The Spudart blog is moving to another platform! For the past month I’ve been spending most of my time converting my blog from a very old platform, pmachine over to a more robust one, drupal.
Excuse me while there is a temporary lack of posts. It’s become quite urgent that I convert my blog over.
If you’d like to know more of the story, here’s what happened:
Spam attacks
There was a spam complaint that my site was sending spam. Except I wasn’t. Someone else was pretending to be my server and sent spam out. My server almost removed all my accounts due to this complaint. (I had a 72 hour notice).
Server upgrade
I told my hosting company this spam was certainly not from me. They took a look at my server backend and found that I had old versions of CentOS and Plesk. They upgraded those two to limit the spam attacks.
Commenting on spudart.org disabled
However, the server upgraded disabled the comments on my blog. Anytime someone tried to leave a comment, an error page would pop up.
Move to a new blogging software
To get commenting back I needed to move my site to another blogging platform. My current blogging platform is pMachine. The company that made and supported pMachine abandoned it in 2004. Therefore it’s really out of date. Drupal is very flexible and will allow me to do lots of great things I wasn’t able to do before.
Upgrading to PHP 5.3
In order to use Drupal, I need PHP 5.3. I was on 5.2. I figured that’s not that big of a jump and shouldn’t break anything. Ooops. PHP 5.3 now declares some of the pMachine functions depreciated, specficially eregi(). So that means everytime someone looks at one of my webpages with that function, it adds a line to the error log. My site gets a bunch of traffic, so that means these error logs grow and grow.
Site going down due to large error logs
All the sites on my server including spudart.org and unlikelymoose.com would go down, because the error logs would get so big that it maxes out my 33 GB of space. Normally I use about 14 GB. So these error logs are getting up to over 19 GB in size! I’m already busy trying to figure out how to make the data get mapped over to Drupal, so I don’t want to slow myself down with trying to figure out how to replace that old functions with the newer preg_match(). (it’s not a straight swap, preg_match() uses slightly different values).
Regular blog posts coming soon
The new spudart.org will be up very soon. I’m getting quite close to figuring it all out. And then when the new site is up, I’ll be back to making regular blog posts. Thank you for your patience.