[dropcap]For[/dropcap] something over year now we’ve been using a page/file caching system on this site to speed up page delivery. It’s been working flawlessly and I’ve been quite happy with it. The caching engine is part of a multi-feature site security package called WordFence we use and it has helped speed things up tremendously. Yesterday I received notice from WordFence that they intend to remove the caching engine from their program in a few weeks. This has sent me on a quest to find a new caching engine to replace it.

I’ll be trying out some different caching engines over the next week or so, so be prepared for things to variously work fast, work slow, depending one what I’m up to. It will likely take some time to get a new cache working and tweaked. I installed one earlier today only to discover that it broke the lightbox effect for pictures in the News feed. Not acceptable.

For some reason a few back end services on this website have stopped working, and I have no idea what the problem is. First the emails that get sent out to people who’ve subscribed to CLA News updates via email are not getting sent any more. No idea why. These emails are sent by WordPress.com and I’ve checked and they still have the email addresses on file and they’re aware of new posts and everything looks like it should be working, but it ain’t. The notification emails just aren’t getting sent when a new article is posted.

Second, the mechanism that automagically submits new posts to the Clary Lake Association Facebook page is failing, without error and without explanation. For the time being I’m manually posting links to new articles on Facebook and will continue to do so until things are working again.

I suspect both problems are related. Hopefully I’ll figure out what’s wrong and get it fixed or it will just miraculously start working again, I’m OK with that happening.

I’ve added a clickable Site Map listing all the pages on the website in alphabetical order. You’ll find it in two places, first under the Home main menu heading and as a text link on the right sidebar right under the Search box. This site map won’t be of interest to most people but those trying to navigate the site with a touch screen tablet, phone, or other mobile device may find it useful. Each top level page of the map corresponds to a Main Menu Heading  (i.e., About, News, Charts & Data, etc.) and consists of a page that lists all the sub-pages under that heading. Note that the actual Main Menu Headings themselves at the top of each page are not links (with the exception of Home and Branch Pond) so clicking on them doesn’t do anything but show you the drop down menu but if you select one of those top level links from the Site Map, you’ll go to the page which shows a list of sub-pages under that heading.

You’ll perhaps also notice that not all the pages shown on the map actually show up under any of the main menu headings. This is not a mistake! The Site Map page is dynamically generated so theoretically it should update with changes, additions and deletions automatically.

The need for a Site Map came about as a result of changes I made to the menu system last month, changes which made things generally work better for most people but which also broke navigation for a small subset of other people, most notably iPod and iPhone users. A site map can give people on certain touch-screen devices easier access to the links they’re looking for.

Putting together this site map should have been cake-easy but I built a good deal of this site back in 2013 when I was still learning how to use WordPress. As a result, there wasn’t much organization in my page layout and almost no hierarchy. Figuring out what I’d done and in some cases rearranging or creating the page hierarchy from scratch has been a bit challenging. Also, a few pages and/or links to files got lost in the process. As I find errors, I’ll correct them. Feel free to bring broken links to my attention. You’ll find the new Site Map below: Continue reading →

Clary Cam3

[dropcap]ClaryCam2[/dropcap] is back up and running again and due to a fortuitous (or not) set of circumstances we’ve expanded our coverage of Clary Lake by adding a third cam designated Clary_Cam3 (picture at left). This new cam is located right next to Clary_Cam1 on the Fergusson shoreline on the south side of the lake, and it points roughly NNE towards the Grant/Gillette property over on the Northeast shore. While I’ve toyed with the idea of putting up a 3rd camera in the past, I hadn’t planned on doing it any time soon. To make a long story short however, the original Clary_Cam2 camera turned out not to have been damaged at all by the lightning strike, but this fact wasn’t discovered until after David Hodsdon had already ordered and received a drop-in replacment camera. So after we reinstalled the original Clary_Cam2 hardware this morning and got it up and running, I made David an offer on the new camera that he couldn’t refuse. It didn’t take me long to get it too up and running.

Between these 3 cameras over 95% of Clary Lake is covered by Clary_cams. The Google Earth image at left shows the rough Fields of View (FOV) of the 3 cameras. There are only a few coves on the south shore and a small gore between the coverage of Cams 2 and 3 that don’t appear on a photograph.

You’ll find all 3 cameras on the revised Clary Lake Webcams page. For now all 3 cameras are uploading photographs to the webserver ever 2 minutes. As I find the time I’ll work to get the remote access funtionality working better for those of you who like to log into the cameras and see real-time video. However, be advised that the networking mumbo-jumbo required to get people out on the internet happily passing packets on a certain port with a certain camera located behind a router, behind a firewall, behind a cable modem with a dynamic IP address (subject to change!) is non-trivial… Anything that can go wrong often does go wrong with the result being a failure to connect.

If anyone is trying to connect in real time and is having trouble, please contact me. Remote access to Clary_Cam2 is currently working for me. No guarantees how long that will continue!

Off and on for the past 24 hours or so one of the web sites on our web server was under a socalled “Brute Force Amplification Attack” by someone with an IP address originating from inside Russia. While only one site hosted on the server was under direct attack, service was was at least partially disrupted for all sites hosted on the server. If you’ve had trouble getting to our site last night or this morning, now you know why. Fortunately the attack was detected before the target site was compromised, so no permanent damage was done or data compromised. This kind of activity is unfortunately all too common now days.

