Life is a State of Mind

If you are not reading Stephen Retherford (aka Sisyphus, Hoosier in Virginia) regularly, you should be. He has posted the most thoughtful, well researched, and interesting stuff I am reading on the web for quite some time, very consistently and with remarkable insight. He’s changed my mind a few times, and would have more except that I am typically in agreement with him before I begin reading.

Used Dreamhost’s easy to use one click install to upgrade to WordPress 2.5, and it looks much easier to edit on the fly with embedded HTML code. The dashboard is very different, may take getting used to; but it puts the most important stuff on top (useful on a short, wide display like a laptop).

FYI - for those who are still using Blogspot; Google has done something silly to the capcha code that blocks comment spammers, and I cannot comment on your Blogspot blogs anymore.

Waldo has been encouraging us to eat locally for some time, for both health and reduced carbon footprint, and liberalrage has shared an incredibly useful link for making that easier, no matter where you live.

http://www.localharvest.org

We’ve found that many local foods taste better, because rather than being selected for ease of transportation, they can be selected for flavor; and rather than being picked way too soon and allowed to ripen in the truck or on the shelf, they can be picked when ripe.

An unexpected benefit, many local growers have excellent weather sense, as growers do the world over… but enthusiastic local growers also blog about conditions as a way of communicating with their buyers and/or share owners. Those weather blogs are the keenest sense of what is happening locally that I’ve been able to fine. Support your local growers. You’ll meet new people, and you may even be invited to a local pumpkin fest or harvest party.

Vermin spammers! Over the weekend they figured out how to get by the older versions of WordPress with older versions of Akismet spam filter module/plug-in, so I came home from dance competition to discover hundreds of spams in my WordPress blog’s moderation queue and thousands that had been blocked.

Making things worse a few guest blogs I help friends run had the same problem. So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 (thanks to DreamHost for making that a “one click” per blog install) and huge thanks to the WordPress team for including the upgrade to Akismet plug-in 2.0 in that install. I am hoping that shuts down the vermin.

Makes one glad that LJ handles all this stuff for you… My LJ blog was completely un-impacted by the burst in spam activity over the weekend. Yay LiveJournal!

The php was a smidge tricky in my comments.php file, but I finally got gravatars working in my WordPress blog. Woo hoo! So comment already so I can see your gravatars!

So I had trouble figuring out how to activate the Akismet filters on my WordPress blog, because I could not find my own API Key - turns out you must register a WordPress.com blog to get that key.

This became more important recently because the amount of spam commentary showing up on my blog was increasing dramatically the last few days. We’ll see how well Akismet filters now.

This is an experimental post with MarsEdit 1.1.2. Not sure I like it just yet.
I have used MacJournal quite a bit and I like the way I can use it to post to both LiveJournal and WordPress (or Blogger), but it lacks a few features that are available at the admin interfaces on LiveJournal’s website and my WordPress website.

Anyone know of an application that has all of the above? Heck, Ideally it would write to blogger, wordpress, and LJ with ease (I am maintaining several blogs now, each with it’s own id, password, and premise).

So it turns out MarsEdit does not allow me to quickly send the same draft to two blogs. Sigh.

I love Jon Stewart’s awesome show. Fun segment about blogs.

It have to confess, I get about 65% of my news from blogs now as they are faster to publish and have more depth than anything on TV, Radio, and traditional newspapers! Accuracy still needs to be double checked and confirmed, but amazingly - the biggest blog site’s have better accuracy and checking built into them than TV (though newspapers and radio are still leading the accuracy and rapid corrections areas).

Amazing! WordPress imported my entire Blogger web log in around 25 seconds. I have not been able to get the same themes working in my WordPress blog yet, and I am concerned about backing up the MySQL database behind my new blog (one of the side benefits of publishing in a free service, but pushing back to my own domain is built-in redundancy). Once I figure those issues out, I’ll probably commit to switching from Blogger to WordPress. I’ll also have to figure out how easy or hard it is to publish to both LiveJournal and WordPress from MacJournal like I do now (with Blogger and LiveJournal).

Well, after weeks of shopping around and days of fiddling with RedHat 9 and Centos (linux distributions) I decided to host my personal website at DreamHost. They have an excellent deal allowing you to host several domains on one account for only $9.95/month ($7.95/month if you sign up for 2 years), and that includes a free domain name registration for as long as you are paying them.

So I moved my home pages and Blogger web log to scottnolan.org and scottnolan.org/blogger.html and copied all the files off Erci’s vampyr.org servers at Interland. Erci will be moving her site and blog over to the DreamHost systems soon too. Interland had great support and connectivity, but their billing was per domain, and as we are adding more domains soon, it was getting expensive. We’ll talk to the folks at La Belle about moving too, but they are paid for quite some time at Interland, so there is no hurry yet. We’ll be standing up a few new domains too (Arthur Murray DC and SGI Fortune District).

One of the other nice things about the DreamHost accounts is that they let us do imap/webmail with SpamAssassin protection and Mailman mailing lists (it’d be really nice to finally get the La Belle and Fortune District mailing lists set up properly for a change). They also have one button installs of things like WordPress, Drupal, TextPattern, MySQL, and phBBS - which will make our lives a lot easier.