The Blogging Essay Competition ended on January 14th but I have been giving the latest few entries some time to catch up in the number of votes. People were still voting on the entries till about a week ago when interest dropped. If you have not read through the entries or voted, I am sure the authors would appreciate your encouragement. I will tally the results at the end of this week and post the winners on Sunday. If I have not said so already, thank you for your participation. [EDIT] Since there is some confusion, we are not extending the competition, but extending the judging time to get all the entries similar exposure to reader reviews.

This blog is now running WordPress 2.1 Ella and I am impressed. This server was running a much older version of MySql and since Ella requires MySql 4.1 support, I could not upgrade right away. I was somewhat apprehensive of upgrading MySql on Plesk and wanted to put aside some time for the upgrade in case things went south. This morning, I upgraded MySql, this blog, all the plugins and performed some much needed tweaking and maintenance. For those that are on Plesk servers and would like some instructions on how to upgrade MySql safely, this post should help. The upgrade was simple, the instructions made sense and were complete, and the upgrade itself went without a hitch. After the upgrade, I tweaked the query cache (sorely missed in MySql 3), upped the key buffer and the thread cache sizes and optimized all the tables. I am satisfied with the […]