Tag Archives: computers

No, Paul, no…don’t change your Book Reviews!

The PolyBlog
June 2 2025

So, I have this thing. An old thing. I thought I killed it, now it’s back in a new form. And it’s insidious.

When I started my website, the biggest thing I intended to put on it was a set of my book reviews. I didn’t really know how many there would be, or how long it would take to write even one at a time, but it was what I saw as my main content. I had nothing else to blog about, I didn’t think.

I put a bunch on one site, changed the format of the site, re-did all the book reviews to match. Moved to a new site, had to fix and adjust all of them. This pattern continued on and off for a few years, and as long as the total number of reviews was less than 100, it was always “doable” to make a change and go back to edit all the previous ones. I did this maybe 5 or 6 times in total, not including small tweaks over time. I’m talking about a combination of both layout changes — the order of things, headings, etc. — as well as the content.

When I broke 100 reviews, I said, “That’s it. These are my reviews, this is the format, I am NEVER changing again.” Which was fine.

Then I had a huge site failure at one point, and I had to redo them all anyway (not in terms of re-writing them, I just had to manually post a bunch of them again). So around 200 reviews, when I was rebuilding, I said, “Okay, this is the ABSOLUTE last time” and that’s where it has stood since before the pandemic. I’m up to about 270 now with another 120 in backlog or so.

And I like the format of my book reviews, I do. I start with Plot or Premise (depending on fiction or non-fiction), write about What I Liked, then on to What I Didn’t Like (although for some books, I combine the two together), add in a disclosure section if I got the book for free or have met the author somehow, and then finish off with a “Bottom Line”. I went through almost 15 years of versions and wrestling with my muse about what I wanted to say in a Book Review, what was fair game and what wasn’t, etc. to get to this point.

I write the review, post it to Amazon Canada (used to share to Amazon US too), Chapters Indigo, my public library, Goodreads (used to do LibraryThing separately), and I publish on my own website. At one point, I also used to include Google Books, but I got out of that after a while. Since the first 200 or so were done, I narrowed it down to Amazon, Chapters, GoodReads, the OPL and my website.

I confess that I had hoped that my book reviews would spark commentary. That people would read them on various locations on the web, and comment…tell me they agreed, tell me they disagreed, etc.

That never happened. Heck, just like the rest of my blog, I rarely know if ANYONE is even reading my posts. It’s like the proverbial joke that writing on the bathroom wall would attract more eyeballs.

But I digress.

So, what’s new, pussycat?

No, not the Tom Jones song. What’s new is oddly enough NOT about the book reviews. It is about something related, which is my To Be Read (TBR) pile.

Way back when I was a young teenager, I started a two-page list of the main authors I was collecting, along with the list of books I needed. However, I didn’t always have complete lists, so if I knew about four books and bought two of them, I couldn’t simply add the remaining two to the list — there could be another ten that I didn’t know about. So, if I went into a store and saw a title that wasn’t on my list, I couldn’t be sure if I had it already or if it was “new” to me. This meant I ended up with a longer to-do list — all the books by author X or in series Y, with marks indicating whether I already owned them. Think of it like having a list of all the Agatha Christie books I could learn about (without having the internet yet), and printing it out on an 8.5×11″ double-sided sheet of paper, with at least three columns, and book titles down to about 8 or even 6 point font.

It had everything on it — what I had read, what I owned but hadn’t yet read, and what I hadn’t found yet. A collector’s list, if you will. Like Pokémon, you gotta get ’em all.

Around 1994 or so, I updated my list and then ignored it for about 10 years at least. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, I got the idea to recreate the list in new form! Except it is way out of control. Take even something like Star Trek novels. There are literally hundreds out there now in multiple sub-series. I don’t have time to track them all, let alone read them all. Or Perry Mason, with 75 books or so. Or the giant expanded Sherlock Holmes universe … it’s actually a research genre for academia, you can become a professor of Holmes’ materials, covering not only the original Holmes’ stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but also other stories involving Holmes, expanded stories involving characters from the Holmes’ books (like Irene Adler), or adding characters like Enola Holmes, a younger sister never mentioned.

I had a dream that when I eventually reviewed all my books, catching up on years of backlogs, I would also have my complete “wishlist” of all the series I wanted to complete. And I wanted it online, cuz I’m anal retentive. I have my own list in OneNote. Incomplete, of course, just as it was on the website.

But the indexing on the website has been holding me back. I recently wrote about a fascinating YouTube video and how it might help me adapt my approaches to certain projects.

Did I just find a life-altering paradigm from a random YouTube video?

And so I wanted to see what would happen if I applied it to my indexing of books in my website. The optimal solution would be, of course, that I would list all the authors I track, compile all the books that they have ever published but narrowed to those that I want to read, and publish the list. Easy peasy right? And then as I read them, I could mark them off.

Another optimal solution would be to take all of that info, throw it into a database, and publish the database in my website, allowing queries. Same research requirement, extra webbing.

A sub-optimal and my current practical solution has been to take the info for a given author, say John D. MacDonald who wrote the Travis McGee novels, upload the names of the 20+ books in the McGee series, and then paste links to the reviews as I write them. Sounds easy, right? Except that ended up being really painful. I was putting the info in one of 27 different pages, one for each letter of the alphabet and one for titles that started with numbers, creating a heading for John A. MacDonald, another sub-heading for Travis McGee, and then the titles of the 20+ books. Just to get to the place where I can link the FIRST review. But it was the only way I could see to put that full list online.

But when I reviewed it from the project management ideal of “what is the actual project”, the reality is that my goal has never really been nor should it have been to have my entire collection list online. Nobody cares about it except me. And I already have it in OneNote where I can see it easily. I thought I was making these lists as an easy way to show “hey, here are 20 books about Travis McGee” and the links to my review, which is cool, I admit. But it’s not “easy”, it was actually really time-consuming.

