October 2nd, 2004

Today has been a good day.

After fin­ish­ing up Zeldman’s Book, I was inspired to bring my code up to the Tran­si­tional XHTML 1.0 stan­dard. The main reason was I simply wanted the site to work across plat­forms - the site looks the same in IE6, IE4, Mozilla, Camino, Safari, or Fire­fox. What I didn’t know is that the speed of my site would increase so much. Sep­a­rat­ing the struc­ture from the layout makes things a lot more light­weight, and in turn, a lot less taxing on web browsers.

The easy part was work­ing through all my old code, making sure every T was crossed and every low­er­case j dotted. The hard part is still only par­tially done - if I really want to make the entire site totally com­plaint, I will have to go through all of my old posts, and make sure all of the hyper­links are formed cor­rectly, there are alt tags on all of my images, etc. Hon­estly, this is not as much of a pri­or­ity to me right now, but it is some­thing I will even­tu­ally get around to. Con­sid­er­ing I have made over 400 posts - that’s a lot of code.

I’ve also come to the con­clu­sion that Mov­able­Type is an awful way to manage a weblog. I haven’t had to main­tain some­thing this much since I was using win­dows 98. Every month or so, I catch myself repair­ing per­mis­sions, having the DB lose info, get­ting random errors, and in turn, losing con­tent. It’s really a pain, and I’m start­ing to think I may switch over to another sim­i­lar system, such as Word­press. We’ll see what happens.

In any event, I dare you to make your site standards-​compliant.

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9 Responses to “It’s Official!”

1. Ryan says:
   October 3rd, 2004 at 10:30 am

   other than the spam prob­lem we never have data­base prob­lems with MT… it’s more than likely bad ram in the site’s server that is caus­ing the corruption….
2. erik says:
   October 3rd, 2004 at 10:53 am

   is that a sales pitch?
3. Daniel says:
   October 3rd, 2004 at 11:11 am

   Yea, spam is a huge issue. I’m actu­ally going to install a plugin for MT today that auto­mat­i­cally closes com­ments after a cer­tain # of days - that way spam is cut down big­time.

   And maybe you’re right about the RAM issue. I’ll be join­ing your team in Decem­ber, I do believe. Suprass is great and all, but I need more space.
4. Ryan says:
   October 3rd, 2004 at 8:54 pm

   no, not a sales pitch erik just a common problem…. The server that actu­ally hosts the dubsix page was having some db cor­rup­tion issues for awhile and it turned out to be bad ram, other than that the server was work­ing fine… :)
5. Daniel says:
   October 3rd, 2004 at 9:58 pm

   I’m sure that having my site hosted with hun­dreds (just guess­ing) of other users doesn’t help either. Seems like you really do get what you pay for in the long run.

   In any event, I’ll most likely stick with MT unless I can find some­thing remark­ably better. What’s the point of spend­ing dozens of hours re-​writing a site just so it will work exactly the same?
6. erik says:
   October 4th, 2004 at 9:46 am

   http://www.whois.sc/www.wtmcgee.com

   looks like the server hosts 234 sites.
7. Daniel says:
   October 4th, 2004 at 10:04 am

   Yikes.

   So, Ryan - how about a ded­i­cated server for 10 bucks a month?
8. ryan says:
   October 4th, 2004 at 11:14 am

   make it $5 and you’ve got your­self a dual xeon, actu­ally the most on any single one server I’ve got is 93 on a dual xeon/1gig ram /2 x 73gig scsi and it’s load is always below 1.0 aver­ages ~0.60
9. Daniel says:
   October 6th, 2004 at 6:48 pm

   You’ll have your­self a deal in Decem­ber.