nothing edifying » meta

Wordpress 2.6.1

mim — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:01:56 +0000

Wordpress 2.6.1 is out. I think this is supposed to be good news, but I’m just relieved that it’s not a security release — just bug fixes — so it’s optional! Anyways, 2.6 has been working pretty well, so unless y’all are having problems with the site (in which case, please let me know!) I think I’m going to laze outta this one. :D

Btw, I made a Links page listing some of the blogs I like, in case you’re in need of more time wasters. :)

New

mim — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:47:54 +0000

I just spent a chunk of Saturday updating this site with a new theme — I dunno, the default one just doesn’t look nice to me. What do y’all think? :)

Updating

mim — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:37:42 +0000

OMG, they totally did! It hasn’t been a month, and now there’s Wordpress 2.6! I know that continuously updating software to fix security flaws is actually a good thing, but it’s a pain! And also, after my previous post, I discovered a user I didn’t create in the users table in my database. So… I felt like I still had stuff to do and I didn’t feel good about posting until I fixed it, but I was lazy. And now I’m glad I didn’t cos I had to update to 2.6 anyways, so at least I did it together.

So… I think it’s pretty much cleaned up now, but I have to re-do all of my prettifying and figure out what plugins I want to use now. I’m too tired! And I know that most people thing that dark text on light background is best, but this default theme is way too glarey! Or I’m getting old. Or something. Gaaaaah, there needs to be 1 button upgrades, even easier than it is now! And I’m ranting but it’s my blog and it really was annoying, SO THERE! :p

Hax0red

mim — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:44:39 +0000

Dooooood, so evidently sometime last weekend, or maybe before, I’m not really sure when, my poor little blog was hacked. Well, something happened to it anyways. I didn’t even realize until neb asked if my blog was ok… which it wasn’t! Anyways, so I’ve been backing up and updating things and I’ve a ways to go. Actually I barely know how much I have to do to clean it up. Or maybe it’s already cleaned up. Grr… Guess it serves me right for not keeping up with the updates, but there are so many! Actually Wordpress is relatively easy to upgrade, relatively being the operative word. And also, last night I fell asleep at like 8pm, right after dinner. (Yeah, I got all sorts of good habits. :p) Gawd, I know it’s good that the program gets updated, but at this point I would be mad if Wordpress 2.6 came out next month. >:(

Okay and since I’m doing this upgrade and all, I think I’m going to stop using Disqus. It’s not that I don’t like it, I do actually, but it’s like 1 more thing to think about and deal with and right now, I don’t wanna! So I’m not totally sure, but I don’t think I can import the comments back in, and they weren’t mirrored, so they are sort of lost. I mean I can still see them on disqus, but not you. Like you care!

So Happy Together?

mim — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:59:28 +0000

Evidently, Amazon thinks that flat irons and Super Smash Bros. Brawl go together. In fact, not merely go together, they are BETTER TOGETHER! Seriously though, much as I love to multitask, even I can’t figure out how to flat iron my hair AND play Smash Bros. at the same time. Eat ice cream and read? Yes. Straighten hair and button mash? No.

On another topic entirely, I’m trying out disqus for the comment system. It allows for threaded comments and whatnot, which might be cool, although I’m not totally sure that I have enough comments to really need a system. Anyways, let me know how you like it in comparison to the regular comments.

About the hopefully not terrible part…

admin — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 10:45:48 +0000

So far in 2007, I’ve received like 16 comments (counting my own), and 2400+ spam comments (and that’s not counting the ones that were caught by the spam filters). I mean, we all know there’s people associated with this blog that wouldn’t mind growing 3 inches, but seriously, the hope of that happening ended after my last growth spurt and this spam, it’s complete madness, and I’m not sure how to stop it.

I upgraded Bad Behavior to 2.0.9 then activated Akismet and I still got at least 50 spams per day. So today I upgraded Wordpress, which misa had mentioned. I’d been hoping to hold off until 2.1 (which they are saying will be out around January 22nd) because upgrading isn’t that much fun (but not too bad either if I’m honest just choresome), but eh, if it could help, I’ll try it. I also disabled commenting on some of my posts — if anyone actually wants to comment on those, you’ll have to contact me. I’m not sure what else to try now. I mean, on one hand, I’d like the spam levels to go back down to reasonable levels, but on the other hand, I don’t want to make commenting extra annoying. So I guess I’m considering some kind of captcha check (like on the contact form) and maybe turning on that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” option. But I’m open to suggestions!!!

