I received an email from my web host Site5 while I was at the cricket on Tuesday, saying this site had been suspended because it was using too many system resources (CPU and memory) for shared hosting.

“Your account is consuming about 10.66% of CPU resources on a shared server, which is not a fair share,” the message said.

“We had no choice but to block the web access of following script to stabilize the server. Because resources are shared, I’m sure you can understand that we need to take action if one site is causing downtime for dozens of other sites.”

I actually don’t fully understand why the site was suspended without warning, but that’s another issue. Being at the cricket I had no way of taking immediate remedial action anyhow.

According to Google Analytics, this site receives about 300 visitors per day, which by itself should not consume excessive server resources.

However, it’s always good to keep the house tidy so I was happy to review and implement several measures.

1) Once at home I installed WP Super Cache. This plugin generates static html files from a dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated, the web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

As it currently stands, about 24 hours after my site was restored, the cache holds 9.89MB with 13 pages and 124 expired pages.

2) I also installed the WP Smush.it plugin and smushed all my images.

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality.

It took about an hour to bulk process all my pictures, and I noticed that most were being reduced in size by around 30 percent.

3) I deleted post revisions from the database and optimized the database.

4) I removed the Daily Stats plugin, which may or may not have been adding to server load. It certainly had a hefty database table of 2MB, which I deleted.

5) I removed several inactive plugins.

Bad Behavior plugin

6) Late yesterday I installed the Bad Behavior plugin. I had used this plugin previously, but encountered some problems with it. So far, it’s working okay this time.

Bad Behavior works by screening all requests to block email harvesters and malicious robots.

Bad Behavior analyses the HTTP headers, IP address and other metadata regarding the request to determine if it is spammy or malicious.

In just under 24 hours, Bad Behavior has blocked 839 attempted visits. That seems an extraordinary number and is probably why the system resources are being strained. An example of the log is pictured below.

According to the FAQ: “By preventing spambots and other malicious bots from ever accessing any of your pages, your bandwidth usage and server load will drop significantly. How much depends on how many malicious bots visit your site regularly. It can also help prevent a denial of service where your Web host shuts off your account because spambots were using up all the available resources.”

That’s what I want to achieve, of course, a reduction in use of system resources.

Site5 emailed me again this morning to say there has been an improvement in that regard, down to 6.81 percent, but more needs to be done.

I’m hoping that if Bad Behavior does its job, there will be a more significant reduction in the next couple of days.

If anyone has encountered any difficulty using this site, please let me know.

Firstly, I switched theme to the Genesis Framework, but retained the previous color scheme using the Streamline child theme.

That required me to revise some SEO settings. I also started adding “featured images” to old posts so they show up in archives and related post links using nrelate.

While browsing old posts I updated some and deleted others. In doing so, I noticed a lot of broken links and missing images.

Unfortunately, some of the free images hosts I had used in the past were no longer online. I’ve decided to store most of the pictures myself from now on.

Broken links were a different, bigger problem. This site has been running for nearly nine years and has more than 4300 links.

Most useful plugin

Many of the pages I linked to have either disappeared or changed. The prospect of manually checking every link in 2000 posts was mind boggling.

That leads me to comment on possibly the most useful WordPress plugin I have ever encountered.

Broken Link Checker saved me an awful lot of time and grief.

Once installed, it ran a check and informed me I had about 600 broken links, including missing images.

It listed them and gave me options for what to do. Initially, I chose to indicate they were broken links and tell search engines not to follow them.

I then began the laborious process of repairing or removing them; not as laborious as it would have been though without this plugin.

Some highlights from the plugin description:

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll) and other content and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of the WP admin panel. The “Broken Links” tab will by default display a list of broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links, working or not, instead.

There are several actions associated with each link.

Despite the magic of this plugin, not every link on this site will necessarily be working properly. Some have been redirected to home pages, holding pages or even to advertisements.

The plugin tells me there are 662 redirects, which in most cases will be fine, but I will check them nevertheless.

Overall however, the site is now much tidier, with fewer errors and hopefully no missing pictures.

Now I’m just looking for a way to bulk edit tags and categories across multiple posts.

PivotX is partly built with jQuery, Smarty, TinyMCE, PHP and MySQL.

I’ve got no intention of abandoning WordPress, but it’s interesting to experiment with alternatives like sNews and PivotX.

WordPress is such a large community now; there are so many themes and plugins to choose from.

My first impressions of returning to PivotX are positive. Setting up and making basic template changes were intuitive, at least for someone experienced with editing WordPress templates.

The features I particularly liked were the search and tag pages. Clicking on a tag link takes you predictably to a list of entries, but also shows related tags, external search summaries and a Flickr feed. Very neat!

On the downside, I couldn’t find a contact form extension and I wasn’t able to successfully insert an HTML form.

PivotX doesn’t have that many themes or plugins, but does have a large enough community to offer reasonable documentation and a constructive support forum.

It’s worth considering for self-hosted bloggers, that’s for sure.

Here’s a back-end screenshot:

More screenshots here.

Update #1: I figured out how to add forms. There is an “extra” template file, which can be renamed and modified with HTML or javascript. In fact, you could use any template file, but I created two for “contact” and email subscription.

Update #2: I received a twitter message that this isn’t a very thorough review. Well, I did say they are first impressions. Also, for the record, I am not a developer or a designer, just a long-time blogger. I will update my thoughts on PivotX here as I continue to explore the software.

Update #3, more likes:

• It’s very easy to create templates for special pages and sidebars.
• The site loads more quickly than a WordPress blog with lots of plugins.
• TinyMCE is built in and works, which means WYSIWYG.

Have you tried PivotX? If so, please comment here.

Update: Although I liked PivotX, I have discontinued the trial site for other reasons.

The latest stats show that Akismet has blocked 81,016 spam comments for an accuracy rate of 99.83 percent. Good work!

I was having some performance trouble with the site and my web host began complaining about CPU strain.

After checking the error log I disabled numerous plugins and decided simplicity was best, for the short term at least.

I claim to have designed this theme myself, although it was based on a free Revolution theme by Brian Gardner.

The plugin enables users to display a configurable number of random links.

I’ve never used the WordPress links feature much, but plan to change that now. I was concerned about creating long blogrolls that nobody would ever read, and which all visitors (including me) would find boring, a waste of space and difficult to use.

This plugin solves the problem by controlling the number of links displayed and making them random.

One problem I encountered is that I don’t use widgets in the sidebar. I’m a WordPress dinosaur who prefers to code the sidebar myself.

It was simple enough to remedy because the plugin author provides PHP code for the blogroll to appear in a page.

It’s a little awkward because you have to set the widget options first and then remove it.

I also had to edit the plugin file to remove references to the title, which would otherwise have been duplicated with the wrong style.

If anyone wants a more detailed explanation they can contact me or comment below.

Here are the problems and solutions. All require editing the style.css file in the theme directory. Make sure to backup the file if you’re doing an automatic upgrade.

I’ll add some tips later for tweaking the theme to show pages.

1) When adding a title, the text ends up under the image and not in its own “column”.
2) The float: left of the avatar image pushes down the author info about 30px.

Solution:

Find: #main ul#postlist li {
Add: display: inline-block;

3) If you press “reply” in a post or in a comment in P2 with IE7, CSS puts a space between form and submit button.

Solution:

Find: #main #respond, .textedit {
Add: height:1%;

Update (May 14): I’ve discovered the solution to 2 & 3 triggers a display problem in Firefox. Tonight I’ll look at creating a separate stylesheet for IE7.

Update (May 15): I create a separate stylesheet called iestyle.css for IE7 which adds the line mentioned above. In header.php I added: