Ministry of Intrigue

Photo by golfer4life under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve had to shut off commenting functionality for the time being folks. The spammers have been trying hard to get in, and the code that I’ve written to run comments though Akismet for spam checking is occasionally resulting in a spinning process on the server if it gets too many requests. So, I’m rewriting my spam checking code, and will hopefully finish that up and have commenting functions available again soon.

Those of you who read this site via RSS probably wouldn’t have noticed, but this site had some unexpected downtime this last weekend. My webhost, the always wonderful Webfaction, uses The Planet for at least some of their datacenter services, however there was a nasty hardware failure at the Huston datacenter:

[May 31st] at approximately 5:45 p.m. CDT, a transformer in one of The Planet’s Huston datacentres caught fire, requiring them to take down all of the generators on site on the instructions of the fire department. This is one of six datacentres used by WebFaction. All servers hosted at that datacentre are currently offline.

According to this Slashdot article, the outage apparently affected approximately 9,000 servers. Because of the nature of the fire, and the directives from the fire department, all the redundant power sources were made meaningless, which is kind of a crappy situation. Luckily none of the servers were actually damaged, so when the box that my site is stored on was powered up at about 6:00am this morning, all my data and services came back online with no issues.

I’m not sure if this is a situation that suggests that Webfaction should use a different datacenter, or if this is an example that goes to show that no matter how well you set up contingency plans you are always vulnerable, but I tend to think the latter. Either way, I’m impressed with how responsive Webfaction was during this event, and I’ll continue to use them as my web host.

The important thing is that the site is online and I’m back. 

It appears that I have written myself into a corner here.

When I first started this site back in 2004, I intended it just as a writing exercise. It was supposed to be a place where I would publish daily in order to build discipline as a writer. I had just completed a semester in the Undergraduate Nonfiction Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and so a lot of my early entries were the sort of literary nonfiction that was emphasized in that program. It was originally an anonymous Blogspot site, so that I would write comfortably and without inhibition. It was a great exercise, and I wrote a few entries that I was proud of.

Eventually, I decided to drop the pseudonym. My friends had mostly figured out what I was up to, and the more I thought about the importance of owning your words, the sillier the idea of pseudonymous writing became. So I dropped the pseudonym and shortly afterwords purchased my domain name and set up a proper Wordpress installation. Everything was fine at first, but I found I slowly became more cautious in my writing. I’m not talking about the nastiness that usually begins to accompany anonymity (per this theory), but rather that I took less risks with my writing.

I began writing far more structured pieces, less personal and more review or tutorial oriented. Those pieces also attracted the most attention from other people, which encouraged me to write more posts in that vein. Because I am a geek, a lot of that writing was focused around tech topics, although I continued to review books and movies. I actively resisted the Ministry of Intrigue being classified as another “tech” site, although I was advised by several people online that the lack of focus made it difficult to get traffic. I also couldn’t control how other people described the site, and because I loved geeking out on technology, the “tech” label stuck.

Eventually I accepted it and while I occasionally covered other topics, I started thinking of the site as a place devoted to tech and even began describing it that way. At first this was just fine, because I love talking about technology and I’m into this stuff. However, over time I found that I was writing less and less, as I struggled with writing posts that did more than contribute to the echo-sphere.

A change was needed, and conveniently I had just discovered Django, so I rewrote my site using it. In part this was an exercise to learn the framework, partly to build a CMS tailored to my needs, and in part to procrastinate on writing content. Once the site was built, it allowed me to do link-blogging, which was a great way for me to do quick commentary on stories that came to my attention, without requiring the effort of writing a longer post. Writing longer posts requires a particular level interest on my part, and when possible I try to skip doing so for stories that have already been talked to death around the web.

Here’s the deal though: I never wanted to be a “tech blogger.”

I wrote myself into an unwanted pigeonhole, and I’ve been stuck in it for quite a while. Everybody knows that the only way out of any type of hole is to crawl out of it, and it’s high time that I do that. So, I’m going to start shifting the focus of this site, back to the more general category of “assorted geekery.” I’m sure there will still be plenty of tech stuff, because I’m interested in it, but I’m going to start writing more often on other topics as well, and hopefully get back to doing more pieces that flex the right side of my brain.