The REAL project is simply to get my book reviews online with a little bit of sorting capability. Was this helping me do this? Nope. I was acting like a card-carrying librarian, trying to create my own card catalogue system for every book I ever wanted to read or had read. So I wasn’t making progress. Yet I had 270+ entries across multiple pages and I couldn’t really see how to convert it into something better than an alphabetical list by title.

Oh, yeah, I can display posts by other variables

I thought I had a solution at one point for structured data of any type. I had a table plugin that was basically a front-end table maker and a back-end flat-file database manager. The benefit was that I could create a table say with the following columns:

  • Book review #
  • Title of book
  • Author’s name
  • Date of review
  • Date of publication
  • Rating

Maybe a dozen or so “fields”. And once it was in the table, yowza. I could sort on ANY column. Great, right? Well, sure, but it meant I had to put a lot of data in the back-end into fields. You COULD upload from a spreadsheet, which I did, but when I moved from a spreadsheet to something more functional and readable in OneNote, it was painful to enter or update. Way too much work, and the pages could be slow to load.

So I decided to ditch all the manual pages I had created. I could generate a list of all the book review posts by title, or date, and that seemed like probably good enough. I have a very structured title structure for every book review:

Title by Firstname Lastname (year of publication) — BRbook review # (Ryear of review) — rating

So for a previous review I did, the title of the post is:

Infection by John Gregory Betancourt (1999) – BR00004 (R2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

It gives all the info I want at a quick glance, really easy for me to find stuff without having to go into the post if I’m looking for something while out and about. More reference for me than anything.

The downside is that I can ONLY sort on the title OR the date. I can’t sort by author name, year of publication, year of review or rating. The previous index pages were letting me sort by author name, but as I said, it was a lot of work to maintain those other 27 pages with all the extra info. Not just the pages of reviews that have been written, but the to do list of future books to read and review.

As I noted above, I said to myself, “Okay, let’s kill those pages and just go with the title or date sort.”

Except…

There might be another way to tweak my approach, get rid of the big work, add a bit more work back in, and let me sort on other things.

I can define some meta values per post

The WordPress system will let me define my own variables for posts, which because I already have a plugin that will sort on various fields, I can then sort on those fields.

I gave it a go the other night, and I took my first three book reviews. I created a new field called BR_number and I put in my five-digit BR number. I assume I’ll never make it past 10K, let alone 100K, but I’m good to 99999. I added another field called BR_name and for the first review, I put in the variable “davidpeter”. This is for Peter David, the author of the first book. This will let me sort on that field, which is last name first. I don’t have a way to access the main post and run concatenation to generate it all, but it’s good enough and short enough to do manually. I’m debating if I want to say “davidpeter1999” so the books by each author will come out in chron order, but haven’t decided yet.

I started to consider if I want to add in fields for ratings, year of publication, year of review, fiction/non-fiction, standalone or series, hardcover/paperback/ebook, and where I had published the reviews, but well, again, NOBODY cares about those features other than me, and I already have them coded on my OneNote pages. Optimal me would say YES, we should have ALL THE DATA, and even want to figure out ways to export / import from my Calibre ebook library would I would also have library categories, tags, ratings, all the other meta data I mentioned, # of pages, # of words, estimated grade level, and formats.

Let’s file that under #SquirrelMode.

I want to go with Name and Number, series is too much trouble. I’m on the fence for rating. But date is easy and obvious. I have one wrinkle to figure out. If I sort by title, all of the posts have the full alphabetical title…which is a fancy way of saying it says “The ….” and “A….” which the computer cannot ignore. If I want to fix that sort, I would have to add a field with a “sortable” book title. Love the premise, hate the amount of work to do it.

It’s all about the back work, not the forward work

If I do this, I want all 270+ reviews to show up in the various sort lists. Not just the ones from here onward. So if I do this, I would need to go back and recode all 273 books to date.

Coding forward is easy; coding backward is annoying. And, as I said, 270+ reviews to add metadata to, so that the future indexing works. Plus all future reviews, even if relatively straightforward.

As a digression, I created a test sort on the first three titles the other night, worked almost right, but I found I was getting something really weird as a result. The sort order wasn’t working the way I thought it should. It was inverted. No biggie, I switched it around, all good. Then I added another title, and nope, it didn’t sort right. I looked at examples, not figuring it out.

I finally emailed the plugin created and said, “I’m sorry to bother you but what am I missing…”. And it turned out to be a simple reference problem, some misleading nomenclature, and general ignorance on my part. It basically said something like “sort on variable” so I put in “sort on BR_name”. Except it literally meant to write the word variable, not the name of the variable. Oops. Not to mention: doh!

Way less work than it was, much greater functionality going forward, and it even looks better in the end. I just have to redo 270 reviews that I said I would NEVER CHANGE AGAIN. Sigh. Don’t even get me started on the fact that I should probably consider doing it for ALL my other reviews too (music, movies, TV seasons, recipes)…at least if I do it for those? It’s only about 50 in total. Not much work at all, in comparison.

Mostly, I’m wrestling with the Project Management question. Adding the extra variables doesn’t help me finish. It adds some functionality without reducing too much. And it’s a manageable albeit boring bit of work.

Sigh. Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll add the functionality to the BRs. But I am NOT going to put in a field to avoid sorting on “The” or “A” as part of the title. That’s a step too far.

An intermittent website gremlin

The PolyBlog
January 3 2023

I mentioned in my post about my plans for the year that things had gone sideways on me for my website earlier in the day. I’ve got an intermittent gremlin hiding in my website somewhere. And finding the little b****** is like a game of whack-a-mole because it can be almost anywhere. Fair warning, this one is mostly for people who are interested in solving website problems aka the technical bunch.

