musings from the sleep deprived

The first batch of substrate made it to my LFS. I think I mentioned in the last post that they recommended, and I went with Activ-Flora. I did some looking into it, and it seemed a reasonable choice. Not my first choice, but reasonable. Went there to pick it up. Box opened… Eco-complete. Huh? Um. Pointed this out to the guy, he pulls out the catalog… Activ-Flora. I point to the label… Eco-complete. Hrmph.

I will still use it. But please, LFS guy… understand that I am an educated consumer, and I choose products for good reasons. If I order A, and you deliver B … as a general rule, I am not going to be pleased about it, and will certainly reconsider any future purchases at your store. Seriously, how unreasonable is that?

Love,
– me

So over the last month, roughly, we’ve been thinking about and investigating the idea of getting the freshwater fishtank going again, and under a strict budget.
Read more

I was going to post about Steve Jobs. I may still. I’m sitting here just sort of stunned, despite the knowledge that he was ill, had been for some time, and that this was coming. I certainly can’t do justice to what he has done for technology, an industry, and how he has enriched our lives over the years. Maybe I’ll get around to that at some point, but right now… I’m just going to let my mind wander through my memories and ponder it all…

Rest In Peace, Steve. Your legacy remains.

So yeah, on this topic. Here are some of the things I’ve been reading recently on that:

• An article user expectations of page load times
• Another article, with many linked further resources

Which led me to several websites detailing how to optimize performance:

• A Yahoo article on that topic

And then the online tools to help you identify your site’s problems:

• One Here
• Another one here
• And Google’s own Page Speed here

Analysis showed my page lacking in several areas. CSS Sprites and js/css/html minify being the most notable.

Interesting, wot? Maybe y’all have been paying more attention than I have, and you’re all like… yeah? So? Thats old news. yeah? Well? Not to me. So yet another area to do some learning on, which is always a good thing. Blogs have a few things that can be easily optimized, and some that can’t. But (aforementioned static hosting aside <- provide link) I’m going to give it a go on this blog and a few other sites I own or host, and see what I can do about optimizing them. I think I should be able to get their “ratings” for optimization up to an A.

I’ve moved stuff around, and all the primary site images (essentially, the brilliant buttons) are all now actually one image, with the CSS taking care of the positioning. Took awhile to get right, not the least of which time was because PSP crashed on me. More fool me. Please, Corel, just fix the goddamn thing.

I did install plugins for wordpress that help you with the minify and consolidation, remove whitespace, etc. I’m now scoring much better on those testing tools. Pagespeed now has me scoring a 69/100, nearly a 40 point improvement!

As part of all the aforementioned effort to make my online life more simple, I’ve also experimented in getting a gallery to be static content as well.
Read more

So, adventure #1. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to use Amazon’s free service to its maximum extent. Here is how that went down: Read more

If you go around EC2, and just use the S3 storage facilities, there’s a lot to be gained here. The huge caveat is that you’re not dealing with a fully functional, cgi-enabled, php or other dynamic generated thing. This is just a raw mapping of files to an very simple httpd daemon. Thats it. Nothing else. So all said, your whole site has to be static content, with no funky stuff. Read more

So Amazon (Web Services) has a service called EC2, which is essentially their hosting service. Due to some stuff I’m working on at work, I have been taking a look at what kinds of service automation are possible, and that led me to look at EC2. Read more

I spent a bit of time today moving the blog up to my hosting provider. Ultimately, I’m trying to slowly relieve my dependence on the machine I have at home to just the core services that I can’t move. Things like MUSHes, minecraft server, mailing lists, etc. Read more