You know what’s the funniest thing? A lot of the spammers have ip addresses from integrity.com, which says it’s the “nation’s best and safest filtered solution provider.” Basically they offer filters so that you won’t see smutty stuff or whatever if you don’t want to. Which err… :P

Two! Hopefully Not Terrible.

mim — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:09:10 +0000

I just realized right this moment that this blog is two years old today. Two! I stuck with it! Well actually, after I bought myself years of domain and hosting there was no way my financially savvy (cheap ass) self was gonna stop, so really, the exclamations are a bit superfluous. But you know, it’s more celebratory that way. :))

Spam-a-lot

mim — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 08:04:15 +0000

OMG, I just deleted like 300 spam comments. What the heck is that all about?! Please stop! Thanks. :P

ex libris

mim — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 06:54:39 +0000

I’m always signing up for online services willy nilly (well ostensibly to decide if I’m going to like it or not). Stuff like Blogger (which is not bad, and really started all the rest of it), or flickr (which is pretty great). Sometimes I sign up for an account, then never really use it. Like ShoZu which I signed up before checking if my phone was supported (it’s not), and also, I’m not even sure if I have a data plan (I don’t even txt msg because I can’t barely type with my thumbs on the keypad — I have a hard time entering people’s names into my contacts). Obviously I didn’t think it through before I signed up.

Anyhows, I signed up on LibraryThing cos the concept was cool — an online catalogue of my books, yay! But the part where I have to enter in all my books? Not so yay. In fact I didn’t enter too much in, and didn’t do anything with it or a while. So I sorta forgot about it, until I was reading fussy and she mentioned about how you can display the book covers on your blog. Which I didn’t know about and sounds kind of cool.

So now there’s a Library page in the links up top with 15 random books that I own and a search for the rest. Although since the books are lying around in boxes and on the ground and under the bed and on the tv, I’m not sure it deserves the name “library.” Also, I ran outta steam after I entered in 51 of them, so that’s it for now. :P I think maybe what I’ll do is I’ll add new books as I get them cos at least that way, they’re sure to be on hand.

Btw, I use All Consuming too, but more for keeping track of books I’m reading and movies I’m seeing than what I own. I dunno if it’s redundant or what. Will have to decide about that, what do you think?

On Upgrading & Themes &c&c

mim — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:08:49 +0000

This weekend, I decided it was finally time to upgrade Wordpress to the newest stable release (2.0.4). Unfortunately, I decided this on Saturday at 3am. Well I can’t help it if that’s when it suddenly seemed like a good idea. (No I wasn’t drinking. That was later on Saturday.) I figured upgrading from 2.0.2 to 2.0.4 wouldn’t be too awful, and they called it a security upgrade! I’m so used to the necessity of doing security upgrades ASAP that not upgrading for a few versions, and not upgrading right away when they announced a security upgrade seemed like foolhardy laziness. (I didn’t even realize that until I talked to neb, cos I just did it.) Since then, I’ve gone back and read some posts on why a lot of people who were using the 1.5 series didn’t upgrade to the 2.0 series. Still, I think for someone already on version 2, it’s not so bad. Although I did break my daily automatic backups.

Anyhows, since I did all of that, I went around looking for a new theme too, cos I wasn’t perfectly happy with Smooth Dirt and cos I figured it was time for a change (I guess it was Change Weekend around here). I recently read this post on 456 Berea St about Light Text on Dark Background vs. Readability. He finds light text on dark background to be less readable, which I disagree with. Maybe it’s a holdover from the CRT monitors, but white backgrounds can get overly glowy to me. I like light text on dark background much better. Although I hate white text on dark background (overly contrasty), and I definitely don’t like the inverted sidebar (where the main content is light on dark and the sidebar is dark on light). Actually, super bright colors aren’t good anyways (like hot pink or electric blue). So overall, this Emire theme by Phu Ly fits what I’m looking for pretty well, especially after a few customizations — added Sidebar Widgets and FlickrRSS and changed the proportions a little cos I like the content side of the page to be wide enough to fit medium sized photos from flickr. Oh and the standard font is Verdana now instead of Trebuchet MS. Yut helped me with some other CSS changes and other page customizations too. I think I like it the most out of all the themes I’ve tried since I stopped using Blogger with the Dark Dots theme. So yay! But let me know what you think. Is the light text on dark background much harder to deal with? Should I darken my text color a bit? Different font? What would make things more readable?

If you’re looking for links to the plugins and whatnot that I use on this blog, go look at the Credits page. Oh and the Contact form works now too.