For context, my blog (and just about every other site out there) is really made up of thirteen basic components:

  1. The hoster’s server hardware
  2. Hardware settings for the overall server;
  3. The hoster’s server software;
  4. Settings for the server space I’m using;
  5. The WordPress application software itself;
  6. The settings for the core WordPress application software;
  7. A theme for the website;
  8. Configurations for the theme;
  9. Multiple plugins for the back-end of the website;
  10. Configurations for the back-end plugins;
  11. Multiple plugins for the front-end of the website;
  12. Configurations for the front-end plugins; and,
  13. My posts, pages, media and comments aka the content.

Most of my time and energy is devoted to #13, the content.

Over the years, I have had as many as 45 front-end and back-end plugins running (#9, 11), adding features or tweaking the look and feel here and there. The theme itself (#7) has been relatively stable for almost ten years, I love the one I use, and I have the pro version that lets me tweak it in a hundred different ways. The first six elements are the infrastructure of the website, and I tend to leave them relatively stable, upgrading pieces when I need to, etc. General maintenance.

When I’ve had major meltdowns over the last ten years, it has been one of three things:

a. I didn’t like the distribution of content across the two websites;
b. Something changed in the server software that messed up my site; or,
c. There was a problem with the hardware.

At times that has been where the company’s systems were hacked, or some setting got changed in the system’s back-end where I can’t see it, and suddenly my site started running REALLY slow. I switched from two hosts because their support for #1-4 was inadequate. But I’ve had an ongoing gremlin of sorts for about five years, and I don’t know where exactly it lies.

When the gremlin appears, things start running slow

As I said, I used to run about 45-50 plugins. But the back-end of my website started running slowly, so I cut it back to about 35 and then 30. Each time, it felt like I was cutting off a limb. I had spent a fair amount of time on the choice and configuration of plugins (#9-12) and liked how everything worked except when it didn’t. I eliminated plugins where there were conflicts and used single bigger / better plugins that could replace several smaller plugins that didn’t play well with each other. A few tools? I just dropped them.

Now here’s the twist in the tale. I don’t care about the speed of the front-end too much. That speed affects a lot of rankings in search engines and is part and parcel of search engine optimization, but most people coming to my site are doing so simply for MY stuff, aka either friends or family or people wanting to know about HR for the government. I’m not going to suddenly go viral because my website ranks higher in a search engine; I’m too niche for that type of concern. My REAL concern is the speed of the back-end.

Here’s what happens for any editing process. I open up an edit window, and the post appears. Then, some of the “configurable settings” for THAT post start to appear — like a featured image, categories, tags, and a few other key pieces that I need to set. Each of those uses up a bit of memory to load on the server. The amount of memory I have available on the server (not storage space, but RAM, basically) is controlled back at the #1-4 stage. As the post loads, it uses up that memory. Those are the basics.

About five years ago, I could run 45 plugins with no problem. I could even edit 10-12 single posts at a time if I wanted to do so (and sometimes, when I was tweaking the format, that made life WAY easier). Then the site started to slow down on the back end, often because of the size of the security plugins. It shouldn’t really affect the BACK-END, but it does for some reason. I cut it to 30, and it was all good again. I’m down to about 25 now. But anything I cut now is really painful to remove. Yet about a week ago, it started to run really slow in the background again.

My post loads, no problem. But whereas the image, categories and tags load within 3-4s if I’m running 0 plugins, with about 15 plugins running, it is about 8-10s for the rest of the pieces/settings to load. Slow load is still manageable at that rate, as I can work on other pieces while those elements load. Except at 25-30 plugins? Some of the edit windows NEVER finish loading. I can sit and wait and wait and wait.

I loaded THIS post, copied over from a previous one and edited it, and I’ve been working on it for almost 20 minutes of writing time. My Featured Image has loaded, while the categories, tags, and reusable images have not. I’ve installed a cache, can save the file, reopen it, and some of the rest or maybe even all of it, will load because it’s cached. (I just tested it, 40s to get my Featured Image to load, a reusable block timed out, and nothing for categories and tags yet. Closing and reopening? Everything loaded in 5s). This is NOT a resource-intensive site; it should NOT take those first times to load, no matter what is running.

Hacking the diagnostic loop

When you try to resolve this type of problem, the first two pieces of advice are (a) changing to the default theme and (b) removing all plugins.

I’ve done that so often (out the wazoo!) that I can eliminate the theme as the cause. It doesn’t matter right now whether I have the default theme or my premium theme installed, it still takes the same amount of time to load on the back-end (I can get a small performance bump on the front-end). I spent a huge amount of time this week testing out some other popular lightweight themes to see if I could get a huge performance improvement and truly eliminate my theme as the cause. I tried approximately 25 different themes, with the same result across the board. If I get above 15-20 plugins, it slows down. Unfortunately, none of those themes works as well for me as my current model. And for what it’s worth, my PolyWogg site has almost the same config WITHOUT the same slowdowns. It happens from time to time, but like I said, it’s intermittent, and NOT as frequent on the PolyWogg site as this ThePolyBlog site.

Now, everyone on the ‘net who knows anything about WordPress will say, “A-ha! it’s a plugin problem!”. Except it’s not. I’ve done the scientific method of loading them one at a time. It makes no difference. And so those with more experience will say, “A-ha! it’s a plugin conflict problem!”.

In other words, it is not one plugin causing the slowdown, it is two of them interacting with each other that is causing the problem. If you are into math and you want to test two plugins, the purest form of those tests would be N plugins * N-1, divided by two. Sort of like scheduling a tournament of 30 plugins in a hockey tournament where they all have to play each other once, which would be 30 teams * 29 opponents divided by 2 teams in each game = 435 games. Yikes.

It’s a nightmare to do that, obviously. I can’t test 435 combinations of 30 plugins, or even 300, if there were only 25. So you can hack the combo pattern. Instead of testing Plugin 1 against Plugin 2, there are a series of variables you can make fixed. For example, of the plugins currently running, I can triage the list into “musts”, “needs”, and “likes”. I have 34 currently installed, but rarely all active.

