George W Bush famously landed on an aircraft carrier to announce the end of “Major Combat Operations” (This turned out to be a euphemism for “the quick part”) in Iraq. Quite conspicuously over his shoulder could be seen a giant banner saying “Mission Accomplished”. We understand this phrase better today than we did then.
Club Troppo is currently in a similar state. Major host shifting operations are complete: the site code and site database have been moved to a shiny new Virtual Private Server. Some of you have probably noticed that the loading time has improved a lot, partly because we have a server to ourselves, partly because moving allowed me to put the whole thing up on the blocks and perform optimisations which weren’t possible with shared hosting.
However the move is not quite complete: there’s still the pesky problem of busted character sets. I’ve been looking into it more today and unfortunately at this stage it looks like the best option is to sit on our backsides. The Wordpress bug database has an entry discussing the fact that Wordpress currently isn’t UTF-8 friendly from end to end. While Wordpress tells browsers it is sending UTF-8 text, and while MySQL has been told to deal exclusively in UTF-8 text, Wordpress itself talks to MySQL using the latin1 encoding. Which buggers everything up good and proper.
Not all is lost: the bug ticket I linked to above shows that there is discussion about fixing this in the next release or two of Wordpress, and the possibility that a conversion script will become available to drag all our old database entries kicking and screaming into the UTF-8 light.
Also-Rans
There are some outstanding issues I should note:
The subscriber list for Missing Link has yet to be migrated to the new mailing list server. I’m chasing Dreamhost for that information. In a related matter, I believe the subscription boxes which appear on Missing Link entries are broken too. There’s also more optimisations to I haven’t tried.
Remember, if you’re having any trouble with the site, tell me: jacques@chester.id.au, or you can use our contact form.
Edit: Another great optimisation was to turn off my housemate’s torrent client. He will earn an A-class evil glare when he gets home.
Oh go on, you should have left it on; it wasn’t affecting my Club Troppo speed :- )
Bah! And similarly humbug! I pay for the internet here. Not sharing the cost means I set the terms. My terms are that the internet must always be snappy. Torrents != snappiness in my experience, which is why he’s meant to throttle them.
Anyhow.
In truth though, I’m just looking forward to getting back to being a plain contributer, rather than obsessing about load times, or having use tail, less, qshape; without having to look at another Apache .conf, Postfix .mf, plugin manifest, PHP code, JavaScript include or CSS file.