Technophobia

Thursday, February 10, 2005

So I managed to import the posts from the old blog, but the categories are hosed. I have no inclination to fix them for now, so I apologize if you’re trying to find that obscure song lyric or whatever.

On the emoticon front, I think I know what the problem is. However, the solution involves a lot of typing that I’m not feeling up to doint at the moment. At least not in one fell swoop. My plan is to do a line or two at a time as I think about it. I think I have about 20-30 smileys, so do the math.

Monday, February 07, 2005

As far as I can tell, the import of my stuff from the old blog was successful. Major kudos to the Solo-Jedis at Accidental Verbosity for the technical assistance with the comment spam clear out. Jay spent some time on Saturday basically doing the work for me and I am truly grateful.

I have to give kudos to pMachine Hosting as well. Julie spent many hours working with me yesterday to figure out why I wasn’t able to import the database file. Her last message to me was timed at 1am to say that she had loaded it and I was clear to import through EE.

The import took less than 5 minutes from that point. Amazing. Taking a quick look at a couple of the categories, it looks like that didn’t go very smoothly, but I’m not so worried about that. I just didn’t want to lose the posts altogether when my other hosting has expired.

Next major task - uploading all the photos/graphics so the posts are complete. Oy.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

I’ve exported the database of my old blog and I’m still considering whether or not to import the entries to this one. My dilemma? Comment spam still residing on those old posts. After a while I stopped fighting the battle with the comment spammers that were hitting my old blog and there are hundreds of those link-infested comments riddled throughout the archives. I don’t want to bring them here and I can’t be bothered with cleaning them up. I thought about just deleting all the comments from the database, but there are some good conversations I’d hate to lose.

Anyone have any suggestions? I have some time before the hosting at that place ends (in May), so it’ll still have a home there. But once that ends, I’d like to have a home for that stuff.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Via Jay is an interview with a link spammer - you know, blogdom’s pestering comment spammers. Here’s the part that raised my blood pressure:

Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour “don’t follow” links defeat Sam and his ilk? “I don’t think it’ll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem” - we didn’t quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - “and they’re doing this to placate the community. It won’t work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they’re left to rot. To use this, they’ll all have to be updated. The majority won’t be. And there’ll just be trackback spamming.”

ARGH!

The good news?

“The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they’re hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that’s a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations’ folder names.”

Monday, January 31, 2005

Hey, you IE users! I know the sidebar has dropped below the posts. I don’t know why since I haven’t changed anything. Sorry for the inconvenience of it.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

My sincere appreciation to Jon of Misplaced Keys for his invaluable technical service today. He got my show/hide blogrolls working. Many thanks, friend!

I found a tip for adding random quotes in EE. From the comments on that post it looks like it’s easily modified to handle images - so at some point I’ll work on adding the kids’ pics.

I’m still trying to figure out why my show/hide code on the Reciproll and Blogs for Bush blogrolls won’t work. Assistance welcome.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

I’m not a fan of Pay Pal and I’ve heard enough horror stories from folks who’ve been screwed over by them to reinforce my distrust. So I choose not to use their services if I have another option when I’m shopping online. Except that I just tried to place an order for coffee from my local coffee lady and Pay Pal lost my order because of some technical glitch. I’m unable to pay with my credit card straight up because it’s “registered” with Pay Pal, so in order to buy anything from this lady through her website, I have no choice but to use Pay Pal. And it’s broken.

So frustrating.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

I think I’ve gotten the border thing fixed. Now on to the sidebar…

Tell me if something still doesn’t look right - except for the sidebar.

LATER: Sidebar fine in Netscape, wonked in IE. *sigh* But I’m making progress, I suppose.

LATERER: Looking at the page here at home, things look fine in both Firefox and IE. Then I changed the text size in the IE window from medium to small and the sidebar dropped. Odd, but it explains what I’m seeing at work since I have it set for the smaller text size. So I’m done messing with that.

Now it’s on to the smilies.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

I’ve moved this post to the top of the page for the evening in the hopes that someone might take the bait be willing to assist.

OK, I’m having minor technical problems with the blog, so if anyone feels inclined to help here’s what I need:

1. Fix the border
2. Fix the sidebar
3. Fix the emoticons - I updated the emoticons.php file with my old smilies, but I’m getting error messages.

I think I just need fresh eyes to pore over the code I’ve got to see what I’m no longer able to catch by way of errors. I’ve looked and looked and I just don’t see the problems.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Emoticons not working at the moment. 

I use pobox.com for my personal email. Basically it’s a way to have a lifetime email address even though you may switch internet service providers or even just email providers over time. It eliminates the need to notify all of your friends and family of an email address change; you simply update the information with pobox. I’ve had my pobox account for years and I love it.

What makes pobox even better is their spam protection. It’s astounding to see how many messages they kill before they hit my inbox. It’s in the hundreds every day and it saves me a ton of aggravation. I rarely check the discards list anymore because it’s so “smart” that I have yet to not receive a legit message. The proof came during the Christmas shopping season - I did most of my shopping online and I was worried that my heavy spam settings might block order confirmations from getting through. But I got every single one of them.

If you’re inundated with spam, look into making the switch to pobox.com. For $20/year for the basic service, it’s well worth the money.

OK, so you IE users, no one noticed that the sidebar was wonky this weekend? Since I use Firefox at home, I never knew that my tweaking over the weekend caused the sidebar to drop. Geeks - any idea?

Friday, January 07, 2005

I don’t know why the sidebar is showing below the posts. I’m trying to add some of the old sidebar stuff and I’m apparently doing something close to right since it’s there but the sidebar is wonked. My apologies for the mess.

Meanwhile, I think the trackback post is working again? Anyone want to test that?

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Someone try to trackback. I think I may have fixed the problem for now.

UPDATED: Jay suggested that somehow the post title has hosed the trackback function on this post only. This is to redo the post title to see if it resets the permalink that’s now not working.

Someone want to try the trackback for this again? I think it’s good now.

Wait, not working. I think I have to actually change the title wholesale.

OK, permalink works.