Category: Blogs

I have acquired a rather large UPS. Used of course, but wasn’t of much use to its previous owner. I also have come across a quad-Xeon workstation, with 16GB of RAM, which I think would make a splendid server for the blog. I’ve had the Xeon for a while, actually, but what’s kept me using the older box is that it’s pretty miserly with electricity, giving it a nice run time on UPS power. Well, now I have a big honkin’ UPS, so that’s less of a concern.

But the quad-Xeon is much faster, and has twice the RAM. The only issue is, I’m using dmraid (FakeRaid) in the current box to do mirroring, because I was short sighted, and didn’t think through the consequences. Ordinarily, I’d just move the mirrored pair over, and things should be fine. But I have to break the dmraid pair, and convert to to Linux software RAID. This is doable, but a bit of a PITA. So I need to do this after hours. I think I can make the transition without incurring any serious downtime.

My plan so far is to remove one drive from the current mirror, and let it run degraded. Set up a degraded software mirror on the new system with the drive I took out, and then copy data from the current box over, while live. Once the new box is running as a copy, albeit an outdated one, briefly shut down the current box and update the files that have changed. After that I should be able to come up on the new server, add the other drive, rebuild the mirrored pair, and we’re good to go.

Looks like it’s all the rage today. At least I’m in good company, but I completely understand feeling stuck with a name that you just don’t think works for you. As Glenn Reynolds notes,

“Pajamas TV sounded a little too Hefneresque (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so it quickly became PJTV, and now Pajamas Media is being “rebranded” as PJ Media.”

It’s funny because I had considered changing the blog name to SIH for a bit, but was talked out of it. Ultimately I just decided to jettison the old name entirely. So far, I don’t think it’s worked out too badly, despite the fact we had a few little issues here and there. Hopefully PJ Media will have a successful transition as well.

Welcome to “Shall Not Be Questioned.” It is our new brand. A few moments ago, I loaded up Snowflakes in Hell for the last time, did an ‘/etc/init.d/apache2 reload’ and we shan’t be looking back. I wanted a name that directly related to our topic, to where we live, and what we talk about. So, what about the newness?

• Well, as you can see there are ads. I’ve tried to make them relatively unobtrusive. Currently most of them are placeholders, because we are just starting selling ads. They should fill up once I get approved by AdSense, and once we start selling on blogads.
• Comments are now threaded, and you can edit comments for a brief, fixed period of time, or delete them.
• Obviously the look and feel is different. I wanted kind of an old document look, so I tried to achieve that.
• Otherwise, as you can see, the content is the same as Snowflakes in Hell. This quite literally was just a rebranding.

I hope you’ll all keep coming by. I will continue to tweak the look and feel as time wears on. If you have me on your blogroll, the old domain will work fine, but the new domain name is pagunblog.com. Shorter to type. Even I got sick of typing snowflakesinhell.com all the time. Now on to fix a few issues.

UPDATE on Ads:

You should be able to get a pretty good idea of where the ads will be going once I start getting the approvals I need. The index pages are more heavily loaded with ads, because most of them aren’t’ being used by regular readers. But we have the 728×90 leader board banner, the 300×250 side banner, and between the post and comments section a 300×250 banner. I also put some Amazon recommendations on the sidebar. We don’t get cash for those, but we get some Amazon credit every once in a while if people click through and then buy anything (even if it’s not what I recommended). The index pages are populated with 300×250 ads between posts that have more than 200 words. All are available for sale through blogads. When ads are not being sold, they will default to Google ads, or the top will be Lucky Gunner. We should receive money from these ads through sales, or through the affiliate relationship through Google and LG.

Your big money making ads are the leaderboard 728×90 and 300×250. From advice from a friend, and through my own research, I have found this to be the case. So I have opted for fewer, higher revenue ads, rather than many lower revenue ones. I will try to keep them tasteful, but I won’t have full control.

We are nearly ready to switch to our new brand. This is a difficult thing for me, because in order to do the transition, I essentially have to put a bullet into snowflakesinhell.com, which I’ve spent the better part of 5 years building up, and never look back.

Not that the domain will stop working. I’ll configure my web server to send out a 301 redirect to the new domain name, which will make it completely transparent to end users, and Google will figure it all out and move the domain internally too. But I will take some hit in page rank, from what I’m seeing. Something like 5 to 10 percent, which may or may not even be noticeable.

The real nail biter is that once I do it, it’ll cost me even more to go back. No finding out something didn’t work as well, and just switch everything back to the way it was. Once we move into SIH 2.0, soon to have a different name and domain, that’ll be it. No turning back.

Of course, I could get cold feet and back out. But I’ve put two weeks of work into experimenting with new looks and new feels, have gone through three different themes, and had woes signing up with the standard advertising outfits. We are going to proceed forward. Very soon. After I’ve had enough to drink :)

I’m going try to do a cutover this weekend, and get started with the all new blog. I’ve already spent way too much time on this than I should have, but I’m picky about getting the look and feel right, and striking a balance between running ads that have a reasonable return on space investment, and ad placement that’s not annoying. I also need to work on how to cut the tables from here over that contain all the new posts and comments, without blowing away the new configuration on my copy. If it doesn’t happen, it means I ran into problems. If I do this right, you shouldn’t notice anything. If I really do it right, you could be reading, click to the next post, and bang… new blog.

I finally made a development copy of Snowflakes in Hell to start working on our new look. Our new look will include ads, but I’m going to do my best to keep them tasteful. I’m not going to take huge flashing banner ads or anything like that. I’ll do my best to boot ads that I find annoying.

There’s just not really any way I can continue to justify the expense of keeping the blog running with all the hope and change that’s happening lately. This blog should, by my projections, make enough to cover costs, and that’s all I’m really looking for. No one is going to get rich running a gun blog.

But the biggest change you’ll probably notice, unless I can’t make my idea for it work (I’m a horrible graphic artist), is a name change for the blog. With the exception of the name, and a new look and feel, it’ll be the same blog. Same posts, same archives, and same comments as always. If links worked before, they’ll still work. I am looking at implementing a few requested enhancements people asked for.

I picked the name “Snowflakes in Hell” hastily, never thinking I’d keep this up. Ever since I passed the 1000 visitors a day mark, I’ve hated it. I’ve also hated it when I introduce myself as a blogger, and I get a weird look from the uninitiated when I tell them the name. Rather than talking about the blog, I get to spend the first 10 minutes explaining the name. I’ve also, rather humorously, heard people that did not know I was Sebastian mention they found something on this site “Snowflakes in Hell,” but they didn’t understand what kind of site it was. With my name and theme, who can blame them? I want a theme and a name that draws people in. I think a more relevant name and theme will be necessary to take this blog to the next level, and continue to grow my audience, and improve my brand.

There will be a new URL associated with the new blog name, but the old URL will still be 100% functional if you’re a creature of habit. RSS feeds should continue to work as normal. We will still be blogging here as Sebastian and Bitter. I hope you’ll all keep reading, and I hope you like the new look and feel.

UPDATE: I should say “working on a new look and feel” = “battling endlessly with poor WordPress themes and plugins.” Snowflakes in Hell makes use of about a dozen plugins. Many of them don’t work nicely with these newfangled highly configurable themes. I’m having all kinds of problems getting some of them to work.

Getting some nibbles in the job search again. Had to respond to a few people today on that front. Then the drip tray under my grill gave out because it had rusted through. I had my eye on a nice 500 dollar Weber grill, but then the job went away. I’m going to try to rig a makeshift drip tray so I can keep grilling.

Blogging will resume shortly, if I can find something to blog about. I haven’t even looked yet today.