Times they are a’changing
I’ve decided to close down this blog … sorta. Something else will replace it, and the mindless posts that exist here will be maintained. A change of scenery is required.
I’ve decided to close down this blog … sorta. Something else will replace it, and the mindless posts that exist here will be maintained. A change of scenery is required.
For some reason, since October 1st, Wordpress has been broken for returning proper feeds. In fact, it generates an Internal Server Error (500) anytime you try and retrieve. Alas, the Googles have not been that useful, and I continue to try and figure out why. Nothing changed.
I hate PHP.
Update: It seems to be related to Textile handling, and I’ve modified that somewhat. I’m still not sure that both RSS and Atom are working, but we’ll see and will look at it after work.
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Well, after many successful years of being hosted at Textdrive, I’ve decided to move off their servers and onto a virtual private server (VPS) hosted at SliceHost. Things at Textdrive were just becoming too slow to deal with, quite honestly.
So, I’m running my own server now. I am insanely happy with Slicehost so far. It’s fast and only took about 90 seconds to set up. Of course getting all my software running was a bit of a chore, but quite honestly, it’s not like I’ve not done it a few thousand times before. For some people, shared hosting might be good, but this is fine with me.
Things should be faster, and I’ll be migrating away from WordPress at some point as well. Stay tuned.
If you see anything strange, please leave a comment on this post.
One really should be more careful where one types rm -rf *, no? In a hurry to head to lunch with coworkers yesterday, I was blowing away a subversion tree, and managed to blow away almost everything in my home directory. This is now the 2nd time in my life I’ve done this (the first was in 1994), which I suppose isn’t bad odds. It was, however, illuminating how out of date my backups were, and how they didn’t necessarily coincide with what I needed to bring the site back up.
Onward.
Add on top of that the fact that I apparantly left my 60GB iPod on the plane coming back from Indianapolis on Thursday, and you have an annoying day. I called the airline, but shocker of shockers, nobody “found it.” Oh well, I suppose it’s a lame excuse to buy a new one.
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Well, I took the plunge—moments after it was released—and upgrade to WordPress v2.1. It has a bunch of new things that I’m curious to use, and hopefully nothing will break. Since I wrote my own theme, and didn’t use anything fancy in it, I think I should be ok. If anyone sees something, please let me know.
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Just for the record, I’ve never had to write much PHP in my life, as I’ve only had to modify a few things here and there. After having surmounted Zope, and a dozen other templating systems, including the atrocities known as ASP and JSP, I can clearly say that PHP sucks more than is humanly comprehensible. Perhaps it’s possible to write something vaguely sensible in it, but it’s painfully difficult.
Right now I’ve deployed part of the new design, but I’ve had to make some adjustments for the silliness of PHP and WordPress. What I haven’t included yet is the commenting pieces. That comes RSN.
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I am in the process of moving my blog from one host to another at TextDrive. This involves moving the database and other pieces, and mostly has just given me some heartburn over the way to configure it through the web-based management components. Really, just give me a damned httpd.conf file, and be done with it. Otherwise, things are moving smoothly, and if you’re seeing this, it’s because it’s actually moved to the new host.
In other news, I also have a totally new site design that I’m working on. I had originally intended to move to Mephisto, but it’s just simpler to move the WordPress over. That just means I have to insert all the PHP tags to make it work. That’s a project for this week.
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What does it say that I’m spending my Saturday evening toying with my blog? After a week out of town in Omaha working long hours to get a demonstration working for a big group of important personages, this is actually quite relaxing. While I keep thinking of moving to Typo, I don’t know that there’s any reason to do so, honestly. For now, WordPress works just fine for me.
In the mean time, I’m playing with some new layouts that other people have written. None make me happy, but I was getting tired of the old design. Until I get the itch to design my own, I think this one will work fine for me. If you have any complaints, please let me know.
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Somehow, comments got turned off on all new posts. Not that people are flooding me with them! ;-)
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For some reason, the comments on this site have been hozed for a few days. I ended up figuring out how to repair it (the joys of MySQL and mysqlcheck), but it seems the actual index file disappeared, and so the system couldn’t be fixed through the normal means.
Unfortunately, the gang at TextDrive, usually very helpful, were slow and of minimal assistance after it was reported 2+ days ago. Let’s hope this is a fluke.
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I have started changing some of my longer posts (i.e. 5+ paragraphs) to have an excerpt on the front page, and the rest on a single-post page. I wonder if this is a preffered format, or if people would rather read the whole thing on one page. My biggest problem with not using excerpts is that when I write long posts, sometimes smaller posts after them get visually lost.
I have reached an odd crossroads. I am contemplating moving to tagging (a’la folksonomies), rather than the traditional categories approach of marking entries on my blog. Originally, I had started using hierarchical categories, and found them, like hierarchical folders in email, a limiting exercise in needless fussiness. They didn’t really add anything worthwhile to what I was doing. Then, after the creation of things like del.icio.us and Technorati, and my work with things like the Dublin Core I started to think more around the ideas of tagging and metadata, rather than structure and organization.
Tagging seems to me to be more about inter-relations, and not organization. It is a way to find similarity and a path through the maze. This appeals to me, and so I’ve started looking at migrating to a tagging-focus, rather than categories. Categories, however, at least as they are implemented in WordPress are little more than metadata tags, so the first thing I did was start tagging things with multiple categories and flattening the categories so they were one dimensional in nature. This got me part of the way there. Read the rest
Ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, I’ve switched strategies for handling spam on this blog. Before, I used a CAPTCHA, which I hated and tended to create problems for those who wished to comment—sight-impaired or not. Now, with 2.0, I’m using Akismet, which is a central clearing-house for spam prevention. To quote their website:
When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
I assume one of the things it does is look for identical comments on multiple blogs. That can probably catch 80% of spam. The sad thing is that every day I have dozens of spam that it has caught. Before, they wouldn’t get to that point, but now I get to see the junk. Interesting, if pathetic.
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Well, after a few weeks of WordPress 2.0 being out, I decided to update now that 2.0.1 is out. The upgrade was pretty much seamless, and in the process, I found a new theme I like a bit more. I really need to do one from scratch, but I’m lazy.
I’m sure this comes as quite a shock to everyone who knows me.
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Seriously though, I’ve made some modifications to the WordPress plugin that I use and hopefully will iron out some of the issues related to those fun and exciting images. I wish the Internet wasn’t crawling with the lowest form of scum on the planet—spammers—so that I could just trust everyone.
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