Why those images generate significant traffic?, I don’t know the answer but my guesses are:

• A lot of guys still have a crush with Salma Hayek even after his pregnancy, which is perfectly understandable.
• The second season of Heroes is premiering in other countries.
• I really don’t have an explanation to the picture of the girl and the solar flare.

Other post that generated some traffic is the papercraft model of Master Chief. I assume that the traffic of this post is because the popularity of the Halo series for the Xbox 360.

Photo by Jackson Boyle

Again several WEEKS passed without a new post in this blog.

Why?, well the main reason is procrastination, if we add to that the number of feeds on my google reader account, Digg, Techmeme, my day job, research for my projects and the time spent stuck on Mexico city traffic that would be a good excuse for not posting.

Everyday by the time I finished reading the most interesting stuff, I have some ideas for a good blog post. But I need to justify my paycheck so have to work in the stuff I was hired to do, so I write some ideas on Google Documents, make a mental note, a bookmark, or post something on my Tumblr. By the time I get home I work a little on my side projects, then do some research and suddenly it’s midnight and another day has passed without posting on the blog.

Even when this blog was in coma at the last page rank update it got a small increase, and the traffic is still coming (low but constant). So, it’s time to clean up the spiderwebs, dust off a little, and wash the windows to continue with this blog.

Today I couldn’t log on the admin section, searching a little I found that in the months this blog was without an update Dreamhost did 2 upgrades to Rails and that broke the backend. The blog was still serving pages because Mephisto creates a cache of every page requested as a static html file and if there is no change it stays in the server.

After freezing the Rails to a previous version (which I should have done long ago), everything was working again and I was able to log in again.

Since this blog is powered by Mephisto the solution had to be written in ruby and one of the benefits or the Ruby language is that is really easy to implement solutions to most of the things you want or need and if you add to that the community of Rails developers you get the equivalent of the support that WordPress has, in the sense that almost everything you need in a blog is already done or is being developed by someone who has the same need as you.

Doing a search in the ubiquitous search engine I found the solution to my problem in webtypes, this plugin for Mephisto does exactly what I want and it looks like its easy to implement/add to a blog.

The obvious drawback is that I will have to write each post twice, but I rather this than doing an automated translation with a web service.

As soon as I install this I will post a mini-howto to.


6:47PM PST March 28th 2007
We just had a drop in out network for about half our servers.. if you can't access your site or email now, please hold on.. we are looking into it and will update this page as soon as we have more details..

Scratch that.. it turned out to be a failure in one of our 10 gigabit network interfaces. We’ve swapped it out for a spare one and thing seem to be working now.. there may be some residual problems where some servers need to be rebooted, however the root cause of the problem is fixed. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any downtime.
Our apologies again..


Resolvieron el problema 35 minutos después, lo cual no es mucho tiempo de downtime pero aun asi fue desconcertante el querer entrar a la parte de administración del blog y que marcara timeout, y al intentar entrar via ssh indicara que la conexion habia sido rechazada, fue cuando recorde el sitio Dreamhost status y ahi estaba la notificacion que despues fueron actualizando.

Hay algunos detalles que quiero arreglar, pero son menores.

Esto lo puedes aprovechar para crear posts con esas palabras y asi incrementar el trafico a tu blog, obviamente que si quieres ser congruente pues el contenido que generes debe ser interesante para tus lectores, de lo contrario estarias convirtiendo tu blog en un splog que puede resultar contraproducente.

Si aun no has leido el libro “The Long Tail“, tal vez ya sea hora de que lo compres para entender mejor las posibilidades de tu blog y la tendencia actual en Internet

Por el momento HitTail esta en beta (que servicio o sitio actual no lo esta?) y es gratuito, si tienes varios sitios o blogs puedes dar de alta tantas cuentas como quieras.

Resulto que el problema que tenia es la version de Rails, al parecer a partir de la version 5219 una optimizacion para MySQL no es compatible con el setup de Dreamhost, asi que volviendo a hacer un freeze de Rails a la version 5218 se soluciono el problema.

Otro problema que tuve fue que me mandaba un error (que ya no recuerdo), lo que hice fue modificar el archivo enviroment.rb y cambiar la linea 22 de:

  config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/cachers

a:

  config.autoload_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/cachers

Despues de eso simplemente reinicie la aplicacion (mediante un simple touch dispatch.fcgi) et voila!. Ahora ya tengo el nuevo diseño en el blog, de hecho voy a convertir un tema de worpress que me gusto a Mephisto, espero tenerlo listo para el siguiente fin de semana ya que aun tengo pendientes unos detalles en este diseño (integrar el plugin de Last.fm y del.icio.us).

Aqui esta un screenshot de como esta quedando:

Tenia bastante tiempo sin un servicio de host y tarde un poco en decidirme en que compañia contratar, estuve leyendo los comentarios en WebHostingTalk para tener elementos con los cuales decidir, uno de los requerimientos que tenia era que el host debia contar con soporte para Ruby on Rails ademas del ya bastante comun PHP.

Esto redujo la lista de posibles candidatos bastante, pero en WebHostingTalk no habia muchos comentarios de hosts con soporte para RoR, asi que viendo la lista de host con soporte para Rails estaban los de siempre y algunos nuevos especializados como Planet Argon pero por el momento se me hace demasiado, ya que las aplicaciones que estoy desarrollando y las que tengo pensadas aun no necesitan tantos recursos. Eventualmente tendre que contratar con otra compañia o incluso rentar un servidor pero eso sera ya que esten listas las aplicaciones.