Chattering-Magpie-blog
Me bad blogger.
It’s Saturday night. It’s not that late but I’m too tired to write anything of substance. I just want to go to bed.
I biked to work one day last week. Getting there was fun. Coming back, not so much. I live 200 feet higher than my work. It’s uphill both ways. Really, it is. Looking forward to bike commuting more next week.
Little Augie is still missing. (sad face)
Mom is back in the hospital. We don’t know everything that’s going on. She had what I think was a seizure and something else that wasn’t a seizure but looked like one. One thing we know for certain is she has an infection that is seriously messing with her cognitive function. She’s on a course of Cipro. We’ll just have to see how that plays out. It will probably take 5-10 days for her to return to baseline.
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Google Cache saved my butt.
I designed the web site for Mo Duk Pai kung fu association. I use Textpattern for maintaining that web site, as well as my own. There’s a ton of nifty plugins, written by people who are smarter than me, that extend the capabilities of Textpattern.
One of those nifty plugins lets you modify an existing post and “save as new” to make a new post. Handy when you don’t always remember exactly how you format posts of specific types.
You can already see where this is going, can’t you?
So we had promotions this Saturday and I wanted to get them posted right away. I grabbed the latest promotions post and just filled in new information. But instead of clicking Save New, I clicked Save, overwriting the original post.
Of course I could never remember all the names and ranks from a test back in October 2006. As far as Textpattern was concerned there was no going back.
The Wayback Machine didn’t have anything more recent for modukpai.com than June 2006.
Luckily I could remember at least one name on the list, so I did a Google search. Google Cache had exactly the page I needed. So no one needs to know I am an idiot.
Chattering-Magpie-blog
What a difference a space makes.
If you looked at this site between Saturday evening 2/10 and just now using IE, it looked like everything had gone to hell in a handbasket. Which it had. No problems in Firefox, though.
This is the one case I know of where Firefox didn’t hold the coder (me) to HTML standards. Usually IE is the one that will let you slide with stupid stuff such as not closing your table cell tags.
Saturday night I was mucking around with my Textpattern pages and forms in order to make excerpts of photo galleries appear on the front page. That would not be a big deal except I have three different methods (one personally deprecated) of posting photos. Exceptions to exceptions to exceptions.
Apparently, I (or Textpattern, not pointing any fingers here, Texpattern) introduced a space in comment code. What should have been <!-- and --> instead were <! -- and -- >. That just gave IE fits, but Firefox let it skate.
Chattering-Magpie-blog
That's weird.
A little experimenting and what I’ve figured out so far is Textpattern doesn’t like the word “pass” in an article title. (I changed the title from “I passed” to My brown-black test)
What up wi’ dat?
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Now what?
Now that the big kung fu test is over, I can return to a semblance of normal life. And try to figure out what the freak is going on with my blog pages.
This article is just not behaving. It’s ignoring the style sheet and I can’t figure out why. All the other kung fu pages are being good little pages. I view source and I can’t see any reason why it’s not displaying correctly. I didn’t use any funky characters in the text. I even tried deleting and reposting. No luck.
It’s behaving as if it were being put into the wrong file directory and can’t access the style sheet. It does the same thing no matter what section I assign it to.
Any clues?
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Those nasty r3f3rr3rs.
DO NOT EVER EVER EVER PUBLISH YOUR LIST OF R3F3RR3RS
I thought it would be fun to show where people visiting my site came from, until nasty porn sites and drug sites started showing up.
Somehow I got on some spammer list. Now I am being bombarded with hits from spammers. My bandwidth has shot through the roof.
I’ve been looking into blocking referral spam with the .htaccess file. It’s mucking about in an area I don’t really understand, so I’m taking some chances. Luckily, braver and more educated souls have forged ahead of me.
It seems to be working. I’ve got code that redirects spammers back to the sites their r3f3rring from, heh heh. I still check my logs to see what’s getting through and adding it to the banned list.
Comment [2]
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Maybe I’ll change.
I have been considering contemplating the notion of possibly flirting with the idea of maybe changing the blog.
This design has been around since Oct 2001. I’m finally starting to get a little tired of it. The site needs a face lift.
I’m also considering changing software that drives the blog. I like WordPress and how it works. But I’d really like something that works more like a Content Management System for the other sections. I’d like something that works like what Sempahoria has, with her three-in-one blog.
So … any suggestions? What do you like/detest about your blogging/CMS software?
For that matter, what would you like to see changed about Chattering Magpie?
Comments [3]
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Who plays backgammon anymore?
Not me. And I doubt that you’re all the interested in the bloody stupid comment spam I’ve been getting, either.
Just deleted backgammon-related comment spam in the hundreds. Phooey.
Comments [2]
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Back in Blogness … sort of.
It’s a new year and a new blog. The old Movable Type blog unexplicably puked and died last November (that’s so 2004). I’ve been too busy, what with Mom and Christmas etc. to try to fix it.
Yesterday I installed WordPress. Their 5-minute installation really does take about 5 minutes. Importing my old posts went amazingly fast. But I spent most of today finetuning to make it look like the good ol’ Chattering Magpie.
One feature I really like about WordPress is multiple categories for links. I never did figure that out with Movable Type. It will make updating and managing my lists of what’s going on at the moment much easier. No more editing the index template every time I watch a movie.
It seems that half the blogs I read are redesigned with the new year. I’ve had this design for the last few years and I still like it. So don’t look for any changes soon. Plus I’ve got a ton of legacy pages that I don’t want to edit by hand.
Comments [1]
Chattering-Magpie-blog
Updates? What updates?
Wait, was I supposed to update my weblog or something? Oh for pete’s sake, I just don’t feel like it. For someone who is supposed to have relieved stress in her life, I’ve managed to pick up quite a bit. Some of it is work-related, some of it is family-related. Right now, my level of coherence is severely impaired by the decent bottle of supermarket chardonnnay I’ve drunk all by myself (oh, I am going to be so-o-o-o-o sorry in the morning). So let’s leave it there, shall we?
Comments [1]
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