We're back on the air in less than a day which, quite frankly, is far better than I expected.
I won't bore you with the technical details. On the surface, very little has changed. But under the hood, some judicious modifications have cut blog-related disk and cpu usage by more than 70 percent. As a software geek, I am well pleased with myself.
Two things you may notice. There's been a major reduction in the number of Categories, and the archives are now compiled as monthly instead of weekly links.
The categories that remain (see the right hand column) are the ones that visitors to the site actually use. To be honest, I went crazy there for a while, trying to create a category tag for every subject or person referenced in every blog post. When the sheer volume of links reached the point that the blogging software was taking nearly two hours to update all the files on the site, I decided it was time to do some editing.
A few dozen lines of SPITBOL code, several hundred megabytes of log files, and about an hour of processing produced an extremely detailed analysis of what people view when they visit. Some categories had never been accessed- not even once. Others received hundreds of hits a week.
More surprising- people looking for stuff in the archives here were far more likely to use the Google site search facility (see the "search kgbreport.com" box at the upper right) than wander through scores of weekly archive links.
The changes cause the front page to load a bit faster and the right hand column is no longer several feet long. On my end, I no longer have to wait anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours for a new post to appear on the site.
Over the next few months I plan to slowly but systematically deal with the ancient stuff written prior to October 2002, when I switched over to real blogging software. KGB Report was actually printed and mailed to subscribers back then, and the port from print publishing format to web code was less than optimal.
I'm going to post those newsletters in a new category called "From the archives." They'll show up as new posts here. The historical perspective ahould be interesting and amusing (I hope), and posting that old stuff as current entries will get them back onto the main portion of the site in a form that's far more attractive and accessible.
Finally, I want to thank those of you who stop by regularly. We've grown from about 2,000 to 3,000 page views a day in the last year, and more than half of you spend more than two minutes looking around.
While you're perusing the site, take a look at the commentwear by KGB stuff in the right column. You can buy t-shirts, mugs, and other essentials emblazoned with pithy quotes and observations. I made over $40(!) in profit from there last year, which more than covers the insurance co-pay for the twice-annual bolt tightenings from my shrink.
Writing may not be entirely therapeutic but at least it pays for the therapy.
So. What did you accomplish this weekend?
Regards,
KGB
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