So, my wife told me that my site design was boring.  Yeah, she was right.  I am no designer.  I just don't have that gene.  But, during my work on Wordcraft, I came across some cool places to find designs that are relased under Open Source licenses.

• Open Designs - This is arguably the the prettiest of the three. The search, however, is painfully slow because all results return on one page.  I guess if you can wait, this is a plus as browsing is easier.  Also, you can pick multiple colors and choose by license.  They only list XHTML templates (at least as search options).  That could be a turn off if you like HTML 4 like me.
• Open Web Design - The site itself could use a design overhaul.  But, the content is good.  The search lets you choose primary and secondary color, a unique feature among these sites.  Thumbnails are a bit small though.
• Open Source Web Design - Their search is not as powerful as the others, but it does return very fast.  The thumbnails are a nice size.

You will find the same content on all three sometimes.  But, it comes down to browsing and searching.

I found my new design at one of those.  Not sure which, I looked at a lot of them.  I did not use the template's HTML exactly as I like HTML 4.0 and wanted a different sidebar than the original author.  But, the design is the hard part.  So, thanks for Deep Red.

Well, I blogged about Wordcraft the other day.  I have just been running live on the software for 4 days now.  Well, that post had no URI associated with it.  It took me two days to figure this out.  Oops.  Welcome to eating my own dog food.  So, running this live with actual users (and a host of bot spam attempts) I am learning a lot and making a lot of commits.  So, I may very well roll once or twice a week for the first few weeks.

So, with that, I have packaged 0.5.  There are 15 changes in this package.  Some features, but mostly bug fixes.  So, if you could use a simple blog, give it a try and help me debug it.  If you do, please use the Google Code issue tracker.  Maybe I can figure out how to have those things emailed to me.

So, a while back, not sure when, I was listening to the P3 Podcast and Paul mentioned his dislike for Wordpress.  He said he wished there was a simple blogging application.  I am probably misquoting him horribly.  It was an idea that I had been tinkering with.  So, I started on Wordcraft in my spare time.  Like super spare time.  That time between the kids going to bed and me falling  asleep.  So, it took a while to get it to a usable state.

Up until now, I have used Wordpress.com for my blogging.  It works quite well.  You can get started quite quickly and it does what most people need.  My wife uses Blogger for our family blog.  It is, IMO, not as nice as Wordpress.com in some ways.  But, it does allow you to edit your styles (for free) and such which is nice.

So, why would I want to reinvent the wheel?  I am a control freak and rarely run other people's code.  I know, it is a character flaw.  I am working on it.  So, what did I come up with?

I had some goals when I started on this.

1. Keep it simple.
2. Focus on what I am good at doing.

Keeping it simple

I use MySQL.  I didn't try to make it work with every possible database.  In fact, it only uses the mysqli PHP extenstion.  The few objects (CAPTCHA) are all PHP 5 objects.  I don't plan to worry about PHP 4.  The templates don't use a template language.  They use plain old PHP.  The are scoped to protect template authors from global scope.  There are only 6 files required to make a new template.  There are just 589 lines of code in the forward facing scripts.  The admin has 2,446.

What am I good at doing?

I write PHP/MySQL code that has to work fast for a living.  It is what I get paid to do.  I am not a designer.  I am not a spam catching wizard.  I don't write cool javascript widgets.  So, I focused on the PHP/MySQL parts of the code.  For templates, I used designs that are released under the Creative Commons license.  I use Akismet and the CAPTCHA libraries from Phorum for spam catching.  I used the YUI Rich Editor for the admin where I needed a WYSIWYG widget.  I even link to the YUI sources that are hosted by Yahoo.  No sense taking on that bandwidth or storage.

So, what does it do you ask?  Well, here are some of the features:

• WYSIWYG editing via YUI.
• Comments with optional CAPTCHA and/or Akismet.
• Custom pages can be created.
• Tagging of posts
• Custom publish dates
• Automatic Pingback support
• Friendly URL support with mod_rewrite
• 5 Templates in first release.  Easy to build more.
• Email notifications to authors

There are some things missing of course.  Internationalization of both the admin and templates is a big one.  There is no current search engine for blog posts.  There is no "blog roll" type of feature.  There is no date based archive.  And I am sure there is more missing.  And I am sure there are bugs.

But, if you would like to try out yet another PHP application, I welcome you to give it a try.  The code is hosted at Google Code.  It is a BSD licensed application.

Just got home finally from PHP Appalachia.  I enjoyed meeting all the great people.

I presented about what I learned and how we deal with importing large amounts of CSV data into MySQL.  I threw my idea onto the wiki at the last minute, made the slides while everyone ate breakfast and I had planned on researching it all (been a few years since I wrote it), but we had no reliable internet.  Some claims I made and their corrections.

1. I said our largest file is about 1.8 million lines.  WRONG.  Actually it is about 4.6 million.  I was correct however that it does finish importing and indexing in about 5 minutes.


2. I claimed I LOAD DATA INFILE to MyISAM first and then "insert into ... select from" into an InnoDB table for speed reasons.  WRONG.  In fact, I do that because I need to merge fields from the file sometimes into one field in the databaes.  I could not find a way to do that with LOAD DATA INFILE.  As to speed.  I can't say either way as I have no solid data.  Sounds like a good test.  MyISAM probably still wins on a LOAD DATA INFILE into a blank, fresh table based on my experience.


3. Total rows currently indexed is 7.2 million.  I did not make a claim, but I thought I would just mention that.  I wanted to include that, but did not have Internet.  (Damn you Hughes)

I spoke at the MySQL Conference and Expo this year about the architecture we have here at dealnews.com.  After my talk, Jimmy Guerrero of Sun/MySQL invited me to give a webinar on how dealnews uses memcached.  That is taking place next week, Thursday, October 09, 2008.  It is a free webinar.  We have used memcached in a variety of ways as we have grown. So, I will be talking about how dealnews used memcached in the past and present.

