dinnersolutions at live dot com and I’ll happily post them for you!
TaMara (HFG)
Alain I hope you’re feeling better and thanks for all the hard work!
Yarrow
@Alain the site fixer: That sounds positive! Keep doing the things you know help. Glad you’re feeling better.
Aaaannnnddd…now the blog has lost my nym and email again. I’ve already posted in this thread so that’s not it. No box to check for “remember me.” Hmmm….
Ruckus
Alan, the site is loading dramatically quicker. But then you’ve removed some things……
I’ve got two WP sites and and a Blogger site and none of them has been as much work as this is. Or any real work at all. Of course I have about a millionth of the traffic. OK that’s a low estimation of the difference. All together over the years my total traffic is probably what this sees in a day. Even I rarely go there. Maybe some day…….
Platonailedit
@Ruckus:
I visit a few fywp hosted sites with lot of photos and videos in them. None of them have any problems whatsoever unlike this one. If Cole is paying any one to host/consult this, he is getting a bum’s deal.
Alain the site fixer
@Yarrow: WordPress version update I just did fixed a bug with the comment check box so that may require re-doing things.
different-church-lady
Kudos to both you and MMMM for your diligent uphill slog.
Uncle Cosmo
One glimmer of good news for you, Alain: I finally broke down & installed Firefox (not “Farfawks,” the West By God Virginny virgin ;D) on my home PC & all the problems I was having getting on & commenting have gone away. Won’t be bugging you about it again – looks like it was InternetExploder11 all along. Thanx 4 ur forbearance.
Now if I can only find a decent small browser that can be loaded & installed on my Cloudbook to supplant the miserable MS-Edge… (Any suggestions from the jackaltariat? WinBlows 10 & only 2Gb of memory/32Gb SSD to work with there…)
Nicole
@satby: Except I don’t see their regular emails anywhere on the site unless they put them into the body of a comment. Which of course, I can never find months later when I have a photo I’d like to send.
Which is not to say I think they should be listing the regular emails, I totally get the format for contact a front pager, I just wish that I could have a option to attach a photo.
Nicole
All of that said, Alain, I continue to thank you for all the hard work you do keeping the site running.
Doug R
You know, if you got rid of the taboola rack of clickbait, I might be persuaded to turn off adblock on my phone.
Similarly if the autoplay sidebar video disappeared, I may turn off unlock on my laptop.
Doug R
Ublock.
Vidya Pradhan
Any chance you can create a paid form of the website where I can subscribe to not see any more ads? Would love that.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruckus: it’s probably loading faster because the things that fuck it up are gone.
Those being the ads, unfortunately.
Another Scott
@Vidya Pradhan: I have Ublock Origin on all my desktop browsers and I do almost no blog-like stuff on my phone. I send sites I like (B-J, Wonkette, CEPR, MotherJones, Eclectablog, etc., etc.) money a few times a year to make up for the loss in my ad-clicks. It’s very easy to do the same here (to the blogmeister) via the PayPal link on the sidebar (which is MIA at the moment while Alain and M^4 try to wrestle FYWP into submission).
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Golden Bear
@germy: Probably something broke the SSL certificates (or at least the way Safari likes them done) during the site maintenance. (I’m using Chrome on Mac, which isn’t generating those messages.) Should be perfectly safe to click through to the site anyway — I don’t remember the specific method offhand, but from the error message there’s a way to tell Safari that you want to visit the site anyway.
Alain, thanks for all the work, I’ve dealt with WP weirdness on my own site, which has nowhere near the traffic or functionality.
BroD
Take it from a grumpy old man: all tech sucks.
Starfish
@Doug R: What browser are you using on your mobile? I am so annoyed about video ads on phones and tablets.
Ruckus
@Platonailedit:
There are major issues with this site.
First, a lot of traffic.