MUST HAVEHIGHLY WANTNICE TO HAVE
FRONT-ENDAddToAny Share Buttons
Display Posts
Display Posts – Date View
Flexible Table Block
Weaver Xtreme Plus
Weaver Xtreme Theme Support

Photonic Gallery & Lightbox
wpDiscuz
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin		Simple Lightbox
Stackable – Gutenberg Blocks
BACK-ENDAkismet Anti-Spam
LiteSpeed Cache
ManageWP – Worker
Media Library Assistant
OG — Better Share on Social Media
Really Simple SSL
WP to Buffer Pro
Wordfence Security
Yoast Duplicate Post		Advanced Editor Tools
Health Check & Troubleshooting
Nested Pages
Redirection
MailPoet
MailPoet Premium
WPForms Lite
WP Mail SMTP		Dashboard Wordcount
Simple Blog Stats
Broken Link Checker
Media Replace
Press This
WordPress Importer

Obviously, I can install the MUST HAVEs, which are 15 plugins and test those. Since I have to have all of them for my current functionality, I might as well test with that WHOLE group running, minus the Caching program (not much of a test if the Cache is running). With those running, everything loads in about 9 seconds. Not bad, right? Not awesome, admittedly, but it loads fast ENOUGH that I can be working on other things while those are lazy loading, so to speak. So those 15 “work”.

Then, I can try adding them either in bundles (3-4 each time) and see if anything happens OR perhaps some of the “bigger” ones in the back-end first.

For Bundle 1, I focused on the WPForms, WP Mail and MailPoet as they all work together. As I added each one of them, the site got slower and slower but not immeasurably with each one. Some added a second or two, some added no increase. I continued with other bundles of three or four at a time, seeing what they did to my load time, and as I added more and more plugins, creeping up into the high teens and early 20s, the site started to hit what I consider my magic threshold. Anything above 21 right now was bogging it down. Hello gremlin, my old friend, you’ve come to annoy me again.

Technical support has entered the chat

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Can’t you get tech support to help? But here’s the rub. Tech support is good for #1-4 (the server setup). Occasionally, they’ll help you diagnose something where it is a WordPress configuration issue (#6). But after that? The rest of that is YOUR website and YOUR problem. And since it is almost impossible to find WHY it would be doing this, particularly as it is intermittent, it would seem like a plugin or theme problem.

I’ve also come to suspect that the gremlin has friends, of sorts. Or perhaps grandchildren.

About four years ago, the problem turned out to be a security plugin that was doing something funky on my site. I think it was mis-interacting with other plugins, but it was going into an infinite loop. It had done that before on another hoster’s servers, and they couldn’t tell me what was going on, they claimed it was my site causing the slowdown but not how. That was the last straw with them, so I shifted to a new host. Everything was fine so I thought that was the proof that it was the previous host. Except then it happened on my new server. So much so that the host contacted me and asked, “WTF you running over there? It’s slowing down the WHOLE shared server!”.

But I got lucky…one of their Level 2 supports looked, quickly realized the security plugin had created an infinite loop of calls, and disabled it for me (with my permission). Everything went back to normal. I checked online and this was a known gremlin for that security plugin. One of the biggest and most popular ones would occasionally futz itself and mess up a config file. You can disable it, uninstall it and reinstall from scratch to fix it — or just use one of the other security plugins. I was running a huge overhead plugin called JetPack which divides the WordPress community in two — those who love it and developers who HATE it. It’s really intrusive. Well, the security plugin was conflicting with it, as was two other smaller plugins to a lesser extent, and I changed security plugins and eventually dumped JetPack anyway. Unfortunately, without JetPack, I have all this other mail stuff to run just so I can get email versions of my posts when I post and allows people to get my posts as newsletter feeds. Not that I have that many people doing that, most get it from Reddit, FaceBook or Twitter. Or referrals from friends.

Anyway. Where was I?

Oh yeah, killing gremlins. Another time it was a legacy of a hack. Another time it was a misbehaving plugin that has since been patched, but I don’t let it run all the time, just when I want some specific stats.

But, as I said earlier, the dang site was bogged down so I reached out to Tech Support earlier noting that I was overloading the Physical Resources AND my IO process limit. Did they see anything that was amiss?

Often I end up using Tech Support as a catalyst for brainstorming. Since they don’t know my site inside and out, I ask questions and they give me crappy answers at Level 1, I eventually get up to L2, and then their responses often trigger something in me.

This time, while I was chatting with them, I got the standard popup in my file manager asking me if I wanted to upgrade to the next level of website performance. I didn’t, it’s almost double the price. I talked to them about it about 8m ago when it started going slower for awhile, and I would love to do it for a month to see if it would make a difference, but alas, they don’t have a trial option to do that and I’m already on a really good discounted plan. If I give it up, it’s gone. I can return to my current lower setting, but at more money than I’m paying now. There’s no simple way to test it to see if it works. And honestly, the improvements will only help me in this area, if at all. There are lots of other “perks” to the higher package but are not anything I need or want or will ever use. Sigh.

So we go around and around, ask a few questions, when I notice something amiss.

My comparison of the three models of plans that are suitable to my situation show that they have three levels of resource availability. The first is 512M, the second is 1G, and the third is 2G. For I/O processes, 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB versions per second. I’m on the middle tier, so 1G and 4MB / second. Except, wait a minute…as I’m going through the allocation process for memory, the piece that is being overloaded right now, my internal server dashboard is showing me 512MB and 2MB/s. The lowest plan settings. I double-check, and then triple-check with a comparison to PolyWogg.ca. The other site? My main site for HR that works? It’s set properly. This one is not.

FFS, is that REALLY it? I ask, they go into conniptions and embarrassment and make the switch / upgrade overnight. Today, everything is loading in 10s.

I should be mad, right?

