Admin Stuff
site changes, updates, news
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Site Move Update
Well, I think I’ve found all the plugins and site theme tweaks I want for the new place. I’ve been testing them at the testing site. So I’ll be shifting soon—maybe even tonight. Make sure to change your links to “spleenville.com” without the “v2” folder—the new blog will be pointed directly at the main url.
Later: oy gevalt! Okay, if you go to Spleenville.com you’ll see a new Wordpress blog. It’s basically empty at the moment except for the default “Hello World!” post and a post I put in to test it. I haven’t set up my themes or plugins or anything. I probably won’t do any more on the site until tomorrow—I’m probably going to bed soon. But it’s ready. This is the last post at this particular url. Reset all your bookmarks to spleenville.com.
PS: I’m not going to delete this site and move the posts I put here, so people who have linked to this stuff won’t have screwed up links. You can still comment on the posts here until the comments close—I think I have them set to close in fourteen days or something like that.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Spammers DieDieDie Update
I’m tired of removing stupid spam comments, which have been getting through despite spam controls like captcha and redirecting links, so I finally installed the Akismet extension and module for Expression Engine. I don’t think it will slow down commenting too much—I’ve used it on my Wordpress blogs and it seems to work just fine.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Opinions are needed
Okay, now that the fun with Chinese bots attacking my site is over, maybe I can get some stuff done. I need some feedback from people: I’m going to be switching the site over to Wordpress, and rearranging the structure slightly. The plan is for the Spleenville.com domain to become once more the main focus, instead of shifting people off to a folder. Anyway, I had a certain structure in mind, but now I’ve been having second thoughts. I was going to arrange things like this:
—The main site address, spleenville.com, would open onto a static page with links (navigation across the top and/or the side) to other parts of the site.
—The static front page would contain some info, introduction patter, maybe a “excerpts from the latest posts” widget or something.
—The blog itself would be on another part of the site, reachable by the navigation links (above and/or on the side).
—I will also have sections for stories, essays, and photos. The sections themselves are easy to set up using Wordpress’ pages and child pages facility (I thought of using categories, but pages are much easier to arrange).
But, after thinking about it I think that it might be better that the main page of the site also be the main blog index page, showing the latest posts in standard blog fashion. For one thing, that means when people click on the title of the site in the header they will get routed back to the main postings page instead of the static “welcome” page and they won’t have to hunt about for the blog link again. Also this will keep me from having the ugly word “the blog” in my navigation menus. So, what is preferable—static front page and the blog just another separate section of the site, or blog on the main page, with still other sections of the site reachable by navigation menus. Leave your feedback in the comments!
Many things about this are not good
Final update: I knew it… Here is the email I just got a few minutes ago from my hosting service:
Nope, don’t need them, as I know exactly what they are: they are randomly named directories, most likely contaiing at least a file named w.txt, and were uploaded from a machine in China, directly via FTP to your site (and probably dated Oct 24 and Oct 26). As you might imagine, all of this does not mean that I’m psychic: it means your password was cracked, and you need to change it ASAP. We’ve been going through the logs finding the people affected, as it looks like someone just ran a massive user/password combo dictionary type attack on various machines, and either got in that way, or logged in directly via the use of an FTP password sniffer (which would mean a client side machine somewhere is infected with a trojan - usually the result of an outdated copy of the adobe acrobat reader that has been exploited). Removing the files is fine and exactly what you should have done; we’ve already added the IP we captured to the network wide deny list. This doesn’t mean that someone won’t try again, only that the one host we foundd in common can no longer access anything here. Too bad for them.
So, two things: make sure the apps you have installed locally on your machine are up to date, particularly acrobat reader and filezilla, if you use it, and number two, change your password from that option in the control panel.
I’m putting this up here for anyone else on Hosting Matters, or heck, any other hosting service—check your server file system! Because I also had that w.txt file they were talking about in there. I’m putting the rest of the entry under the break and deleting the code as well.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Site redo updates
You’ll all be thrilled to know that I’ve progressed in my design for the site do-over. I’ve figured out the basic layout, and how I want to set everything up. It just remains to find the theme that best suits my design. I hate hate hate hate busy themes, and I’ve just about had it with pale type on pale backgrounds (wtf people?). But that’s a diatribe for another day. What I haven’t figured out is where I’m going to put things—I’d like to keep things here on my server space, but just in case I’ve set up a new blog over at Wordpress.com which has most of what I need. (If you’d like to help keep Spleenville.com going—yeah, I’ve decided to keep the domain name, it’s my “brand” as they say now—please feel free to donate by clicking on that Paypal button in the sidebar.)
Anyway, I think that in a few days I’ll be moving some stuff around here. Bookmark “spleenville.com” by itself for the big day!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
55 WPM
It was the batteries after all, so my keyboard is back up. Not that I have anything to say now… I’ve been playing with the testing site and have figured out how to set up a static page as the home page and put the blog on another page. (The object is to make the blog just part of my overall site, instead of the main focus.) I’ve been looking at themes—while all of the themes I have installed on the test site so far have some points in their favor, none of them have quite all the elements I want. So I’ve been thinking of just getting one of the “framework” themes and building a child theme on top of that. (And now the server that the testing site is on seems to be down. It’s been down a lot lately. Even the Spleenville servers have been having some trouble in the past week, though thankfully not that much. It’s a good thing I don’t use the victorysoap.us site for my main blog, I’d be frantic.)
