Service Interruption?

July 30, 2010 Timothy Sanders

Hey folks. I'm hip-deep in ridding myself of this troublesome web server at the moment. I haven't actually decided where the blog will go and whether the archives will actually be online at the end of everything. But I'm planning on making that decision today. I may even pull the trigger on some DNS fun and games soonish and that could mean this here site might disappear. Here's a few notes: 1 ) I'll have a blog somewhere in some format when this is done. 2 ) That somewhere may not be the current URL. It's possible I'll put the blog at the top www domain and remove the vestigial "reserved for development" page. That's not terribly likely because it would restrict my future web development paths. What's more likely is that the blog will end up being a page something like blog.hiddenjester.com and www.hiddenjester.com would remain a simple static page that I could tweak as needed. At any rate here's the key bit to know: if this site goes away for a few days do not panic. If you visit mainly by RSS feeds or a bookmark be sure to set a bookmark at http://www.hiddenjester.com. That will be where I post the newest location of the blog.

Well that brings matters to a head

June 17, 2010 Timothy Sanders

WordPress 3.0 is out, and that means something has got to be done about this here blog-a-ma-thingie. I've been thinking about what to do for a while and I've made no decisions but now is your comment window. Obviously I haven't been posting very much lately, partly due to busy-ness and partly it's because it is very surprising how much blogging can be replaced by Twitter. But here's the key bit: I'm tired of being a WordPress admin and I don't need to be hosting my own Apache web server in 2010. There are several suggestions to go from here:

The blog could end with a whimper not a bang, and I simply take it offline.
I could switch to a hosted site somewhere:

I could switch to either something that runs WordPress or something willing to import a WordPress archive to preserve the existing almost 800 entries.
I could switch to something more social/link share-y. This probably means Tumblr, although I haven't looked at it in any depth. This would likely mean there's no place for the existing entries to migrate so this is a cross between end-with-whimper and the preserve-it-all camps.

I suppose somebody could make a cogent argument why I should continue to run my own deal. I don't know what that would be but hey, I'm asking for comments!

I feel a little like I still want some sort of web presence somewhere. I still want to make the occasional post that is too long for Twitter and I'd like to still have a "hub" to link together my Twitter, Flickr, and whatever else I want to put there. The big question to my mind is how much value I assign to migrating the original posts. There's a really interesting discussion here about archiving ephemera. Of course, no matter what I decide I'll make an *archive* of the blog, but is there any responsibility here to keep that stuff online? Does anybody really care what I wrote about Magic The Gathering Sets five years ago? I barely do, I have trouble imagining anyone else does. Please don't take this as any big internet drama. It's just that I don't want to be the guy responsible for keeping current on the anti-spammer technology anymore. It's interesting to me to discuss the value I should put on posts from 2003. There have already been detritus jettisoned from the blog in the past: the first year of the blog pre-Movable Type is still available, but you have to know the URL, and I never did put "Pic-A-Day" back online after some conversion or another (was that on MT? My how time flies!). So part of me says "Hey just figure out what you want from a new site and go find it. Move forward, and nobody cares about the old stuff.", but part of me feels like there is some value in the history, in the continuity. Anyway, sound off if you have opinions!

"More email addresses than pants"

April 1, 2010 Timothy Sanders

David Pogue's review of the iPad is pretty much just down the marks I'd expect (although he does say he actually got 12 hours of video playback on one charge!) but I did chuckle at one line.

Read the first one if you’re a techie. (How do you know? Take this simple test. Do you use BitTorrent? Do you run Linux? Do you have more e-mail addresses than pants? You’re a techie.)

That's Crazy!

March 24, 2010 Timothy Sanders

This is all over the net today, but it's worth linking to. Adobe's got this "content aware fill" they are working on that is just crazy.

I don't currently own or use Photoshop, but something like this would be super-tempting to buy.

Wordpress Update and User Policy

March 22, 2010 Timothy Sanders

I just updated to the latest and greatest WordPress so give me a shoutout if you see anything weird or odd on the blog (Please, no cracks about the content itself, thank-you-very-much). This particular update was triggered by a recent uptick in new account registration, most of which look somewhat spammy in nature (and in particular one that was trying to look like an Admin account.) So I'm going to clarify my position on new users. Registration is open and it is quite likely that your first comment will be held for moderation. I get an email if a comment is held so I'll usually get to it in less than a day. But if you make an account and then don't make any comments I'll probably delete the account in a day or so. There's no reason to want an account if you aren't posting comments. My guess is that this accounts are looking for older unpatched WordPress installs and once the spambot involved finds an up-to-date version it just moves on. But if you want an account, try not to look like a spambot :-)