Second, a non standard site, with plugins and standalone code. Every time one thing changes it can screw up the entire site and lots has to be done. For example, I have a site that people have commented how nice it looks, did I write the entire thing myself. I just laugh, it’s a standard theme, all I did was add widgets from the hosting site that belong to the theme. It took less than a day from start to finish. But as I noted above my total traffic on all 3 of my sites (all of which are inactive as far as I’m concerned) over the years, is about what this site gets in a day. And yes I still get looks almost every day, from one to maybe ten at most. And yes some of those looks are from Russia.
Third, the site has been in operation for over a decade. I think around a decade and a half. The site has been rewritten I believe once in that time. It’s like looking at what the company I worked at was still using when I left in 2005, COBAL.
debbie
I have to sign in every time i comment on desktop. At least, it’s started allowing me to edit myself.
kindness
I’d pay a subscription fee for a no ads site. How much would it have to be to make that work? And please, don’t think I’m asking anyone to be Andrew Sullivan.
Another Scott
@Starfish: Not Doug R, but I’ve got the Brave browser on my Android phone. (It was recommended by someone here a few months ago.) It blocks ads and various things. It seems well done, but I haven’t used it all that much.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@kindness: Having different versions of the site makes more work for Alain and MMMM and probably isn’t going to happen. It’s too much work.
Just install Ublock Origin in your browser (if you’re using Chrome or Firefox on the desktop), or install Brave on your phone. They will block the ads for you. Then send whatever you think is a fair “subscription” amount to Cole occasionally (when the PayPal link is back up).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
You can use a private tab on most mobile browsers and that blocks the ads.
I use firefox on Android and it works fine. It was, as of Friday even remembering my name/address for commenting. Still doing it!
@Major Major Major Major:
Yes I noticed that those pesky things were missing. Including ads.
As money is necessary to keep the site going it might not be a bad idea of John to do a once in a while site bleg and get rid of the ads altogether. But that might not get enough money coming in to make things work. And a site that one could opt out of the ad stream by pitching in a few pennies would add a huge overload on the system I’d bet. I doubt there is solid answer to the money issue, it’s necessary but ads just strike me as the wrong way to go about it. Especially as a lot of online ads today are extremely, whats the word, shitty. Both in content and worse in how much space/time they take and cost. Does one really make a lot, considering how much hate they get, and effort they take?
Gravenstone
@Alain the site fixer: Was going to note that once again I’m offered the opportunity to edit the most recent comment at the time I refresh the page. Imagine that’s part of the ‘wonkiness’ that you’re seeing.
That, and nym/email fields have depopulated again. I realize that’s a constant battle on your end.
Ruckus
@Gravenstone:
What’s fun is I have the edit buttons for your comment but not for mine. It won’t let me edit it but the buttons do bring up the editing window.
Amir Khalid
This site works almost perfectly for me. All I want is to see Recent Posts and Recent Comments come back.
mad citizen
Alain, Big thanks for all of your hard work! Like Amir, the site seems to work very well for me, but I almost solely lurker/read and comment sometimes.
Alain the site fixer
@Vidya Pradhan: let’s see what the future holds. I’ve got some things to show John and see what he thinks.
And I see the check box is gone from mobile site. I know WordPress fixed a bug, thought it wouldn’t remove the damned box. Grr. I’ll get to it as soon as I can.
Alain the site fixer
@Amir Khalid: I’m working with M4 on that. Right now, memory and cpu time is a major issue. There are over 5 million comments, so having a query run against that table every time someone loads or refreshes the page is a major resource drain. Folks forget or don’t know the crash some weeks back. It’s been quaking for a couple of months and removing that made things better. I hope to have it return.
Doug R
@Starfish: Firefox for mobile
Suzanne
Can you get rid of the fucking pop-up ads that show up in the lower right corner of my tablet? FUCK. So irritating.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@schrodingers_cat: For all kinds of programming or software usage (Microsoft often gets me into “is there any damn way to do this simple thing?” mode), I usually end up at StackExchange. If I just type the question into Google, 90+% of the time one of the top links or one of the only useful links will be at StackExchange.