Maybe one of these days I’ll get back to blogging about important stuff like my sinuses.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Blog Software Change Update
Well, I have been testing a variety of CMS and blogging software both well-known and obscure (Bloo? Zomplog?) and I’ve basically settled on Wordpress. I just figured out, using a Wordpress test site I put up, how to make the default messy Wordpress tags into nice, neat tags (I had to make an .htaccess file, but it worked fortunately—and now I know that mod_rewrite is installed on my server, which is good to know), which is a big plus. I thought of installing Wordpress MU (multi-user—what Wordpress.com runs off of, but they offer it for free), but that might be overkill for just my personal site. I do want to somehow separate my site into sections but running off one install but I might do that with categories. (I still might play around with MU, but I don’t know if I have the patience.)
Another thing I had been wanting was an easier editor to write in than I thought Wordpress provided, but then I found that little “toggle full screen” button in plain site on the editor bar, along with a button that added the rest of the function tags, and now I feel like a dummy. Also Wordpress has a lot of nice plugins and seems to be the blogging platform of choice for most of the world these days. And also it is free. Did I mention it was free? Well it is. It’s free. I like Expression Engine but there are some things I want to do that only the licensed version does, and that costs $100, and it will be a lot of work to get it to do just what I want it to do and I just don’t want to spend all my time fooling with it. Maybe when I get a decent job, and have some money put away, and am settled down somewhere, I can look into the software again. (Maybe by that time they’ll have that new version of Expression Engine they’ve been working on for years and years.)
So at some point in the near future the site will be down briefly while I do the switchover. I’ll post an announcement for that day for my ten readers. As I will if the url changes, though the root of my site will always be “Spleenville.com” and the blog will always be available from there. I tentatively have an idea that I want my site to be set up this way: the main page (spleenville.com), where people will be able to access the blog, my fiction, maybe a page of my photos and art if I ever get back into that, and I don’t know what else. Anyway, feel free to take a look at the test site—I’ve set it up with a variety of themes and a theme switcher plugin (look for the list of themes in the sidebar or footer depending upon which theme is active). I’m going to be testing some other plugins as well so check back.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
News of My World
Sorry for the lack of posting! Except for hanging about Twitter I haven’t felt like saying much, for a variety of reasons. One of them is I’m down in the dumps because it’s the most! wonderful time! of the month again, when my brain, such as it is, becomes a gray lump. Another reason is I’ve gotten more and more exasperated with the limitations of this install of Expression Engine that I’m using to run my blog. It’s the Core version, which is free, but there are things the complete version does that I am beginning to want and need! And there is so much free software out there (cough Wordpress cough) that does a lot of things right out of the box that I would need to build from scratch on EE. And most of all, EE costs a lot of money for someone who is unemployed and flat broke, whereas Wordpress is free free free. So if the site goes down for a moment (hours, days) it’s because I’ve decided to switch over, the Wordpress or something else but it will probably be Wordpress. I’m still doing some research into other blogging/CMS platforms though, so that won’t happen for a while yet. Don’t worry, the main blog will still be at this url, so you won’t have to change anything in your blogrolls.
That being said… on the other hand, I find Wordpress still has some quirks that irritate me. Most of them have to do with the admin screen, the “Dashboard.” They used to have a nice, clean interface with a nice big post entry area. But now you start out with an interface crowded with what I call “junk,” most of which you can fortunately remove, but still. And the posting textbox is rather small, unless you change the interface from two columns to one—but then it just sort of spreads out, and everything else is a long scroll to the bottom. It would also be nice if the rich text buttons would load faster. In the widget area it can be a bit of a struggle to drag buttons hither and yon, especially if you have a small monitor so that you’re scrolling a lot. On the other hand, the Dashboard looks nice.
I am even thinking of importing all my blog posts from all my blogs into this blog. It could be done. Of course, all the links would probably be dead—but most of them are dead now. Which reminds me of an article I read recently about the problem with the internet being the way links eventually get cacked. They just degrade, because people don’t pay for their domain names (hi there), or servers die (yeah, that’s happened to me too), files get deleted, articles get put behind subscription walls… stuff happens. I just thought now that the solution might be some sort of individual label that was attached to each item people upload to the internet that was permanently part of that article or image or whatever, and that some sort of universal tracking system could therefore be able to find that item no matter where it moves to. But I don’t have the programming knowledge to know how to do this or even if it could be done. And how to make it safe from hackers.