So, it looks like most of the problem has been a misconfigured server on their end. Instead of being on the higher plan, they’ve had me on the lower plan for some time. I’ll write to the billing people, just for sh**s and giggles, but honestly, I’m not sure I can be that mad at them.

First and foremost, the error has almost NO effect on my website for the user. It’s a wee bit slower than it should have been, but not noticeable as I don’t have that many viewers. I don’t pay for the higher tier for front-end performance, I pay for the backend.

Second, I know how it happened. Way back when they got hacked, they had to create what they called LifeBoat servers. They suffered a massive attack from a former employee, something very hard to defend against if not impossible (the person had access in the building to the servers!), and they could have been dead in the water. They managed to find a way to make things work again, and while frustrating, they created lifeboats to get us up and running as fast as possible. They have customers that are WAY more important than me, but they got me going pretty quickly, all things considered. And when it was “over”, they moved lifeboats back into the main hubs. Which I’m pretty sure is when I got downgraded to the lower-tier plan for space. It shouldn’t have happened, but it’s understandable how it did.

That’s hard to generate anger around…little front-end effect and an understandable reason. Plus, I’ve seen that information in my dashboard for some time. I just didn’t realize what it meant. As I said, I’ll ask for a retroactive credit of some sort, or they’ll extend my expiry date by a month or two or three, but I’m glad that part is fixed.

Oh, right. I left out the important part. There ARE two plugins messing up my load time on the back-end.

I already knew one before I started was a likely culprit. Stackable. It’s a plugin that lets you add a whole laundry list of really good extra style blocks. Back in the dark ages before the Pandemic, I tested a bunch of “block” plugins, and Stackable won by a country mile. I bought the lifetime premium membership option. But, well, it is designed to add things to the back-end editor. Of course, it slows things down. That’s what it does when it adds that functionality. I’ve reached out to them, and they’re working on a speed improvement, but for now, I just have to pare back what I use.

The second one was another likely suspect. I was pretty sure my Mail bundle was screwing things up. I have MailPoet that formats my email newsletters (emails of my posts), WP Mail SMTP that lets me send mail as an authorized sender less likely to be caught in spam filters, and a WP Forms plugin that lets me add a nice contact form to my site. Do I need all of them? Meh. It’s more professional to have them than not. And it means I don’t have to run JetPack. What I should do is find a simple integrated plugin that does all three in a lightweight fashion and pay for a lifetime subscription. But that’s a problem for another day. In the meantime, I put up with MailPoet, as it is the one that slows things down.

I’ve stripped the two suspects down to their skivvies, and the site is loading. Maybe that’s all I can ask for now. Other than my rebate from my hoster.

For now, it’s resolved, if not solved.

Holy crap, I missed two milestones!

The PolyBlog
November 11 2022

I’ve been doing a fair amount of blogging in the last two years here and there, I’ve moved some stuff around, added some content that was pending. And somewhere in all of that, one of my “tools” stopped functioning. I had a word count plugin that wasn’t very good, and it even reached the stage where WordPress wondered if it was abandoned before it was updated recently.

So, I haven’t been keeping track of my word count overall between my two sites. I knew I was up there. I had hit 1.5M words quite some time ago, and I figured I was probably over 2M now easily. I had to be, right?

Today I did a quick dive to find a simple word count stats plugin to replace the old one, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are lots of REALLY complicated ones out there, but I don’t want all that extra bloat. I just want the basic stats.

Basic stats

For the number of posts, I have 1591 here at ThePolyBlog, although 26 are still in draft. PolyWogg has another 147 with 3 in draft, although that will likely increase as I revamp that site a bit more and add some regular blogging posts about HR or astronomy. If I add in pages, I get 21 at ThePolyBlog and 41 over at PolyWogg, for a grand total of 1691 posts, 29 drafts, and 62 pages (mostly for the HR guide like info). I still need to trim some of that, but that’s not bad. Nothing super exciting in there, although I’ll be intrigued when I hit 2000 active posts.

Another stat shows up, it’s categories — 15 at ThePolyBlog and 10 at PolyWogg, but the PolyWogg ones will reduce in the short term. Both sites have a huge number of tags used, 1239 (TPB) + 1403 (PW) gives me 2642 overall, but I’m phasing out some of that work and reducing my use of tags for a lot of the newer posts.

I have comments tracked as well, with 260 at TPB and 479 at PW for a total of 739. It’s not the best of indicators though as lots of people just email me direct, which doesn’t show up in those stats at all. Nor do comments on FB or Twitter. It’s a sign of engagement, and I wish more comments were made directly on the site, but well, that’s not what my followers do.

The big stat

For wordcount, almost the entire total is me. Andrea has two guest blogs and we’ll add another few in the next couple of weeks, but that’s only 3765 off my total at the moment.

For PolyWogg, my guess was somewhere in the 400-500K range. Nope, I’m up to 687,752 words. Almost three quarters of a million, and set to grow as I upload my new version of the HR guide. Some of those words will overwrite some existing temporary text, so hard to say how much it will grow by as I do. I should reach 700K by January though, and possibly closer to 725K.

The real surprise was ThePolyBlog. I estimated I was at 1.5/1.6M based on previous estimates and earlier counts. I changed a few things around, sure, plus I’ve been blogging a lot. I was surprised to see that TPB is up to 1,830,374 words. 1.8M all on its own.

What does that mean for a combined total? It means I blew past 2M and hit the next milestone…

2,518,026 words!

Holy crap. I thought I had probably surpassed 2M, I had no idea that I’m now over 2.5M. I missed both milestones!

Man, I’m wordy.

Saying no to free money

The PolyBlog
September 26 2021

I find it intriguing that on a regular basis, I get comments, enquiries and outright offers from people about how to monetize my sites. Mainly, they are referring to my PolyWogg site, and the HR content. That it is free money that I’m not “grabbing”. With suggestions of how to turn the site(s) into a consulting business or to sell the content as training, most often. I find it intriguing for two reasons.