Edit: I think I meant StackOverflow.
Ruckus
What really baffles me is that at times everything is perfect for me, loading, editing, name is saved, etc. Others are having massive issues at the same time. Or vice versa. Yes we are all on different systems, tablets, desktops, laptops, apple mobile, android mobile, kindle……. Ad blockers, 18 different browsers, winders, mac, lynx, whatever combo that is possible…… And what is going out the door should be the same for all of us, but it seems that it isn’t, given all of the different results we get. How much of it is us and how much is the site?
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Nicole: I imagine the back end of this site as a mass of loose wires, Jacob’s ladders, alligator clips and duct tape, kind of a cross between a telephone switchboard and a mad scientist’s lab. Where every piece of duct tape is a crucial part of the electronics and Alain knows where all of them are and what they do.
Steeplejack
@Alain the site fixer:
I cannot conceive of a stupider way to implement the “recent comment/post” function. And, believe me, as a database guy I’ve seen it all.
What you want is a very small table for each (comments and posts). When a new comment or post comes in, you insert a reference to it in the small table and delete the oldest item in that small table. The small table never has more than five or six entries (whatever is the number that you want to display on the Balloon Juice page), and they are easily and quickly retrieved whenever someone refreshes a Balloon Juice page.
Not railing at you, Alain, just the fact that Balloon Juice is probably riddled with inefficiencies like this. I always picture a grass hut that has been “renovated” over the years into a 10-story office building—with the grass hut still sitting in the first-floor lobby and controlling the plumbing and electric.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
Isn’t the electrical for all 10 stories run off an extension cord from the one outlet in the grass shack, which then runs across the floor of the main conference room and gets unplugged every time someone wants to plug in the projector for a powerpoint presentation?
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Kudos to you, Steeplejack, for your perfect description and excellent suggestion re: how to handle Recent Comments.
@Ruckus: And you, Ruckus, who would have thought that one could improve on the perfect description? Your addition is beyond perfect.
Steeplejack
@Ruckus:
I see you have visited Balloon Juice world headquarters! Did you eat in the cafeteria? I hope not.
J R in WV
@Alain the site fixer:
I used to be in the hot tub most mornings, then on the commute the heated seats with the XM-Sirius Spa channel of calm jazz playing. Had to work to stay awake, but was able to stand up straight when I got to work.
No more daily commute, now, though!!! Hurray!
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: How can you think of eating in the cafeteria? They have been out of mustard for a long, long time.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: I assume you take your meals in the hot tub now?
Alain the site fixer
@Steeplejack: WordPress is designed as WordPress is designed. Most sites don’t have our issues; the ones that do have load balancers with multiple servers, etc. We’re hosted on a kickass server, but it’s still hosted server.
The inherent problem is that this is a 16-year old WordPress site with lots of plugins and quirks. I’m at work on a rebuild to see what we can do to change things.
Mike J
@Steeplejack: I would like to see what sort of indices are on the comment table. I’ve seen WP installs with NONE.
But as you point out, information that changes little but is referenced often can benefit from caching.
Steeplejack
@Mike J:
You shouldn’t have to do an indexed query at all. If you must use the big table, just go to the bottom and get the last five records. By default they will be the most recent entries. Duh. Not pretty, but still better than a query.
J R in WV
OK, who let out the secret specs for the lobby wiring?
And THAT GRASS HUT is the Green House, you guys, where the Green president lives!!!
For cryin’ out loud, doesn’t anybody know the secret signs rules any more? We don’t talk about the secret basement stuff out in the open like this!!!
;-) ! So funny, guys, love the grass snack in the lobby for plumbing and wiring image. No real grass shacks in WV, mostly boards with newspaper between the layers of boards to stop the wind.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Good point, but I didn’t get that far. I looked at the “today’s menu” board outside and saw “Meatloaf à la Thurston.” Yeah, no.
