Cubs 63-60, 0/3
Cardinals 59-62, 3/6
POTG: RF Daryle Wad (HR, 2B, H, R, RBI)
Runner Up: 1B D Lee (2 H, HR, BB), SS Ryan Theriot (2 H, 2B, R)
My eyes have seen the glory! The finish line is just a Save button away. I can tell you for sure, this will be the last one I do tonight, because I think the Giants game will finish tomorrow.
I really hate getting behind on these. This time, it really got to be a mess because I was already behind, and then things broke loose. I don’t know if I’ve ever posted an explanation of last weekend’s down time, and I don’t know if it’s really that interesting, but neither was this game.
My version of the story is MY movable type software was breaking everyone on this server’s site. I found this semi-insane, because I don’t think my blogs get that much traffic. As best as I can figure, the actual problem isn’t people visiting the site or leaving the comments, it’s a massive amount of spam bots trying to post comments. The spam filtering software is good enough that very few actually seem to get thru – though there’s been some earlier this week, if you were looking – but the spam filter also sucks up some CPU each time runs. And it was running a heck of a lot, and so nothing else on the server was.
As a result, they – my hosting company – wanted to move this site to a higher priced plan, where it’d be less likely to take other sites down with them. I had talked to them about combining the server space for this site with the server space for the luchawiki – which had earlier ran into the same exact CPU usage problems, but wasn’t come close to hitting it’s bandwidth or space limits – and they said they could do it. But at the same time, they shut down my movable type, so it’d stop killing the servers.
So I waited for them to move, and waited, and got some mostly plain HTML updates on the CMLL Blog just to post the news, but really did little else with the site because I didn’t want something to be lost in the move. And I waited, and asked about the move, and got no response, so I e-mailed again, and no response. Still haven’t gotten a response, actually.
I wasn’t totally waiting and doing nothing. I did do a fair bit of research, trying to figure out the right google words which would lead me to other people who were having this problem. (There had to be other people, I’m not that unique.) I eventually found a software plugin called AutoBan, which blocks the IPs of spammers from even being able to see your site. They all get redirected to a dummy page (so dummy, there’s not actually a page at this point) and can’t even look at the blog to find the comments they’re not allowed to use. Since I had nothing else to do, and since I knew how to do it, I installed the plug in, and slowly turned MovableType back on. That’s why I had the entries back up, but no comments for a while, just to be sure there wasn’t a more basic problem. Things seemed to go okay, so I turned the comments on, and waited for disaster. It never came. The comments were never supposed to be down for as long as they were on this blog, but a check box in the new version just didn’t work, and it took me a while to figure it out.
What I’m left with right now is a site that seems to be working – I’ve upgraded to 4.0 with Autoban, and it seems to be working better than it had been on the previous version – but I have no idea if everything might get deactivated again. I still haven’t heard from my server company, and I’m not going to go out of my way to talk them, because it’d be unprecedented to get good news out of one of them. I’m not too worried about something happening to the site, because I know how to make do, but I wish I could worry less about getting and keeping everything working, and come up with more ideas of stuff to do.
I know this was a non-baseball and completely frivolous digression, but if Ted Lilly had thrown a little better, maybe I’d be talking about the game. I will say, if I was a Cardinals fan and I saw Rick Ankiel throw a perfect strike to third base, I would’ve been thrilled and in agony at the same time.