Standard Mischief

I’ve semi-taken down the blog for maintenance. I’ve mostly just disabled comments which shouldn’t be such a big deal because I get so few. I’ve got a few things planned.

First, I’m moving to a new server. Second, I’m moving the posts to an new subdirectory, from:

http://standardmischief.com/2007/01/30/really-cool-post-title/

to:

http://standardmischief.com/blog/2007/01/30/really-cool-post-title/

Third, I’m going to attempt to take a copy of the mySQL database backup and run it through a sed filter so all those full path internal resource links get corrected, before I upload it to the new database.

Fourth is “adventures in .htaccess”, where I’ll learn how to write a .htaccess file such that all the links already out there in the tubes of internet still work

Fifth is a few image files that I’ve decided to move to a new area so the blog is easier to backup. Links pointing to those files need to be fixed.

Finally, I’ve got to change the DNS records to point to the new server, and fix anything I haven’t thought of yet.

Oh and here’s the little link I found amusing. This page has something they call a “WordPress Toaster“, which seems to be a tool to help set up multiple blogs. Quote from the page:

Hey… if you’re a serious about building a search engine friendly, WordPress blog empire, then you already know that…You need to put up lots and lots of blogs .

or er, splogs. I like that part where it says, “search engine friendly”.

Even better, WordPress Toaster is NOT an online service that costs money each and every month. Buy WordPress Toaster for our special low introductory price of only $47.00… and you own it!

Which I assume means you’re buying a splogging script tool for spam-script-kiddies.What makes it funny (at least to me), is that the whole thingy is written like a Ginsu knife commercial, except I spent five or ten minutes clicking around to see where it says “April Fool’s!” or something. Only sadly it doesn’t. I think it’s a real product.

Talk about dirt simple and fast!

It doesn’t ever say “Now how much would you pay”?, but I keep expecting it to.

…After you install the program, you will be directed to our activation server and your software will be activated within 24 hours of receipt of your activation email.

This is the clincher, it’s trying to sell a product to such a shady bunch, so there’s a 24 hour delay to make damn sure the payment is legit before activation.

Say Uncle tips me off to the The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Ownership Blog. It seems that they are accepting comments without moderation.

What they (The Brady Campaign) haven’t figured out yet is that their particular brand of propaganda requires endless repeats of the same damn lies until people take their claims as the truth. Letting in dissent from just anyone with a browser would ruin the effect. It can’t last. I’ll give it 48 hours, tops, until they put some kind of moderation in place.

Update 03-Feb-07: Comments are still up. Of course they are running at least 10 to 1 against the Brady Bunch. Still, I’m surprised.

Well, it looks like Chris is back, probing the TSA’s Security Theater at the airport again.

My absolute favourite question during this chat was the following:

Q: How do you know if I didn’t just write the letters “SSSS” on the boarding pass myself
A: We know. There are secret things that the airline staff will write that you won’t recognize.

Q: But the woman at Continental forgot one of the S’s on this boarding pass. Are you sure they know your secret signals?
A: Move along.

Meanwhile, I’ve been eagerly awaiting hearing about Tgirsch’s (over at Lean Left) return trip without the proper government issued ID card, but all he seems to be blogging about is us damn libertarians and the (so called) “global warming deniers”. What a wonderfully loaded propaganda term.

I got a bug in the system way back when I first installed WordPress 2.0.1

People could leave comments OK, and those comments displayed OK, but when there was a overview of the posts, the comment count was displayed wrong.

This problem followed me through several upgrades. Finally I decided to do a fresh install. Well that didn’t fix things, but I noticed that Spam Karma 2 (hereafter SK2) was no longer bundled with WordPress. I got the latest version and installed it, but I still had problems. At that point I returned to searching my problems in the WordPress forums.

I finally found the problem. There was a big bug in the version of SK2 bundled with WordPress 2.0.1, so the upgrade actually did fix the problem, at least on any future comments. I had Spam Karma 2.0 Final r2 installed. The one you need to upgrade to is currently Spam Karma version 2.2 r3.

To fix older posts you have two known options:

1) Go into the database and do it by hand (yes, that’s slow and you do need to know how to stumble around in mySQLadmin) Specifically wp_posts in the field comment_count category.

or

2) Go to every post that has the wrong comment count, and add a comment. When the new SK2 approves it, the total proper count will be corrected. You could then erase that comment, count should then decrement OK.

Yea, both of those options suck. Sorry, that’s the best I can do. Oh and I really wish that Dr. Dave would splash this all over his home page. I have months of posts that I now need to fix by hand.

Still, to put this in perspective, the only reason comments are open is because of this plug-in. I wouldn’t be blogging without it.

Images from the old blog are still missing, and the template needs fooling with, but things seem to be working OK in the comments department. I’ll have those restored soon.

While I like a simple, text-centric layout without a lot of fluff and flashy crap, I’m not sure this is it. For one, it’s got grey on white text. I mean, WTF? Ever hear of contrast? I’ve already bumped up the font size a bit, but I’d like a theme that kinda let you chose your preferred font size.

I also would like a theme that let you chose a ?troglodyte? (light text on dark background) mode, because sometimes this is just way too bright white. I’d also like to tweak the fonts.

Still, it’s got a list of comments on the sidebar (which is good, because something is broke on the comment counter under every post), and it’s a good change of pace.

I’d tweak it a bit more right now, but this is what I’m doing instead of addressing my resolutions. Besides, that would require me actually sitting down and reading those books on CSS and PHP, instead of just checking them out from the library.

Those of you reading me from my full text feed, y’all can ignore this.