WaterGirl
@Alain the site fixer:
I think that’s exactly what Steeplejack was saying, just with a fun image to go with it.
Steeplejack
@J R in WV:
LOL, you’re right: they call it the “greenhouse.” Marketing wanted to go with orangerie, but that was a bridge too far. Plus no one could pronounce it.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Thanks a lot, Steep! I made meatloaf last night – I hope that image doesn’t spoil it for me.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
@Steeplejack:
I worked in that building. It was only 3 stories and the problem was in the winter every woman in the building would plug in their personal heater under their desks because well, they were cold. That would get someone to turn up the thermostat, to mild heat stroke, which would cause someone else to turn it down to Donner Pass levels, which would cause the women to turn their heaters back on…………. It would have been hilarious if I traveled as much in the winter as the almost every week from April to November. It wasn’t hilarious. Company solved it by putting a locked cover on each floor’s thermostat. You might notice a flaw in that logic. We certainly did.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Somehow your comment reminded me of the old cartoon where some guy in an office building says something like “the network goes down every night about this time”, and in the next panel you see the cleaning lady in the next room and an unplugged cord on the floor that she has just taken out of the socket so she could plug in her vacuum cleaner.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I beat him to it.
@Ruckus:
I guessed on the age of the site within a year, and on that note I think it’s just having teen hormonal issues, it wants to get laid but is having technical difficulties with dealing with others. And knowing where everything goes.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Where do you think the idea of the cartoon came from?
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: From real life experience!
I have met the child that the “molly switch” was named after. I used to work with her dad. (Guessing you will know what a molly switch is.)
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
You’re good. It was the “à la Thurston” part that got me.
Ruckus
Alan, something that is strange, which of course is nothing new in BJ land, my name used to always be in smaller type at the top of a comment but now it’s the last comment in a thread and mine is normal sized.
This is not a complaint, it is a superfluous nothing but it is a change, at least for me from the last few years.
@WaterGirl:
Had never heard the description before or knew it had a name but it makes sense.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Yeah, that was a bit off-putting. I am a big Thurston fan.
A friend of mine used to joke at Easter time that we could put a ball in my cocker spaniel’s mouth and serve him up for Easter like a lamb. P.S. check your email.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: I did testing on that with Alain a year or two ago. If you post a comment, your nym shows u in small type for exactly 5 minutes. After that, if you refresh, your nym is the normal size.
It used to be that this was only true of your own nym, but earlier today I noticed that other nyms have also shown up in the small type.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I checked my email and had the following from an old buddy.
Walking can add minutes to your life. This enables you at 85 years old to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at $7000 per month.
My grandpa started walking five miles a day when he was 60. Now he’s 97 years old and we don’t know where he is.
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
The only reason I would take up walking is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
I have to walk early in the morning, before my brain figures out what I’m doing.
I joined a health club last year, spent about 400 bucks. Haven’t lost a pound.
I guess you have to go there.
Every time I hear the dirty word ‘exercise’, I wash my mouth out with chocolate.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Some of those are pretty funny!
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Part of the editing function, the timer for when you can edit?
Which would make some sense now if you saw my comment to @Gravenstone: because I was seeing the edit buttons below the last comment, not just my comment.
Seems a strange way to time the edit though, that would have to track each comment on the site that is less than 5 min old rather than subtract the comment time stamp from the site time. Eat up memory from the server when ever the site is busy. Which seems like a rather roundabout way to do a rather simple job?
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
He forwards me a lot of stuff, most of it isn’t worth repeating. Being an old fart and knowing how many other old farts there are on BJ I figured some might appreciate it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@WaterGirl:
Will check when I get home. I’m over at Sighthound Hall being Uncle Steep.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: Speaking of the occasional interesting thing that arrives by email, here’s something I got from the folks who wrote Crucial Conversations. As much as we talk about non-apology apologies here, this might be of interest.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack (phone): Go, Uncle Steep!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Ruckus:
Are you forgetting exactly what we’re discussing?!
