LINICKX.com

No Comment

nick — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 19:44:00 +0100

Linickx.com has been using comments on WordPress for over 5 years now and over that time the quality and quantity of comments has varied. In the last six+ months comments have become mostly spam. To reduce the amount of outages caused by spam, scrapers and other internet-rubbish the comment forms and previous comments have been removed.

Intelligent humans are still able to use twitter or the contact form to get in touch :)

ipv6 ready

nick — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:05:00 +0100

I've been testing the AAAA records for linickx.com, I'm supprised how easy it was!

The cloud servers over at rackspace (where this is hosted) come ipv6 ready - i.e. with a native ipv6 address attached to the internet. I'm using CentOS 6 so your experience may vary :)

ifconfig showed the IP address in my network stack, a good start! The first thing is that there are two iptables config files /etc/sysconfig/iptables & /etc/sysconfig/ip6tables, it should be obvious which is which! I'm not sure I agree with Redhat's decision to have two config files but they are configured the same it is only the IPs that need to be different, therefore I can have the same statement in each to open up access to apache:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

By default --dport 22 (SSH) is open on a RHEL/CentOS box, therefore I recommend you change that as appropriate - yes you need to think about ACLs on IPv6 as well as IPv4!

Since there are two config files for iptables there are also two services, you will need to restart the service to load up a new config:

[nick@toad ~]$sudo service ip6tables restart

The apache config file is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, by default there is a Listen 80 statement, assuming you haven't changed that apache should be already listening on ipv6 port 80!

[nick@toad ~]$ sudo netstat -nap --inet6 | grep 80
tcp        0      0 :::80                       :::*                        LISTEN      6878/httpd          
[nick@toad ~]$

What happens now when you hit up your server will happen depend now on your config, check you VirtualHost statement, if you have an IPv4 address you want to remove it, so you have something like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName localhost
  ServerAdmin root@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html
</VirtualHost>

If you use a NameVirtualHost *:80 then your ServerName statements will start working when you published AAAA records.

To publish an AAAA record use whatever method you use for ipv4 A records, they're the same thing :) ... I used my rsdns util ... kick of a test and watch your access log, all things being equal you should see ipv6 source addresses!

...OK, I have assumed you have an ipv6 source to test with; the quickest method is http://ipv6-test.com/validate.php, the more involved method is to setup a 6in4 tunnel with tunnelbroker.net.

If it all works you can get yourself a cool badge like this one!

Test Facebook post from linickx.com (WordPress)

nick — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:58:00 +0100

A while back facebook disabled RSS importing of my linickx.com posts which has resulted in my facebook timeline being very empty.

It's taken them a while, but facebook appear to have got with the program and released an official wordpress plugin... nice work guys!

This is a test post to see if I have it setup correctly... assuming it works my friends will starting seeing a bit more linickx'y things :)

Speed, I am Speed

nick — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:47:00 +0000

Recently I've been focusing on getting linickx.com not only available, but snappy too!

HA Proxy distributes the load across two cloud servers
Varnish Caches have a hit rate of between 30% & 49%
WP Super Cache serves up static files to Varnish
HypderDB distributes MySQL Requests across my two servers

My next step is to get some minification going, either with page-speed or a WP-Plugin.. they seem to be a bit tricky to troubleshoot tho!

If you are looking to measure your websites performance, I've been using pingdom for server response times and webpagetest.org for gathering client load speeds.

A New Style!

nick — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:38:00 +0100

After many happy years my ps3-tribute theme for linickx.com is retiring. Today linickx.com as a new shiny theme, this version is a bit more self indulgent than the last and returns to having a home page with /blog type layout rather than a single entry page.The main aim was to go minimal, I've always admired simple themes, hopefully this lives up to the dream! This new linickx version 4 themes is based off of twentyeleven and I'm hoping to leverage some of the new features, I'm already taking advantage of post types and custom backgounds as I digg deeper they maybe more to come :)

I'm in the process of tweaking any bugs, if you find something that doesn't look right please let me know.

LINICKX is now a word!

nick — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Whilst trying to find something of mine via google I've noticed something new. LINICKX has now been accepted by google as a word, not back considering I made it up!

In the past if you googled for linickx - www.google.com/search?q=linickx - google would suggest "Did you mean links?", but today I've noticed that is gone!

So it appears that my continued internet activity has made an impact on the wold wide web, Very cool!

4 Years of Blogging

nick — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Exactly 4 years ago I posted my 1st WordPress post.

Twitterings

nick — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:12:00 +0000

Those with a sharp eye will have noticed there are two "linickx" twitter accounts. I've had my main @linickx for some time, although I don't spam it all the time the linickx.com tweet integration and integration into facebook/mugshot/add_social_site_here.com is cool.

Twitter has been in a lot of main stream media recently, and I've noticed that it appears to be becoming a popular replacement for RSS, many non-technicals just don't "get" RSS but it appears that twitter is providing an alternative source of keeping up with news... rather than just answering the social question "what are you doing?" .

My blog will always have the most interesting content..... of course the definition of interesting is up for debate.... but in an attempt to reach out to those using twitter to follow blogs & news I've created another twitter account @linickxfeed; This second account is simply tweeting when I create blog posts... I'm not sure of the etiquette, should tweets from people be mixed with auto-magic stuff from blogs?

Hopefully this approach won't cause to much confusion, and If it does I'll just have to delete the account :) So....

@linickx - Are twitterings from Me, feel free to follow, direct message, send messages to @linickx and anything else you can think of.
@linickxfeed - Is a BOT, feeding from linickx.com not a person, follow only.

LINICKX - PlayStation ID

nick — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:22:00 +0000

LINICKX.com New Tag Line

nick — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:05:00 +0000

I've decided it was time for a change, and updated my tagline, my browser/html site still scrolls thru random rubbish, but those subcribed to my feed should see my new tag :cool:

Moments of Genius followed by Trash