First and foremost, I find it amusing that they think that I have never considered it myself. I have, I admit it, but it is always more of an abstract idea than a serious option to consider.

Which brings me to the second reason. I view my site as my words upon the waters. I write it, people read it. It’s not poetry, it’s not hard-won, it’s not a book. I have a well-paying job already. I don’t see any compelling reason to charge for the content, even if I could. It almost offends my sense of honour to suggest that I should profit from it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely altruistic. I have a desire to write fiction, and I would absolutely write that content for sale. There are a couple of areas I might write after I retire that again, I think, would be amenable to book format and sale. Yet for most of my content, the idea of profiting from it seems wrong.

A recent article came my way from WPBeginner.com and it lists nine types of ways to make money from your website. The categories blur a bit for me, and so I would group it by four headings as I try to organize my thoughts.

Monetize

The most common suggestion for any site is to run ads. You can do it with Google AdSense or sell your own advertising directly if your site is popular enough. I get a few nibbles from time to time asking if they can pay me to run an ad on my site. It is the crassest of the options and turns my stomach at the thought. I never want ads on my site, not now, not ever. I hate them on just about every site I visit, even when done tastefully. It also strikes me as a stupid question. If they had actually visited my site, they would know that I don’t run ads ANYWHERE on the site now. Is their product so compelling or the pittance big enough to say, “Oh yeah, let me change my entire approach?”.

I did consider affiliate marketing for my book reviews. If someone read my review, liked the book, and clicked on it such that a few pennies went into an Amazon account for me to buy more books? That seemed okay to me, more or less. It wouldn’t affect my review in any way, it was so removed from the review writing and wasn’t enough to push me towards the ugly side of reviews i.e., paid reviews. But it was too much work to maintain, and I didn’t really generate any revenue from it. I just don’t write enough book reviews, and I wasn’t going to put lists of books on the site just to get clicks. Meh.

I have been approached by people wanting to exchange posts or “sponsor” certain blog posts, and that is way too close to paid reviews in my book. My site, my name, my opinions, my reviews. Period.

There’s one other area that the article talked about, but it doesn’t really apply to me. The idea is to create a site, get some traffic, monetize it, and then sell the site to someone else. “Flipping” sites, they call it. The third circle of Hell would be closer in description, if you ask me.

Memberships

The short version of this is that you sell “memberships” and people get members-only content. A private forum, or articles only they can see, or maybe a Q&A section. A few enquiries have been aimed at this, partly because I already have the content. So lock it down, make it more interactive, and sell regular subscriptions or even one-time only subscriptions. Separate from the icky feeling I have of only sharing with certain paid subscribers, there is a lot of overhead in managing memberships, payments, and privacy. Pass.

A heavily-related version would create unique content, like a job board for example, or some sort of posting where people pay to post their content. Could be a job board, could be Ebay for certain products. Or people could pay to list their company. Or events. But instead of the site being private and people paying to access the content, it would be public with people paying to post. Except I have no desire to post other people’s content.

Sales and Services

These generally fall into five categories, one of which I’ll hold to the end.

For services, some people suggest offering consulting services, or coaching, or even freelance services in whatever field you do. I have no interest in starting a side hustle nor particularly in continuing to “work” after I retire. My brother has a gig that would be far more likely for me to embrace than this.

A second service people often suggest is to sell physical products online including standard stores, online t-shirts, dropshipping, or simply as a full-scale Amazon affiliate store.

The third is very similar to the job board idea, where you turn your website into a platform to host other sales, like an online marketplace or auctions site where others can post their goods.

Finally, if you build off that “flipping” option earlier, there are suggestions to go hardcore with the WordPress material itself i.e., plugins, themes or graphics tied to WordPress layouts and look/feel. My skills are NOWHERE that good, and again, it’s just a side hustle consulting business. I already have decent skills in other areas, but again, I have zero interest in using the site to build a business.

Things that don’t offend my sensibilities

Obviously, I could turn the content into a book (for the PolyWogg HR Guide), and I like that idea. It makes sense to have a book option, people can read it online or if they want a copy of the book, click and order. Very popular, doesn’t offend me. I’m a wannabe writer and I spend a LOT of time writing on the sites. If it was fiction, I wouldn’t hesitate to charge. Why not charge for non-fiction if it’s in a book?

My hesitation, like my initial intrigue, is two-fold. First, I want people to have access whether they pay anything or not. I don’t like the idea that someone could benefit from my approach, but doesn’t because they don’t have $10 or whatever to pay for a book version. Or that ordering just adds friction. I want as many people to read the stuff as possible. Charging for it kind of restricts that goal.

But I also hesitate because I wasn’t charged to GAIN the knowledge. I asked people about their experiences and a lot of what I write is not just my own experiences but theirs. If they didn’t charge ME, how can I justify charging others? It doesn’t feel right.

If I go sideways for a second too, I also feel like it’s part of my duty as a manager in the public service to help other public servants figure out how to prepare properly for selection processes. And I already get paid to be a manager. So wouldn’t I be asking someone to pay me for something I should already be doing as part of the duties in my day job? Not as part of the day job, obviously, but as part of my obligations to help others in the community.

Once I retire, my position will likely shift a bit in that regard as it will take more work to stay current on stuff, and I won’t be an “active” manager. No residual duty to “help” would be in the way of charging. I already said I don’t want to do consulting that much, or even really coaching. Too time-consuming in my view. I might for some occasional cash or to keep my hand in the game. But not as a major function tied to the website.

I have thought about changing the content from a static website into more of an online course option with modules. And some people have suggested doing so as a full training course that is “sold” by subscription. But I have the same hesitations in whatever form it is provided, video or text.

And yet there is one area where I’m more open to the idea. If, after I’m retired, someone wanted to pay me to make a presentation to a group, I’d be willing to do that. Truth be told, I love the idea. I don’t care particularly if I get PAID to do it, provided there isn’t much cost to me to participate. Reimburse me for my out-of-pocket expenses like parking or a coffee, and I’d likely be good to go. I do have another area of expertise where I could see it being potentially lucrative to get hired to present in various locales around the world on two or three specific topics where I could develop a stronger content base on my website.