In addition to writing, I’m going to start doing some more mixed media stuff, in particular video, although I haven’t ruled audio out yet either. At some point I’ll redesign the site to highlight these new types of content, but for now I’ll just embed them inside of standard entries. I’m still primarily a writer, and unfamiliar with working in these other mediums, so expect plenty of false starts and sloppy beginnings, but over time I hope to improve. The first of these videos, being my awkward introduction to the format, in which I ironically spend a lot of time talking about my site in terms of covering tech, is embedded below.

I don’t know if this new direction is going to go anywhere, but hopefully by allowing myself to experiment and write more freely it will help the site to become more pure.

I hope you will join me on the journey.

I just have to share this hilarious video that I found via Techcrunch. It’s a song, written and performed by Kina Grannis about a certain social news site that I have a love/hate relationship with (although that’s a subject for another post). It’s titled, “Gotta Digg,” and it’s actually really great.

In other news, I’m heading to Iowa over the holidays to see family and friends so I probably won’t be posting/bookmarking nearly as much. Have a wonderful holiday!

Hopefully not too many people tried to stop by the site today, because I had a pretty severe outage due to my own foolishness. I’ve been trying to implement a few new features to the site, and in one particularly bad move I managed to wipe an important file that isn’t stored in my SCM because it is server dependent. I keep it separate to help simplify testing between different servers and in the general hope that one day I’ll be able to abstract away the code for this site so that it can be packaged up and deployed easily to other people’s servers. Anyway, I had wiped the file and replaced it with a shoddily written copy, and when that failed to work I panicked and wiped everything to redeploy my entire installation.

Not my finest moment, not by a long shot.

Anyway, there are a few new features now, only one of which is actually visible to the user, because when you are coding for yourself, you should always put yourself first in line for awesomeness. I made some improvements to the composing process, and did some caching and database backend work. For the user, I’ve made the link roll omnipresent on the site, because links = love and expanded the purpose of the front page a bit. Previously, I would display a heavily truncated edition of my most recent blog post, and my most recent link. On the new front page, you will have more of a short tumblelog of recent activity. Under the advice of my good friend DHP, I’ve made sure that the most recent blog post remains sticky at the top, with the recent activity in all categories down below.

Honestly, I’m still conflicted on this new look, as I’m also tempted to just display the latest item in each category (blog, links and photos), but that seems not much better than I was doing before. I’d love to get your feedback regarding whether you feel the front page is an improvement, or whether you would prefer a tighter summary of each category and quick access to the footer.

I’m amassing quite a todo list for the site, and for my own benefit as well of those of you who are strangely curious, I will share. Here it is in no particular order:

• Finalize front page design (of course)
• Fine tune the caching so that it stays responsive and unobtrusive.
• Develop style sheet for mobile browsers
• Refine default style sheet to improve readability
• Add additional media types for some new projects 
• Finish XML-RPC interface
• Improve internal search application
• Improve Akismet integration (I report spam/ham, but via the command line. Need to add it to admin page)
• Connect OpenID logins to Django auth system to take advantage of native features

That should keep me busy for a little while, I expect. I’ve also got a number of other posts that have been sitting in the queue as drafts including a few reviews I’ve been procrastinating on, so I’ll be finishing those too. Yay, for new content!

Hopefully, I’ll get all of this done soon, but in the meantime you can stalk me via the interwub. Please consider leaving me some feedback either by posting a comment or by emailing me at daniel at andrlik dot org.

<clears throat>

This is actually just a short post to warn you that there will be a pretty major overhaul to the site in the near future. The majority of this will consist of a redesign to improve readability, as well as making the site play nicer with mobile browsers, specifically Opera Mobile and WebKit. I may add a few new features as well, such as a few different media types. Right now the site has clear demarcations for browsing the different types of media, although I am considering also enabling a more tumblelog-like experience. Right now, you can get the tumblelog interface in the primary feed for this site, but I’m going to present a way of getting that experience on the site itself.

I also have a few other surprises in the works that I’m not ready to talk about yet, but they should be pretty cool.

Stay tuned.