For more information, visit the MySQL web site.

Man, what did I do before strtotime().  Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps.  And I still could not do really cool stuff.  Like tonight I needed to figure out when Thanksgiving was in the US.  I knew it was the 4th Thursday in November.  So, I started with some math stuff and checking what day of the week Nov. 1 would fall on.  All that was making my head hurt.  So, I just tried this for fun.

strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")

That gives me Thanksgiving.  Awesome.  It is cool for other stuff too.  At its very basic, it can take a MySQL datetime field and turn it into a timestamp.  Very handy for date calculations.  It also understands RFC 2822 and ISO 8601 date formats.  These are common in HTTP headers and some XML documents like RSS and Atom feeds.  Also, PHP can output those two standard formats with the date() function.  So, this makes them a good standards compliant way to pass full, timezone specific dates around.

So, Google Chrome is out. If you don't know, it's Google's new browser. I downloaded it on my Windows XP machine and tried it out. I found this curious thing in the options.



So, I thought, I will click "Learn more" to see what they are watching. I get this.



So, I unchecked the box. Let's hope the premature launch is the reason there is no more information out there.

UPDATE: The page comes up now and says:

Information that's sent to Google includes crash reports and statistics on how often you use Google Chrome features. When you choose to accept a suggested query or URL in the address bar, the text you typed and the corresponding suggestion is sent to Google. Google Chrome doesn't send other personal information, such as name, email address, or Google Account information.

So, if you use their suggestions, they know it.  And it tracks what features you use.  Hmm, I think I will disable.

Patrick Galbraith wrote in his blog about switching to innodb_file_per_table.  For those that don't know about this setting, it places the data for the tables into .ibd files within the database dir instead of storing it in the ibdata files in the main datadir.  This is useful if you don't want to babysit your innodb tablespace.  At least, that was my main reason for wanting to use it.  There is still dictionary data stored in the ibdata file(s) so you can't just remove them.

Anyhow, the delima Patrick wrote about is recovering the space used by the ibdata files in the datadir after you have converted the tables to one file per table.  I commented on his blog, but thought it worth a full post to be sure others could find my solution.

1. Backup your data (cuz, you never know)


2. Convert all tables to MyISAM


3. Stop MySQL.


4. Delete ib* in the datadir


5. Restart MySQL.  MySQL will recreate the files.


6. Convert all tables to InnoDB

It worked for me.  Your mileage may vary.  No warranty that you won't lose all your data.  Try it on a dev server first.

The benefits of this were that the data was online while we converted the tables.  The only downtime was while we shut down MySQL, removed the files and waited on MySQL to recreate a small 10MB ibdata file and the ib_logfiles.  I am not 100% sure you have to remove the ib_logfiles, but I did for good measure.  I just run with a single 10MB autoextend ibdata file.  I think it is at 34MB or so on our main database server now.

We are hiring!  dealnews is looking for a full time systems administrator.  The developers have been sharing the sys admin load for over 10 years now.  But, we really need a dedicated person now.  If you are interested, see our jobs page.

So, I wrote about the begining of our wild database issues. Since then, I have been fighting a cold, coaching little league football and trying to help out in getting our backup solutions working in top shape.  That does not leave much time for blogging.

Never again will we have ONLY a cold backup of anything.  We were moving nightly full database dumps and hourly backups of critical tables over to that box all day long.  Well, when the filesystem fails on both the primary database server and your cold backup server, you question everything.  A day after my marathon drive to fix the backup server and get it up and running, the backup mysql server died again with RAID errors.  I guess that was the problem all along.  In the end, we had to have a whole new RAID subsystem in our backup database server.  So, my coworker headed over to the data center to pull the all nighter to get the original, main database server up and running.  The filesystem was completely shot.  ReiserFS failed us miserably.  It is no longer to be used at dealnews.

Well, today at 6:12PM, the main database server stops responding again.  ARGH!!  Input/Ouput errors.  That means RAID based on last weeks experience.  We reboot it.  It reports memory or battery errors on the RAID card.  So, I call Dell.  Our warranty on these servers includes 4 hour, onsite service.  They are important.  While on the phone with Dell, I run the Dell diagnostic tool on the box.  During the diagnostic test, the box shuts down.  Luckily, the Dell service tech had heard enough.  He orders a whole new RAID subsystem for this one as well.

There is one cool thing about the PERC4 (aka, LSI Megaraid) RAID cards in these boxes.  They write the RAID configuration to the drives as well as on the card.  So, when a new blank RAID card is installed, it finds the RAID config on the drives and boots the box up.  Neato.  I am sure all the latest cards do it.  It was just nice to see it work.

So, box came up, but this time we had Innodb corruption.  XFS did a fine job in keeping the filesystem in tact.  So, we had to go from backups.  But, this time we had a live replicated database that we could just dump and restore.  We should have had it all along, but in the past (i.e. before widespread Innodb) we were gun shy about replication.  We had large MyISAM tables that would constantly get corrupted on the master or slave and would halt replication on a weekly basis.  It was just not worth the hassle.  But, we have used it for over a year now in our front end database servers with an all Innodb data set.  As of now, only two tables in our main database are not Innodb.  And I am trying to drop the need for a Full-Text index on those right now.

So, here is to hoping our database problems are behind us.  We have replaced almost everything in one except the chassis.  The other has had all internal parts but a motherboard.  Kudos to Dell's service.  The tech was done with the repair in under 4 hours.  Glad to have that service.  I recommend it to anyone that needs it.