The Thin Line gets real hosting

RickyRobinson.id.au and The Thin Line have been moved off the computers in my bedroom to a real webhosting service. There’s a number of reasons for this. First, my blogging software has a memory leak in it somewhere, which necessitates the restarting of Tomcat every so often. I think the problem lies in the way I’ve configured Tomcat (probably with the database connection pooling stuff) rather than in the code itself. In times past, I might have had the time and the actual desire to track down this problem; I have neither of those two things right now. I’d rather be writing blog entries than debugging my crappy blog software. :-) Second, I’ll be moving house soon. I’ll be taking my workstation with me, which has the Tomcat install on it, but leaving the firewall, which was doubling as the web server. So my blog configuration was actually distributed across two machines, and separating the computers would completely break my blog. Now you’re wondering why on Earth I had such a convoluted setup. Well, when Tomcat was running on the firewall/gateway, which is a very low end machine, my blog site loaded very, very slowly. It improved enormously when I switched it over to my workstation, which just goes to show that network communication is by no means always the bottleneck in a network/distributed application (requests for my blog were still coming through Apache on the gateway, and were forwarded to Tomcat on my workstation via the Apache JServ Protocol). I suppose I could have moved Apache to my workstation too and just done port forwarding on the firewall, but for whatever reason I didn’t go down that track. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the process of moving would mean my website and my blog would have been offline for quite some time. Lastly, I’ve given up trying to update my blogging system with the latest cool feature. I got as far as adding an RSS feed and pinging Technorati whenever a new post is added, but where’s the commenting system and support for trackback and so on and so forth?

So, I got myself some web hosting, transfered my web site to the web host, installed WordPress and then imported my blog via RSS. For now I’m just using one of the WordPress templates. I might try to revert to the gray look later on.

Hopefully your browsers and aggregators are being automatically redirected to the appropriate URLs. Just in case the feed redirection isn’t working for you, the RSS feed can now be found here.