Found on the sidewalk on 7th Street.
And I finally paid to have the ads removed from the blog. Probably not something most folks notice, since everyone seems to read via a feed, but the ads won’t annoy ME anymore.
Category: Meta
Spoons
Sometimes these two are so cute I can hardly stand it. Other times, I want to strangle them both because they’re being assholes.
That’s not news, though. What IS news is that I have finally managed to get all my archives added back to the blog. It was really bothering me that 10 years of blogging had potentially been sucked into the ether, never to be heard from again. Now it’s all been resurrected, and it’s all in one place.
A Blogging Observation
I’ve been slowly (oh, so slowly) adding posts from the old blog. I’m nearly through the entirety of 2007. It’s tedious as all hell, and I’m not sure why I’m doing it, except that I’ve been blogging for a long time, and it pisses me off that I lost all of those entries.
So.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that I spend a whole lot less time these days fussing with technical, under the hood crap. It seemed like, back when I was self-hosting WordPress plus my own image gallery, I spent half my time keeping things running and half my time complaining about having to keep things running. Now, without all that nonsense to worry about, I can complain about other things.
#winning
Blog Excavations
When my old blog got hacked a couple of years ago, I went back to Blogger. I was fed up with the lack of help from my web hosts’ alleged help department, and I was fed up with trying to stay on top of back end stuff I didn’t really feel competent to be in charge of. But Blogger is clunky as hell. The mobile app is especially exasperating, because it does not know how to handle HTML. The WordPress app does, though, so I decided to give WP another try, only this time NOT self-hosting.
It was the best blogging decision I have made. If there are draw-backs, I haven’t seen them yet. I expect I’ll eventually need to pay for space, because I’ve gradually been adding back the content lost when my old blog was eaten. I’m having to do it manually, though, copying text from the actual database, so it’s a slow process.
Which is all to say that I have finally excavated the Covered Wagon Women entries. Also the few entries I did on Laura Ingalls. I regretted losing those the most. My photos and artwork are all available on Flickr, so they’re accessible whether the blog is here or not. The writing, though, was not.
Also! Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon is coming up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to read this time around, but the blog excavations have nudged me in the direction of more ladyjournals. I have a ton to choose from, and I’ll likely be sharing my favorite bits here.
Customer Service FAIL
It looks like I’ll be moving web hosts after all, due to new billing policies at my current host[1]. So if this gets disconnected before the move is complete, the old Blogspot blog still exists. It’s empty right now, but it’s there if I need it.
Signed,
Hoppin’ MAD
____________________________
1. No, I’m NOT okay with having my card charged 15 days before the bill is due, without so much as a courtesy reminder. And NO, this is not business as usual. I checked my old bank statements, and the charge has always previously been made on the actual due date. So yeah, I’m royally pissed off.
Blogiversary
I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for six (SIX!) years. Holy crap, how in the hell did that happen?!
Bah Humbug
The cafeteria folks put up their Christmas tree over the weekend. Today, they’ve added Christmas music. I am appalled.
Also, there is nothing that makes me panic like not being able to get to my blog from either the front or back end. I thought it had been hacked. Aieee! But it seems to have just been a weird network glitch or maybe a temporary problem my web host was having.
There will likely be more connectivity issues tonight, because my hosts are doing some sort network maintenance. If you have trouble getting any of my pages to load after 11pm EDT, that’s why. They’re estimating that they’ll be finished by tomorrow morning.
On the bright side, I upgraded Akismet and that seems to have stopped the spam-trap problems. No spam is good spam, yes?
ETA: I’m still having intermittent outage problems. Got the dreaded “server encountered a problem” message, which makes my stomach hurt, because usually that means there has been hackage. After refreshing, though, the page loaded fine, so I’m still assuming that whatever the problem is, it’s on my host’s end, not mine.
Spam Comment o’ the Day
And I quote: “Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.” It included a link for Levitra. Ha! I think I’ll toss that one into the spam bucket, thanks.
On a related note, I don’t know what the hell is up with Akismet, but either their servers keep going down or there’s a recurring problem with my host’s firewall or something. For the last week or so, whenever I log into WordPress, I get a message saying Akismet is b0rked. Hence the SPotD. Normally I would never see comment spam, but this one got through.
Fun with Stats
Fifteen of the last twenty visits to my blog were from people searching for information on the Ingalls family. That post is over three years old, and it is still, by a huge margin, the most popular on my blog. I think that’s kind of amazing. And weird.
You Have Got to be Kidding Me!
So I log into WordPress, and am greeted by the following:
WordPress 2.8.2 is available! Please update now.
I DON’T THINK SO!
red paper boat 