Rants and musings, without care for substance.
Posted in site news on Jun 16th, 2008
I finally got around to burning some additional RSS feeds. These feeds aren’t exactly new, but I didn’t ever make a point to advertise their existence or make any effort to see how many people were subscribed.
This first one includes the last title, caption, and thumbnail of the last 20 photos that I’ve added to [...]
I’ve been inspired by some recent giveaways and have decided to do something a little different and fun this summer.
In the next few days there will be a contest on this blog. Perhaps the first of many. Words, cleverness, trivia, and photography will be involved. There will be plenty of time allowed for entries. There [...]
I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 this morning without too many issues. It took longer to download and install all of the plugins than it did to convert the database over. I would have upgraded before, but I was running an antiquated version of MySQL until the server upgrade this past week. The upgrade itself took [...]
Posted in site news on May 10th, 2008
After putting it off for a year or two, I invested in a small Dell PowerEdge (with a warranty) to replace the server that’s served this blog up from the beginning. In addition to faster dual-core CPUs, faster memory, and faster disks, I changed to a Linux-based operating system. This is a departure from the [...]
On a whim, I migrated my domain’s mail to Google Apps yesterday. Without explaining the virtues of outsourced application hosting, simply put the email sent to this domain is now handled entirely by Google.
So far I’m impressed.
The whole process took less than an hour. After you provide your domain name, Google provides file called googlehostedservice.html [...]
Because I said that I’d update on my success.
Bad Behavior has blocked 613 access attempts in the last 7 days. 111 got past the plugin, of which 110 were flagged by Akismet as being comment spam. The remaining 1 comment was placed into the moderation queue due to the number of links. So after a [...]
Posted in complaints, site news, software on Dec 27th, 2007
I am being flooded with comment spam. Now I know I’m not special in this regard; everyone who uses the Internet has to deal with spam. Whether in email or comments, removal is always more tedious than detection. I’m not a huge fan of closed-source services, but Akismet has been doing an excellent job of [...]
I was hungry this morning. Having cooked some spaghetti pies up the other night, I wasn’t feeling horribly creative this morning. I threw some leftover salsa/tomato-mix from California Tortilla into a batch of scrambled eggs. I thought the fresh mix of tomato and onion worked pretty well, compared to some processed salsa that I’ve used [...]
Posted in in the news, site news on Aug 6th, 2007
I was quoted in today’s issue of Express. For those of you outside the DC metro area, Express is a free daily mini-paper published by the Washington Post. It has sudoku, crosswords, and enough news for metro riders to get the general idea of what’s happening in the world in four stops or less. I [...]
Posted in site news on Jun 25th, 2007
I don’t feel the need to justify my writing to anyone. It’s fun for me and if anyone gets a chuckle of out it so much the better. I don’t understand the term “comment whoring.” Sometimes I wonder if people think the same way I do. Ellipsis? Question mark? What other way do I have [...]
Posted in advertising, site news on Jun 8th, 2007
To make my blog stick out, I decided to submit a face to Blogtimore. I do enjoy free things, you know. Then it occured to me that I had no suitable images; the only images I had came with the theme. So being the geek that I am I whipped out my (literally) dusty copy [...]
I hear from good authority that my site is blocked by AACPS. That amuses me. I also hear from good authority that there are proxy/anonymizer sites that aren’t blocked by AACPS that render my site readable. That amuses me more. Hooray for smart kids who know how to bypass stupid Websense filters. I’m not sure [...]
I just ran a batch of Analog reports on the webserver’s logs this morning, where I learned that the traffic to this blog has more than quadrupled since November. I think that’s pretty good since I don’t advertise much beyond word-of-mouth. That generally doesn’t count RSS subscribers either, although you guys are growing in numbers [...]
Posted in site news, troubleshooting, web sites on Mar 28th, 2007
I was reading someone’s blog today. I’m told to keep that someone on the DL, so I won’t even say whose. You know it doesn’t matter. It is completely irrelevant whose blog it was.
I saw a trackback link on the blog.
It triggered me. I couldn’t recall receiving any pings under WordPress, despite having the “Allow [...]
Posted in complaints, food, site news, troubleshooting on Feb 21st, 2007
I wrote a new page today detailing some of the places I like to eat. It isn’t a regular post since I intend to update it periodically when I try new places or dishes. Damn you Alton Brown for creating a television show named after a phrase I use regularly!
One irritation with pages (which I [...]