I just did a minor point upgrade to WordPress and installed a plugin to help me auto-kill spam. If you saw weird things over the last hour or so (especially in the sidebar) I wouldn't worry about it. If you see something weird moving forward or if you have problems posting comments please let me know.
Read moreClosing Comments
One thing about the Wordpress blog is that it attracts more comment spam. (Not sure why, it just does.) So I'm closing out comments on a few older entries. For instance in this entry I referenced "Mr. Bipolar Guy" and about once a day now somebody tries to put some spam comment about bipolarity on that entry. (And I suppose maybe now this one, although I think it's probably a matter of whether the post gets any GoogleJuice(tm).)
Anyway, nobody real is commenting on a one year old post, so I closed it, along with a couple of others that were spam magnets. If you want to comment on an old entry let me know, I can always reopen one.
Read moreConversion efforts and this week's story
No, I didn't post a story on Friday. Yes, I'm still working on it.
Turns out that this "Oh, I'll have to patch up a few entries here and there" logic is flawed. I don't know why I'm surprised, but Google is slowly crawling the entire (old) site so I keep getting emails about the 404's to MT-style links. It had been 2-3 a day from Google but then yesterday it got all excited and sent me 54 missing links. I sat down planning to work on the story, but just spent a couple of hours writing the .htaccess file to fix them all. Still hundreds left I suppose, but a lot more entries work now. The CityDesk archives are available, though there's no sidebar link yet. Random pre-Flickr pictures are available as well.
Read moreWhat The?
So, it turned out that I didn't convert my web server from Linux to the Mac Mini as quickly as I would have thought. You might ask why, and this is part of the answer. I had been wanting to do a redesign of the site for a while, and more recently had decided I wanted to switch from MovableType to WordPress. We can talk more about why I wanted do that later, but this post needs to be all about business.
So there's several things that are still wrong on this version of the Post, but it's good enough to cut over. I'm missing the archives of Pic_A_Day and of the original CityDesk blog, but I'll move them later. I'm missing the BoardGameGeek and Twitter feeds (plus I want to add a Flickr feed in the sidebar.) I'm sure there's other stuff I've forgotten, but I'll move things over as I have time.
The comment system is slightly different than MovableType, users have to "register" now. That account is only on my server, so don't be super worried about any of it. I won't share your email address with anyone :-)
The last point: although all of the content came over from MovableType, the links are not the same. There's a table I can make to redirect from the old links to the new links, but it's right on the cusp of not being worth automating, or hacking WordPress to happen automatically. What currently happens is that if you hit a old MovableType link you get a 404 message and I get an email. I'll go through the emails and fix up magic redirection so the old links still work.
So if you have a bookmark to something from the old site, please hit it soonish so I can get it working again. Ideally I'd like for people to start using the NEW links, but I don't see any reason to expire the old format.
Anyway, welcome to the new blog. Help me kick the tires a bit and I'll slowly get things customized the way I want!
Read moreThe CityDesk Archives
So somebody yesterday tried to access "The old CityDesk Site" link at the bottom of the page and got a "forbidden" error for their troubles. (For those who don't know the first several months of the blog weren't done with MovableType and I just archived it away when I converted.) I suspect it was just a web spider but just in case I fixed the permissions. If you were sad at missing the old archives, they are back. (Mostly. I notice the Java Tic-Tac-Toe links don't work, but I don't think that's worth fixing. If I'm wrong let me know.)
Read moretechnorati tags:CityDeskArchives
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