{"id":7422,"date":"2015-11-12T10:30:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T18:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=7422"},"modified":"2015-11-15T17:17:26","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T01:17:26","slug":"change-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/change-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Change Everything At Once"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"logosI don\u2019t like change. \u00a0When I finally decided to spin off\u00a0Chit Chat Across the Pond into its own podcast I told you about all the things I haven\u2019t changed in my life in decades. But once you start changing things, it gets easier and more tempting to keep changing things up. \u00a0It\u2019s almost like change causes\u00a0more<\/em> change. \u00a0You\u2019ll see in\u00a0this story that it was a cascading effect that has really gotten me \u00a0out of my comfort zone but I\u2019m enjoying the ride.<\/p>\n

Since I was changing the podcast, it seemed like a good idea to change my recording software at the same time. Instead of\u00a0GarageBand, I started using\u00a0Amadeus Pro<\/a>. \u00a0Instead of using iTunes to add the ID3 tags I started using ID3 Editor<\/a>. \u00a0ID3 tags are those are the little bits of information about the audio file, like my name, the fact that the show is clean, and the artwork. I chose ID3 Editor because it had a scriptable command line that would make Dorothy squeal with delight.\u00a0Levelator, the software that I use for making the audio levels consistent broke in El Capitan but I had just changed over to using\u00a0Auphonic to level the audio (and bring it up to loudness standards) so that was yet another change.<\/p>\n

Well if the podcasts\u00a0have changed, we\u2019ve got new artwork, three new applications for the audio, maybe I should rethink how I write the blog posts. \u00a0For a decade\u00a0I\u2019ve been using Feeder from\u00a0reinventedsoftware.com<\/a>\u00a0to create my giant blog posts of doom (\u2122 Donald Burr) but it wasn\u2019t really designed for this particular task, it\u2019s designed to create the podcast feed that delivers the audio files to you. \u00a0Feeder is still essential to the podcast process, but it was time to torture another developer with my blogging needs.<\/p>\n

So I bought\u00a0MarsEdit from http:\/\/red-sweater.com<\/a>. \u00a0MarsEdit is pretty cool and I\u2019ll go into it more later, but it\u2019s\u00a0designed to write blog posts, add images (I used to FTP them by hand and then link to them even though Feeder could have handled that) and helps with easy categories and tagging. Remember when I said the first change caused a cascading effect of change? You would think changing my blogging software would have no effect on my web server hosting plan…but you’d be wrong. \u00a0<\/p>\n

When I first ran MarsEdit, it pulled down all of my existing content so that it was in sync with my entire website which was awesome. But think about how much data<\/em> is on podfeet.com after more than a decade! \u00a0Downloading all of that content caused a ton of remote procedure calls, which my web hosting company, Bluehost,\u00a0thought was an attack so they blacklisted my IP address from my own website!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not blaming them, in fact I’m VERY glad that they have protections against remote attacks like this. I called them up and they let me back in. They said they could whitelist me for 72 hours but if it started happening again I’d have to call back.<\/p>\n

I chatted with Daniel, the developer of\u00a0MarsEdit about this, and he suggested I have my host whitelist the user agent string for\u00a0MarsEdit. \u00a0Back to the Bluehost I went, but they\u00a0explained that because I was on a shared hosting plan that wasn\u2019t possible because it would affect other domains. \u00a0A while back I upgraded from \u201cregular\u201d shared hosting, which is thousands of sites on one physical server to Pro shared hosting which is only<\/em> ~400 sites on the same server. <\/p>\n

My new best friend Cody at\u00a0Bluehost asked whether I\u2019d considered a dedicated host. I knew that was about 5X the price so I said no, but he suggested a VPS, or Virtual Private Server. \u00a0This is just like the virtual machines we can create on our Macs and PCs; they host several virtual machine servers on a single box. When you create a VM you dedicate a specific number of processors and RAM to each virtual server, which means you’re not sharing those resources with anyone else..<\/p>\n

Cody checked the pricing and told me that it was only about $5\/month more after some fees I’d have to pay up front. That sounded great to me. I’m going to fast forward through a few things here, but here’s a couple of important bits.<\/p>\n

Cody suggested we do the transfer to the VPS in the middle of the night, but evidently did not understand quite how this works. In the morning I was greeted by a tweet from alert\u00a0NosillaCastaway Michael Price showing me a blue screen indicating that podfeet.com was unavailable.<\/p>\n

\"Podfeet<\/p>\n

It turns out that even though I was paying for a static iP, they had moved me to a different<\/em> static IP on the VPS. A quick call to Bluehost who explained what happened, jump over to my domain registrar GoDaddy and change the A-Record and we were back in business.<\/p>\n

The scary part though was something else he didn’t know. When we talked about the VPS, I absolutely asked him whether they were still my system admins for this server, and that they would keep it all patched up and such. He was wrong. I discovered AFTER the server migration that Allison is now a Linux System Admin. <\/p>\n

Well, even though I have tamed that terminal and all, I am NOT a Linux admin! I considered dialing back to the old plan, but I had already fallen in love with how WICKED fast podfeet.com had become! Seriously, whatever you’re doing right now, go over and click around on the site, you’ll be AMAZED at how fast it is!!! I couldn’t bear to give that up.<\/p>\n

I then realized that I know a Linux sys admin who I would trust with my website, so over the next year, Bart says he\u2019s going to teach me to care for it myself. \u00a0We\u2019ll see how well THAT works out for him in the long run!<\/p>\n

I almost forgot, one more cool thing about the VPS, I get a terabyte of bandwidth, which means I could potentially host the podcast files on my own server, cutting out Libsyn! \u00a0This would help me partially recoup the costs of the VPS. \u00a0I\u2019ve got to do some ciphering on how that would work though because there\u2019s a 30GB cap on storage but I think it could work. I might also just start hosting the files over on archive.org. It’s not the fastest downloads on earth but Tom Merritt hosts his files there so if it’s good enough for his level of traffic, I bet you guys wouldl be ok with it!<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s recap – change the podcast itself, the audio software, the leveling software, the ID3 tagging software, the blogging software, the web hosting plan, the podcast hosting location\u2026all that\u2019s left is to completely redo the website! \u00a0See what I meant at the beginning? \u00a0Once\u00a0I start to change, I simply can\u2019t stop!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t like change. \u00a0When I finally decided to spin off\u00a0Chit Chat Across the Pond into its own podcast I told you about all the things I haven\u2019t changed in my life in decades. But once you start changing things, it gets easier and more tempting to keep changing things up. \u00a0It\u2019s almost like change […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7422"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7453,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422\/revisions\/7453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}