The article I referred describes it as “paid engagements as an influencer”, although I prefer to think of it more as speaking engagements for expertise. If someone in Boston wanted me to speak to their Board about one of the topics, I’d be happy to do so relatively cheaply, so long as they pay for my travel. I just don’t know if I want to hustle that much to seek out those options.

Last but not least

I have zero interest in setting up a Patreon account to attract donations. I am not interested in “patrons” sponsoring me or whatever. And yet, I love people who set up donation buttons to “buy them a coffee” for a variety of different sites or services. It is the equivalent of “shareware”, which is another concept I love. Completely free to use, full versions of whatever, but if you want to send me a couple of bucks, feel free to do so. As long as I’m working FT, I won’t do that. I might consider it after I retire. I haven’t decided yet. But it does interest me at least a little.

And yet NONE of these are things are attractive to me anytime soon. Nor, if I do have interest in the future, do I need any help doing it. Yet, like I said, I get enquiries that intrigue me, even if my answer is a polite but firm “no”.

My impossible quest for laptop supremacy

The PolyBlog
August 10 2021

Ah, late summer. The time when a young man’s fancy turns to back to school tech. Papers. Notebooks. Maybe, dare I say it, the laptop of his dreams?

Okay, I’m not a student, but I do dream of getting the “right laptop” some day.

My quest started in the late 90s. I wanted to get a laptop, was debating whether I would get a laptop instead of a desktop, but it’s not really what I wanted the laptop to be. If it replaced my desktop, I wanted power to crunch spreadsheets, handle wordprocessing, some basic games, a bit of photo editing, and internet browsing. Call it the SWGPI protocol. Five basic things. I give it a name because it is going to come up again. Stay tuned.

So if it was a desktop replacement, I needed some power to do SWGPI, plus some video editing, and a good sized screen. But then if I did that, and wanted to go mobile, I would be stuck with this honking big laptop. Great to take my whole setup with me if I was going to Peterborough for the weekend, no chance of leaving anything behind, but battery life would suck AND it would be unwieldy. What they used to call luggables.

I decided to get a full desktop, which then left me wanting a simpler writing computer to handle wordprocessing, a small game or two, and a bit of internet stuff. WGI, if you will. Lightweight, good battery life. That was the dream.

And so off I went one weekend to Toronto with my nephew. We combed all the big and little computer stores in Toronto to see what I could find. What I found was bulky replacements (SWGPI) at a reasonable price OR I could find near WGI but at insane prices. $2500-$3000. My dream was found in a Sony Vaio at $2999, onsale from original pricing of like $3999. Way out of my price range.

Expanding my search to New York

At the time, David Pogue was a tech reviewer for the NY Times. I found his email online, and despite him saying very clearly “Don’t ask my opinion about stuff”, I wrote and asked him anyway. I basically asked him, “Are there any lightweight laptops that don’t have an optical drive, etc. at a reasonable price?”. I was surprised but he answered and said, “Not really.” Everyone had gone BIGGER with their designs, i.e. the desktop replacements, so there was supposedly no market for the little footprints.

Fastforward about 8-10 years, and netbooks were all the rage. Almost exactly what I had been looking for previously. I had made do with some other tools here and there, but never really found what I wanted at the right price. Netbooks seemed like the answer, but it took me a while to decide on a model. I still have it. The only problem? It was slow as molasses. Even with everything eventually stripped down to Linux. Adequate, but not the dream.

I also tried pairing a Bluetooth keyboard with my Android tablet. The result was buffering and fast battery drain.

I bought a more powerful and faster laptop, a nice HP model, 17″ screen, great. Not small, but powerful and met my needs. Poor battery life so I upgraded it, but it was never the dream either. It still works, and is strong enough to use it in my basement for a streaming computer. The wifi is kaput though, so not much good for coffee shops. And, of course, with a 17″ screen, a DVD writer, and a few other internal bells and whistles, it’s firmly in the luggable category too.

Family influencers

A few years ago, Andrea jettisoned her desktop in favour of a laptop. It is plugged into a docking port that connects her to an external mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and a monitor, and it serves her well. Well, it did until the hard drive died recently. She was ready to ditch it entirely and get a new one, so I thought I’d pay for a simple repair and use it as my portable machine. Bigger than I wanted, but not horrendous, even if still in the luggable category. Except it wasn’t that much to fix, it didn’t take too long, and by the time it came back, she hadn’t replaced it yet. So she just took it back. But it made me start thinking about a new laptop of some sort.

Last year in March, as the lockdown began, it was clear Jacob would be using a computer a lot more than he had. We considered the one he had in the office upstairs, a full-size desktop option, but we were leaning towards something a bit more suited to his interests. The one he had was a repurposed desktop that Andrea or I had used previously, and it got him going, but if he was going to be online all the time for school, maybe something a little nicer was in order than just what was doable for occasional surfing or playing.

We debated similar issues to what I needed. He was going to use it as a desktop replacement, so we were going to get some power. He has some eye issues, so a larger screen was also warranted and likely all the time (not just plugging into a larger monitor). And he was starting to get into gaming. There was a nice gaming laptop on sale at the time, way more power than he was going to need for awhile, and twice the cost of the type of laptop that would “do him for now”. We took the plunge. Of all the things we did in the last 16m, I think it was one of the best decisions. Jacob LOVES the computer and its power.

Enter the dragon

The dragon is my messed up head. I started thinking I wanted a new portable tool for writing, or simply anything I could use upstairs instead of always working in the basement where my office is set up. I spend the whole day down there, I don’t really enjoy coming down here at night too. But if I’m doing stuff on my computer, this is the computer I use.

I thought I was going to have Andrea’s used laptop and she would get a new one, but she ended up keeping hers. I like the power of Jacob’s computer and he has even been able to use it well at the cottage, but it’s more than I would need. My solutions? Not so effective.

We have been considering picking up a new iPad with a keyboard and having that as an extra tool around the family room, kitchen, etc. We have an old one already (Gen 2), plus Jacob’s (Gen 3, I think?), and they’re okay, but not awesome. Not something we would grab to play on, too slow by contemporary standards. And I’m leery about relying on it for writing anyway (given drainage of the battery from using Bluetooth connections constantly).

So I’m back to the same eternal question…full desktop replacement or portable tool? The solution is relatively obvious for me. I have a properly working desktop, upgraded within the last year, and I love the current power. I don’t need to change it. Ergo, I’m only looking for a portable tool. The WGI option again.

Possible dream dates

I did my due diligence online, but there is only so far you can go in internet research to know what you want. A friend lent me a Chromebook recently which is almost all I want. It lets me write, it can access the internet through wifi, and the footprint is about right. But the specific model has a keyboard that’s a bit wonky for layout (including one key in a really awkward position that I hate), and I found it limiting for my work. It does run, of course, Chrome OS instead of Windows, and a limited form of Chrome OS at that, so I couldn’t load an app version of Word even. I had to rely solely on Google Docs. Doable, but not really ideal. Almost, and the price was right. But not the dream.

So tonight I went off to Canada Computers first. I checked out three or four different models that they had, and it quickly became clear that I’m likely aiming for a 13.5-14″ screen. That’s on the smaller size for availability although there are some 12.5″ models too. The screens are all way above my needs, and the power is likely to come out to an i5 Intel option or Ryzen 5. They benchmark almost equally at the moment, and I don’t have a preference. The background for the size is almost comical though. I have a great shoulder bag that I got at MEC maybe ten years ago. I love it. And so I want a computer that will fit inside it. Anything bigger than 15″ for screen size is really challenging for that option. Don’t get me wrong, I have other bags, including a full padded knapsack. But it isn’t the dream. I want it small enough to fit in my shoulder bag.

One computer looked great until I checked the reviews and tested that aspect myself. A few reviews said the keyboard was compact, almost cramped, but on a small footprint, there’s not much you can do about that. It’s as wide as it is. Except on the one, it was also cramped for depth (keyboard to function keys). When I typed and went to hit the space bar, my thumb was tapping the trackpad. And not even “close” to hitting the space bar. My hands and fingers are just too big / fat for such a layout design. Pass.

Another one from HP was decently priced, good look, backlighting was a bit odd, but whatever. My current laptop is HP and I’ve got a lot of value out of it, so I was willing to consider it. It felt like I was typing on something made by Mattel. A toy, not a workhorse. Pass.

Asus has a series of small footprint laptops called Vivobooks, and I found a workable model. The right price and size, the keyboard feel was fine, as was the layout. I wasn’t 100% sold though, and battery life is not quite as high for the model they had in stock. I didn’t need to buy tonight, and there were some other brands to consider.

I headed next to Best Buy. I ended out checking out another HP model (Envy) that hadn’t been on my list yet probably should have been, but I wasn’t a fan of the keyboard again, and it was the same price as others that were better on specs. Pass.

I considered the Vivobook models as well as some Acer setups, but nothing was drawing me in. Nice but no sale.

And then I thought, not for the first time, “I really like the Microsoft Surface Pro that I use for work, too bad they’re so expensive.” It really does all I need it to do, but work paid for it. I had seen MS Surface options in the $2K range in the past, well outside what I wanted to pay.

But I happened to see on one of the review sites that there was an MS Surface option for less. What the …? Ohhhhhh, there is regular and then there is Pro. Well, what are the regular ones like? Slick as sh**.

I’m sure I’d like the Pro models more, but the regular new version 4s are equal to what I have on my desk for work. It runs full Windows so I can run 64-bit Word. I have enough power to do all my internet stuff, including editing blogs. I can do some basic gaming, and some basic video stuff no problem. And battery life? Off the charts. They rate it to 19h, but even the PC Mag benchmarks put them in the 15-16h range for video usage. If I took it to the cottage, I could likely use it for three or four sessions without having to recharge. Around the house? Maybe five or six outings. And it is well within my budget. Sign me up, amirite?

Well, no, cuz there are 4 different models. Son of a biscuit. There’s a really nice 12.5″ footprint, but I feel the typing is a bit challenged. Another in the 13.5″ that is highly doable, another in 14″ and then options that are either tablet-y or 2-in-1 foldables. All reasonably within a couple of hundred dollars as each other. I even considered one that would take a SIM card. But I ruled it out, dumped the tablet-y one, passed on 12.5, went with 13.5.

Whew, all settled.

Everyone wakes from the dream

I want to take it with me to the cottage, I have 10d to get the laptop and get it set up, plenty of time. Except none of the Best Buys within 300km have ANY in stock. Are you freaking kidding me?

I grabbed the info for the model I want, I’ll do some more searching tomorrow online, but in the meantime, I trotted down the road to Staples. Hey, look, there’s one! Same price, same model, all good. Oh wait, small distraction, there’s an open-box version of an older model, really sharp and small, $300 less. I feel like Red Leader was talking in my ear, “Stay on target…”.

Copy that, Red Leader. I’ll stick to the 13.5″ model, MS Surface 4. Great, let’s do that one. Oh wait, they don’t have THAT model in stock. There is, however, the same model with an extra 256GB of SSD space, only a measly $400 more. Umm, no. For way less than that, I can use a USB key or upload to the cloud. None of the base models in stock. Frack.

I really thought I was coming home tonight with a lightweight, small footprint laptop with long battery life. I was SO happy that I had it figured out. Alas, the quest continues. Sure, at least I’ve assembled the clues into a coherent map, but that isn’t the same as grabbing the Holy Grail.