Speaking of hackers and other annoying web things… I already need to update my “Guide For Being Allowed To Follow Me On Twitter.” I blocked, though I did not report as spam, the following:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Guidelines for my future Twitter followers
I got one of those ambiguous “So-and-so is following you on Twitter!” messages in my email today. I always check out the profiles of new followers, and this one was one of those Twitter sites that don’t seem to have an aim or purpose. (Believe it or not, some do, even mine nowadays.) The guy is apparently from the Philippines, but he doesn’t seem to do anything or link to anyone, and his “tweets” (ugh, hate that term already) are cryptic and seem pointless. The url in his profile does not exist. However, his icon wasn’t someone’s tattooed arse or a naked underage Thai girl and there weren’t any come-ons for “Asian sexxxy flirts!” forums so I didn’t block him. Instead, I messaged him asking him who he was and why he chose me to follow. I wonder if I’ll get a reply.
Still, I find it just a little exasperating that anyone and sundry can just “follow” you and you can’t find anything out about them so I have decided to compose some rules for any future Twitter followers. This is of course a quick list; I may think of more later. (And this does not touch upon my rules for getting me to follow you. Those wait for a future time.) Here they are:
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Well, I wonder what caused this?
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”
Update; they’re back now. Odd.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Stuff I’ve been doing
Well, in between washing the cat and trying to catch and destroy all her fleas, and getting over some gut-virus or whatever it was, I’ve been attempting to redesign the site. The basic goals are: a very simple design that focuses on the text; a larger, readable font; a completely fluid layout so you can see it on just about any browser and resize text as large as you want without the page running off-screen and the horizontal scrollbar showing up. Here’s the test site I’ve set up—it’s basically a copy of the main site, though right now I only have the index page set up to look right using the test style sheet. That style sheet and layout, by the way, is hacked from the one from this article. As you can see it’s still very bare-bones, and I’ll be playing around with the text styling (I liked the initial caps in the entries of the theme I use on my Library Wordpress site) and colors and so on. The background will remain white or at the very most a pale color, and the text will be dark. The link colors may change—I don’t know if I want to go with this cool color palette, or a warmer one. I will pick whatever is easiest for a wide variety of people to see. Let me know what you think so far.
Also coming up in the near future, perhaps—I may move all my stories over to my Expression Engine install, if I can set up a separate template group with its own categories with entries that can be arranged in ascending order (oldest first, so I can do chapters). I have been playing with Drupal for my novel but so far I’ve been disappointed; you can set up a “book” with ascending order chapters but the program is kind of wonky and the themes for it are mostly rather ugly or just too bloggy for what I want to do.
Okay, back to staring at code and being confused.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Surfacing
I’ve got some kind of bug, or I ate some bad food (I’ve decided to blame the leftover spinach; I really don’t do well with leftovers), so I’ve been uninterested in posting anything. Also, I’ve been fighting a battle with my cat’s fleas—I finally had to buy some overpriced flea soap, which I can’t afford, and I had to wash her twice in the last week. This involves me getting into the tub with her and listening to her yowls of Fear! and then having to wash myself to get all the flea soap off. I hope that soap did better than just make sure her fleas are nice and clean.
I’ve also been struggling with figuring out a new site design. I promise it will be plain, easy to read, dark-text-on-light-background, light on the graphics, etc. I want to overhaul the site to get everything tied together a little better than it currently is.
And that’s it. I can’t remember anything else I wanted to post about, so I’ll end this here.
Monday, October 05, 2009
A trip down memory lane
Hey guess what? One of my old blogs, Twisted Spinster, is back up again! I had lost the ability to get to it because I let the Twisted Spinster domain lapse. But with help from my hosting service, I got it up and running again. I’m using the subdomain now—http://twistedspinster.spleenville.com/. So if you have old links, you can update them. (Note: this is for archiving purposes only—this is my old blog from 2004. I’m not going to be posting over there anymore. I just happened to have some good posts that year, as I recall.)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
A Momentary Disturbance in the Force
Oops. I made a new template group in my Expression Engine setup so I could test different stylesheets before messing with my actual blog, and I forgot to switch to that group when I changed the style sheet. Fortunately I had the original style sheet saved.
Anyway, I’m trying to get into learning Expression Engine a little better. You’d think I would know now, since I’ved used it for years, but I never got that much into it. I mean, it’s only the software I use for my blog. Anyway, I’ve decided that switching the blog to something else like Wordpress is a waste of time, as this works quite well. I’m going to be changing the site design into something easier to read. I may make an entire new style sheet, or just change a few things in this one—for instance, make the font larger and darker, especially in the comments area.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Trivial Twitter Update
I came across someone using the name “weirdsister” and decided to make my Twitter user name (and thus, Twitter site url) something more in keeping with my “twisted spinster” online presence. But “twistedspinster” was taken and adding “the,” “one,” or “a” to the beginning made the phrase too long for Twitter’s url setup. So I am now “twistyspinster.” It’s pretty neat that you can do that without losing your stuff. I’ve already sent notices to the few followers I have, changed the link on the sidebar, etc.
That’s all for now.
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Most recent entries
- Site Move Update
- When I was an atheist
- US interference in Latin American politics
- Spammers DieDieDie Update
- Opinions are needed
- Many things about this are not good
- And they wonder why women are still messed up in the head
- Insert “Hot For Teacher” Joke Here
- Podhoretz Person
- Site redo updates
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