I have updated the theme of the site. The theme is K2, a slick theme/framework. I had been using K2 since the beginning of the site, however I was several versions behind. The theme is a pretty basic theme that is fully customizable with CSS. I am not a very creative designer, so I doubt I will ever make it look that slick. This theme has an easy option to change the header image, so I’ll probably start with that eventually. This theme is now wider. The old one was optimized for 800×600 screens, this one is now optimized for 1024×768. Since 97% of the visitors to my blog had at least 1024 or higher this should make it easier for pictures and text to be displayed. Hopefully I will figure out how to customize it more. Any input on the theme is appreciated.
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
After my previous observation of Endpoint’s memory usage, I came across a disk space issue. On both test Windows 2003 clients, I found that the space on C: was completely gone. Using some space analysis tools I found that on both servers, c:\program files\common files\Symantec shared\virusdefs contained several gigs of temp files. Some research on Symantec’s forum’s showed me that this was a common problem. I also found on this blog that this should be fixed in MR2. I have not checked my version number, but I am assuming that I don’t have MR2 installed. I haven’t yet had a chance to install and test, but have instead removed Endpoint from one of the test servers, and my own desktop where I was testing. Performance on my machine instantly improved. My machine is a brand new Dell, with dual core and 2gb of ram. If it can slow that down so drastically, I am definitly not going to drag older machine’s down with Endpoint. Hopefully MR2 improves these problems.
There is a very useful Windows command that Microsoft didn’t include in any version of windows but should have. This is the uptime command. There is a knowledge base article here. It was released back in the Windows NT days, but still works on all current versions of windows. I have found this to be an easy way to find out the uptime of the windows servers I maintain without have to log on to the box.
Ok, not really, but I do know if somebody is looking at my site. When I stopped keeping my site up to date about a year and a half ago, I let the mint stats that I was keeping break. This past February I connected the site with google analytics. This is the website stats tool that google runs that they bought from Urchin a few years ago. It is a pretty good free stats tool, which seems to integrate well with adwords (which I don’t use). Now though, I wanted a little more real time stats as well as more flexibility. So I went back to Mint which is a great stats program. It does cost $30, but it is well worth the money. I would highly recommend it to anyone who runs their own website. There are numerous plugins that can be added to enhance the functionality, or you can write your own. My installation can also be hosted on my server, which I like. That gives me more control over the settings and allows me direct access to the database if I want to run queries. I am already getting addicted to watching my stats and seeing when I have visiters. Not that I have a lot of visiters, but I do have a couple of posts that get regular traffic. Watching my stats will probably help push me to post more useful articles. Please note that I do not give out the stats information nor do I have any way of identifying who you are while visiting my site.
I’m not sure if anyone really subscribes to and reads my feed (not much new stuff to read) but I noticed today that since upgrading wordpress a week ago, my feed was broken with feedburner. I downloaded the latest version of the feedburner plugin (I didn’t know google now owned feedburner) and modified the settings and my feed is back working now. Feel free to check it more often as I am now going to be more actively putting content on the site and interacting with it more.