Schrade.Blog

For the last year or so, this blog has been running slow, slow, slow.

From time to time, I tried to figure out what was going on, but I figured that Typo upgrades were just causing things to slow down and use more and more memory.

Until tonight.

Tonight I did a database dump and it came to 44 MB.

There is no way I have 44 MB of content in this blog.

So I had a look at the dump and realized that I had close to 100000 sessions in the sessions table, and that there was a table for Sitealizer plugin that's no longer part of typo.

So after a drop of the Sitealizer table and a

rake db:sessions:clear

Typo is now using 20% of the memory it was using before, running much, much faster, and the database dump comes to a slim 476 KB in size.

So this is my reminder to myself (and everyone else) to be sure to clear out your sessions table from time to time.

Last Thursday I published a couple of blog entries and the next thing I knew my FeedBurner stats looked like this:

So I figured I'd ask the lazyweb. Anyone ever seen anything like this before? Is FeedBlitz just spamming my RSS feed?

I've been on vacation down in LA for the last week.

A couple of days ago, my friend James pointed to the horizon and said something along of lines of, "look at all of the smoke from the fires up North."

Well, I had no idea how bad things were until today, when I was driving back up I-5 and literally 10 minutes didn't go by where I didn't see a caravan of 5-10 firetrucks heading South. This was over the course of a 5 hour drive, so I figure that I saw about 200 firetrucks.

We also drove just East of the fires under two lines of helicopters, one that was flying in and dropping water on the blaze, and another that was returning to load up their water tanks again. The suburbs that we could see from the highway all had police cars stationed in front of them to keep people from trying to return to their homes.

It was more than a bit surreal.

Hopefully they get the fires out soon and everyone down there is safely evacuated.

Scary, scary stuff.

I think that I actually had one of the first batch of Twitt(e)r accounts months and months ago, but I've never really used it. It looks like Twitterrific might change that, at least for a few days, or until I get bored with it again.

Check me out at http://twitter.com/kurt.

I see that several more blog search engines have launched over the last few days, so I just did a quick survey of people at the coffee shop and over IM asking, "have you ever used a blog search engine to search for something?"

The answer I got from every single person? "No."

I'm not exactly in a little coffee house in the middle of nowhere either. This place should be filled with people right at the core of who should be using blog search engines.

I think that the real problem is that no one ever says "I really want to search for something, but I only want results about it from blogs." It's just not a compelling vertical.

Been working hard trying to get an alpha release of Squishr out the door this week. Back to blogging soon, assuming all goes well.

I've been using Measure Map for a few weeks and Google Analytics for a few months and I'm somewhat confused by the visitor numbers I'm seeing. Looking at the first half of January, Measure Map is reporting that I've gotten about 20% less visitors than Google Analytics. Now one of those numbers has to be wrong, but which one?

Well, I also have a BlogBeat account, and the data there is very similar (within 1%) to the Measure Map results. Thus, it looks like Google Analytics has some sort of problem where it is skewing the number of visitors up by about 20% on my blog.

Now I'm not asking for super precision from these services, but is anyone else experiencing this? I would like some confirmation that others are seeing something similar before I try to figure out what's happening. (and before Google slaps the Measure Map front end on the Analytics back end and all of my stats get inflated by 20%)

Or perhaps "Complain, and Ye Shall Receive." After my post complaining about Google Analytics earlier this week, I got a Measure Map invitation in my Inbox. Thank you to Jeffrey Veen for that one. (And thanks to Measure Map for having an install tutorial for Typo.)

I've also decided to install Blogbeat, as suggested by Jeff from Blogbeat in the comments. I'm going to give those two services a week or so to gather some statistics, and then I'll write up a more detailed comparison of all three.

It ought to be interesting to see what these services are doing to differentiate from one another. If anyone knows of any other blog analytics services that I should include in this shootout, let me know.

Let me start off this post by saying that I love Google Analytics. I use it pretty much every day to monitor the traffic to this site and to several others. In concept, it's a great application.

Now if they could only just get the damn thing to work.

I'm not sure what they were expecting three months ago when they launched, but they must have been off by an order of magnitude or so with their estimates about the number of signups. That's the only way that I can explain taking 3 months just to get back to the point of letting people sign up again.

Did they do any load testing at all on this thing? I still find it to be a regular occurrence where the initial summary page just sits there, refusing to show me my data. Even after multiple refreshes I still end up with nothing. The solution? Come back in a few hours.

Now I know that this is a free service and I should be happy with what I got, but just because something is free doesn't mean that you shouldn't finish it and get it tested before you send it out the door. If you own the world's most powerful computer, I feel like you really shouldn't be having simple application load problems.

Oh well, I guess I'll just keep using it when it works and continue waiting patiently for a Measure Map invitation...

I've pulled the my tag cloud off of the sidebar of the blog, as I'm not finding it to be a very good way to visualize data about what I'm writing about. As you can see:

the web2.0 tag is so big in this cloud that everything else gets swallowed up. I still think that tags are a good way to classify information, but the whole cloud growth idea seems to be flawed once one topic gets too much traction. Perhaps we could have a cloud where all of the words are the same size, but they have different intensities. Or maybe I just need to write less about web2.0. :)