To thwart the attack we have temporarily blocked incoming and outgoing connections to the web server from all locations outside the continental US and Canada. Unfortunately has had the side effect of breaking some of our site functionality. In particular, the weather widget in the sidebar (it actually gets it’s data from a place in England of all places) and a few other back end systems are not functioning yet. We should have full functionality restored by sometime tonight.

Never a dull minute.

I was using my Nexus 7 tablet earlier today to poke around this website and was shocked and amazed to see how difficult the menu system was to navigate using a touch screen on a tablet or phone. The problem was that the top level menu items for the most part all had links associated with them which makes it challenging-to-impossible to select a sub-item on a touch screen. I mean, good luck. This is not a problem with a Mac or PC using a mouse because you can hover over the menu heading and then click on the link you want in the drop down menu

FIXED: now only those main menu headings with no submenus (currently only Home and Branch Pond) have links associated with them. The rest require you to select a page from the drop down list. To get to this news page for example, you can touch (or hover over) the News main menu heading and then touch (or click) the first item on the list, News and Comment. I don’t think I dropped any pages in the process, but if you see something missing, let me know.

While on the subject of site updates/changes, I’ve also added the current water level to the top right side of the screen, right above the search box. Because I can. It gets updated automagically whenever I update the water level charts which is usually daily around 7:30 am this time of year. The lake level is currently at -67.80″ below the top of the dam. You’ve never seen it this low.

Not a working form! Look on the right side of the page!

A quick reminder to those of you who don’t want to miss anything new on the Clary Lake Association website but can’t seem to find your way here on a regular basis, you can signup to receive email notifications of new posts on the site. If you want to try this out, on the right-hand sidebar on (almost) any page on the site, usually right under the Weather “widget” look for the “Subscribe to Clary Lake Association News via Email” item (pictured above). Just enter your email address in the field provided and click the “Subscribe” button. You’ll shortly receive an email with the subject line “Confirm your subscription for Clary Lake Association” that provides a “Confirm Follow” button to click. Rest assured that your email address will not get shared or revealed to anyone. This will not generate spam or unsolicited emails, only notifications of new posts.

Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll receive a single email when a new article is posted to the site including an excerpt to pique your curiosity, and a link to click on to take you to the article. At the bottom of the email is an Unsubscribe link in case you want to stop receiving emails and a “manage your email settings” link to fine-tune how you receive notifications.

I hope you consider taking advantage of this neat site feature; a couple of dozen people have already signed up. This service is provided by WordPress, the people that are write the software used on this site. If you’re a busy person or just can’t remember to check here as often as you would like, try out post notifications. I’ll be posting a link to this post under the “Site Help” main menu heading.

I’ve revised/updated a couple of pages on the site and want to bring the changes to your attention. First some time in the past 2 weeks the data table on the Clary Lake Water Monitoring Data page and needed to be rebuilt. I ended up replacing it with a really cool table system that allows you to do stuff like sort the data on any column. As it turns out, being able to sort the data can reveal some interesting trends.

The other change is to the Clary Lake Water Level Charts page. Though it doesn’t really look all that different, the changes to the back end system are significant. Updates are now mostly automated making it much easier for me to maintain and update the page. The most time consuming part is still walking down to the lake to make the measurement which is a ritual I have become so used to I don’t even think about it any more. Also, page updates (which happen almost daily) can be done without the site cache clearing itself which will improve overall site performance. The cache will still clear periodically, but it no longer does so daily simple because of a minor page update.

One of these days I’ll get a new camera for the Clary Lake webcam. There’s currently no money in the budget for it.

Websites are a lot like cars and webmasters are a lot like gear heads. We’re always trying to make our websites look better, do more, and go faster. Once upon a time, websites mostly consisted of a bunch of static text files linked together with the relatively simple HTML markup language to format the text, insert pictures, and make links to other pages and sites. Now days, most web pages are actually dynamically generated by program code usually executing on the server side and sometimes both on the server and in your web browser, and it’s done each time, when a visitor requests the page. This can add considerably load to the web server and slow down the generation of pages. I’m sure you’ll agree, there’s nothing worse than a slow website.

One easy way to speed up a website is to implement page caching so that frequently requested pages are dynamically generated once by a caching engine and then served up many times, rather than being dynamically generated by the server each time the page is requested. This reduces server load and increases page delivery times. Some caching engines can also cache web pages as compressed files which can be delivered as-is if the visitor’s browser knows how to handle compressed files. There are other tricks to improve performance, and you can get some impressive speed improvements using these techniques. I’ve been using a rudimentary caching engine on this site for some time now but I decided to look at other options and after some research I settled on a new higher performance engine which promises noticeable speed improvement. Best of all, it’s free.

The downside to caching and the reason I’m posting about this at all is that you run the risk of delivering old content if the caching engine doesn’t pick up on the fact that a page has been changed. I don’t expect this to be a problem but wanted everyone to be aware of what’s going on here, server-side. Browsers also cache files so the problem can be compounded. Usually, hitting the reload button on your browser will result in getting the most up-to-date file. This new caching engine is pretty good about deciding when it should deliver a cached page and when it should generate a new page. This new caching engine is highly configurable: certain pages (such as our funky Webcam page) can be designated “Don’t Cache.” 

I’ve updated the 14 September 2015 post entitled: Attorneys for PPM & AQF file reply in support of their motion to amend to correct a bad link to the September 11th document filed by the lawyers for Pleasant Pond Mill LLC and Aquafortis Associates LLC.

In the future, if you encounter a bad or broken link on this site PLEASE bring it to my attention. Email me or leave comment. Thank you.