I’m sorry for any service interruptions there have been with my site, but it appears that the disk filled up, due to exim being out of control and faithfully logging all the spam it rejected. Thats fixed now. Oh man what a week.

So I added some new categories, and had no good way to fix them. Fortunately, just yesterday a few days ago a new version of Batch Categories was released that is compatible with WordPress 2.0, allowing me to quickly fix my categories. It was looking dire there for a few minutes. Enjoy better navigation and categorization!

When I moved http://www.joeyhagedorn.com to the new server, I thought I had the site working perfectly. And the website was, but with the best of intentions, I thought “Joey, we can delay configuration of Exim until later, when I’m ready to start handling my own mail.” This was stupid. The comments come through e-mail! Anyway, Exim has been configured, comments are restored, and I apologize for the short service interruption in saneness of my website.

Google Sitemaps are an interesting new web technology. In the past, it seems as if all webmasters had to communicate with search engines was the robots.txt file. Sitemaps instead provide an XML interface to inform web crawlers to examine valid URLs with priority and modification date.

In order to get everything to play together, I’ve used a Wordpress Plugin and a Gallery2 Module to build my sitemaps then tied together with the following sitemapindex.xml file:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/sitemap-wp.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=sitemap.Sitemap</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>


The key was configuring the Wordpress Plugin to write its file at sitemap-wp.xml but ping google at the location of the sitemapindex.xml file. I also had to hack the Gallery2 module to write the correct URLs, and setup a rewrite rule such that google would see the gallery2 sitemap at the correct root… Anyway, i think it works now, hopefully some more visitors will find my site helpful.

If you’re reading this, the transition is complete.

Over the past couple of days I’ve migrated joeyhagedorn.com over to a new, fast, server. Its my own virtual private server from a company called Quantact which I have come to be a customer of by ways of a recommendation by Matt Ronge. So far I’ve been quite pleased, though I’ve got a bit of Apache tuning to do before its over, and I still need to setup automated sitemap generation and submission to Google via the Google Webmaster Tools. The transition was mostly painless, though required some cleverness to upgrade Gallery2->2.1 and the WPG2 plugin simultaneously…

I hope the site is upgraded to “bearable” speed, as I realize it wasn’t before. If you find any broken links, ugly pages, etc, please let me know. It really makes me feel better to be running secure code. In the next week or so, I expect to introduce a few new features, if I can get Gallery to play along, and finish up some long overdue posts.

So I enabled Akismet to try to curtail comment spam with very little intrusion. Please let me know on the contact page if you are having trouble getting through with a comment. There is one more option I’ve got with this stuff, but hopefully this will take care of it all.

Also tonight I a friend posted this URL on a NTWRKtruth plasma screen at Filter via text message. Their “Hacks” section on their website is totally a sham; they’re not hacks if you advertise them. Welcome to anyone who happens upon the site from said advertisement. Please leave a comment or something.

joeyhagedorn.com will be experiencing a planned outage for most of Saturday, May 13 as the server is relocated. Sorry for the inconvenience.

*UPDATE*

As of approximately 9:30 PM CDT on Saturday service was fully restored.

Thanks!

Joeyhagedorn.com was unavailable today for approximately 1:10 beginning at 3:10:43 AM and continuing until 4:19:00 AM due to an unannounced IP address change and corresponding DNS update lag.

It is unlikely any users were affected by this outage, but if some were, I’m sorry.