FYWP put a lot of power in the hands of DIY bloggers, and that’s a good thing. But the dark side is that, as with everything else, some DIY is better than other DIY. Balloon Juice seems to have a lot of what I have heard called in home renovation “load-bearing drywall,” if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack (phone):
“load-bearing drywall”
ha ha ha ha ha
Alain the site fixer
@Steeplejack (phone): Yeah, that’s truly it.
But seriously folks, this is untenable. Some things will have to change. No one is happy and so we need to make some leaps forward. I’m still going to work on the main site but I think this is just chasing phantoms; I want to build for the future and throw away a lot of the old. We will adapt.
But don’t worry, this won’t be something we just spring on folks.We’ll do like the past, have a demo and some users comment then make some tweaks and see where things stand with more users. Then hopefully launch.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack (phone):
Oh I absolutely do know.
Load bearing drywall. That’s an interesting concept. I don’t think it will hold up though.
About the DIY segment of WP, that is a real problem isn’t it? As I said above, I’ve got blogs myself, 2 WP and 1 Blogger. And had a website that I changed for my business. All of the blogs are themes that I edited with the provided tools, so they work within the framework of the theme. BJ has been added to, subtracted from and re”engineered” so much over what is a pretty long life as these things go that it is rather amazing that it works at all. It sounds like it needs a complete, ground up do over, by someone(s) who know what they are doing and are up to date in what’s what. That costs money because no one should do that that doesn’t own the site. It’s too much work. Although I’d bet a clean start with the right theme could actually work. I just looked through a lot of WP themes and I see a number that could most likely work almost as is. I have no idea about what to do with all the comments ever made.
Ruckus
@Alain the site fixer:
Per my last comment I think you and I are in agreement.
Current is just untenable. Life has changed in 16 yrs as has computing, WP, technology……
And I’m no expert or even close to it. But I’ve seen kludged up things before in life. Computer programs, buildings, DIY projects, space shuttle/rocket parts, projects at work, governments……..
Sometimes starting all over is not just necessary, it is the only thing.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Ruckus:
Boom! Tip your waitress.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack (phone):
Damn, and I thought I’d get way too much shit for that easy one.
Another Scott
@Alain the site fixer: Dead thread, but maybe The Powers That Be are still watching it twitch.
Isn’t part of the problem the fact that WordPress isn’t really designed for discussion forums?
If we’re thinking about a re-design, should we think about a bigger picture? Do we want Balloon-Juice to be more of a smooth running discussion forum, or more like a social network?
Apparently BBPress is a WP addon that makes a site act more like a real discussion forum. While BuddyPress is a WP addon that makes a site act more like a social network. (And if one wants a discussion forum as part of a BuddyPress site, then one normally uses BBPress.
I’m sure the server tuning issues with BuddyPress are even more complex than what we have now (more moving parts), but it’s under active development and presumably will only get better.
I’m not on Twitter and FB and don’t imagine ever joining them. But I can see the appeal of being able to easily send private messages to others here, posting pictures, and all the usual “social network” kinda stuff.
It might be something worth discussing and thinking about. It might even get JC to pay a little more attention to the place and spend less time on Twitter. ;-)
Thoughts?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
Re Balloon Juice as “social network”: No, no, no, just no. Private messages go against the very idea of an open, group discussion, and weaponizing the ability to post pictures and videos is a slippery slope to hell: that much more (unc0ntrollable) content to police and process correctly. People will post pictures of all different sizes, they’ll accidentally post autorun videos, videos in different formats, etc., etc. Remember that all too many Juicers have trouble doing italics or a blockquote without shooting a toe off.
If there is a sizable group of people who want Balloon Juice to be a social network site, they can just set up a Facebook page and run everything from there. The technology already exists and is someone else’s problem to maintain.
I think Balloon Juice should be a “simple” discussion board, but one that works really well, which it does not right now.