Over the last few months I’ve been receiving emails from Hub Pages, urging me to “refresh” my Hubs. In my usual way of dealing with emails, it was delete button - CLICK! Until this weekend. I was bored, so I tootled off to Hub Pages to see what was going on. Quite a lot has changed, I’m glad to say, over the last three years. The site seems to be pretty polished now.

Anyway, I cleaned up the Hubs I’d created three years ago, and added one for Blat - The Blat Hub page

A few of you might be interested in creating a Hub page for your blog? If you are, give it a spin. It might result in more readers.

There are a few reasons why I have deactivated these blogs: -

1. If you don’t have the imagination to write your own content, then you probably shouldn’t be blogging.
2. It is unfair to other bloggers on Blat, who do take the time to compose their own content.
3. It is commonly known that Ezine Articles are used by those looking to manipulate search engine results. One of the rules of using Blat, is that Blat will not be used for search engine optimisation strategies.
4. Search engines, in general, take a rather dim view of links to Ezine Articles. I’ve worked hard to keep junk, that search engines don’t like, off Blat, and I’m not going to let anyone spoil that.

If your blog has been deactivated, and you’d like to have it reactivated, as long as you undertake to remove the Ezine Article rubbish, I will reactivate your blog.

To everyone else: please do not post articles from Ezine Articles, otherwise your blog will suffer the same fate.

Technorati recently went through a bit of a bad patch. I think that most of us assumed that it was dying - Flooded with spammer type junk and useless rubbish from idiots who like to abuse any free service they can get their greedy claws on, just so that they can con someone into buying worthless junk. Anyway, Technorati didn’t die. It has undergone some changes which will hopefully restore its status as a useful blogging tool.

If you already had your blogs hooked into Technorati, you might find that, since the changes, Technorati is no longer indexing them. If this is the case with your Technorati account, just delete your blogs on Technorati, and reclaim them.

If you weren’t using Technorati, I strongly suggest that you do, especially if you want people to read your blog! Create an account for yourself at Technorati, and then go through the claim process to add each of your blogs.

Over the last few days I’ve been keeping an eye on Amatomu. It seems as if they may finally have got their server problems sorted out… I hope! So, today, I hooked Blat back into Amatomu. Hold thumbs!

PLEASE DO NOT APPROVE SPAM COMMENTS POSTED ON YOUR BLOG!

If you don’t know what comment spam is, please read this: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs

If you can’t make any sense of the Wikipedia information, comment spam is easy to identify. Most often is contains comments and links that have absolutely no relevance to the post you have made. Most often the comments contain links to sites selling fake Rolex watches, home loans, wedding paraphernalia, breast augmentation, damn stupid games, porn sites, etc., etc., etc. 99% of the time, comments that contain only something like “Nice site! Thanks!!!” is comment spam! Do not approve it!

As part of the comment spam removal exercise, I deleted ALL comments where the comment author’s email address was @hotmail.com. So, if you are missing some valid comments, sorry, but at least you know where they went.

In the past the Blat sitemap functionality has treated all blogs as being equal. Of course this is unfair to those who blog regularly. So, in an effort to get people to update their blogs regularly, I have changed the way that the sitemap functionality works. From now on, only the last 60 newly updated blogs will be offered to search engine bots for indexing. This means, if getting your blog indexed by Google, Bing, etc., etc., is important to you, you’d better blog on a regular basis!

If you want to see the content of the Blat sitemap, you can read the XML by clicking this link: - http://blat.co.za/sitemap.php

Over the last few months Blat has been experiencing problems, with the server losings its connection to the database more and more regularly. I’ve made a few halfhearted attempts to sort out the problems, but they became more persistent rather than going away. Last week on Thursday I rolled up my sleeves determined to get to the bottom of the problem. Those of you who regularly blog on Blat will no doubt have noticed that finally the problems seem to be fixed!

I spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and a big chunk of Sunday monitoring processes, error logs and access logs to get to the bottom of the problems. Basically it all boiled down to a number of little things that added up to one big problem. I have spent hours fixing literally hundreds of errors in the PHP code of various themes and plug-ins. These errors were causing excessive error logging, causing the error log to grow as large as 1.3Gb in a single day! I have disabled plug-ins on many blogs where people, obviously not fully understanding the functions that many of the plug-ins provide, had enabled them. I have removed much of the third party code, providing various widget functionality, that people have put into text widgets in their blog sidebars. Many of these third party widgets do not work correctly, and were contributing much of the excessive error logging.

I have also waded through various blog posts - Obviously there are a number of “bloggers” on Blat that type up their posts in MS Word (Or some equally brain-dead Microsoft rubbish word-processor), and then copy and paste it into their blog. Mainly due to the fact that Microsoft rubbish is developed for people who have no idea what they are doing, copying and pasting from MS Word usually means that all sorts of useless garbage gets pasted along with the text. Rubbish like CSS styling information, attempting to make the pasted text look the same as it did in the word-processor. Well, I waded through hundreds of blog posts and removed all of the garbage. Tip: - Do not copy from MS Word and paste it into your blog! It usually ends up in a blog post that look a lot like dog poo!

I also spent many hours monitoring Apache (The web server that Blat uses). When Blat was falling over, WordPress was reporting a database error. The reported database error was rather misleading because the database was actually working just fine. The problem was being caused by Apache spawning a huge number of client threads - So many that the server would run out of memory, causing everything to grind to a halt. I have made some pretty extensive changes to the Apache configuration, which will hopefully now cause Apache to behave more appropriately. I have also made changes to the MySQL (The database used by Blat to hold WordPress data) configuration, which I hope will make it more efficient. Along with the configuration changes, I have also stopped various processes on the server; processes that were unnecessary and that were only consuming various resources.

After all that, the Blat server now seems to be stable

Today I wrote a bit of PHP code to go through the database, looking for blogs that have been registered on Blat but never used. I also got the code to look for blogs that hadn’t been updated (i.e. Had nothing posted to them) for four months or more. The PHP code sent an email to the owners of all of these blogs (Almost 1000 in total), asking them to either USE their blog or delete it. Quite a few of the emails bounced with address unknown errors. ALL of the emails that bounced have had their associated blogs deleted. So if your blog has gone missing, you now know where it went!

6 a.m. This morning and the database was dead again! Damn!

It has taken me three hours this morning to get control of the Blat server and reboot it. When the database goes stupid, the server runs out of memory and starts shuffling data in and out of virtual memory - Virtual memory is disk based memory, which makes it incredibly slow, which, in turn, makes the server unresponsive - Hence the three hours.

I’ll be working on the server today, doing my best to get to the bottom of this problem.

I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to work out what was going on. At one stage I thought it might be the Yandex crawler overloading the server as it tried to index all the blogs on the site. I blocked the Yandex bot using robots.txt, but the database problem persisted.

Anyway, today I noticed huge MySQL binary log files. I’ve never bothered to look at the binary log files because I was convinced that I’d turned MySQL binary logging off. But if binary logging was off, why was the latest log date/time stamped with today’s date? So I dug into my.cnf to see what was going on. Hmmmmm… Two bin-log lines in my.cnf! One was commented out, but the other wasn’t. Which means that binary logging has actually been enabled, even when I thought it was disabled. So I have purged all of the MySQL binary log files and I have made 100% sure that binary logging is disabled.

In a nutshell, I hope the database problem now goes away now… For good!

Over the last few hours I’ve been monitoring memory usage on the Blat server, and it’s been hovering around 43% which is pretty low. I’d expect to see it at around 60% to 65%, but the lower, the better

I’ll continue to monitor the situation over the next few days. Let’s all hold thumbs that the database problem is now a thing of the past!

myScoop still looks a bit rough, and it probably still needs some work, but hey, it’ll never work if bloggers don’t support it.