Category: Cooking With Code

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Cooking With Code

Puzzled

In case you hadn’t noticed, Scribblings has undergone another revamp. I’ve never particularly felt like my personal blog needs to have the same “look and feel” as the rest of the site, but I’ve grown so fond of the Easel theme being used everywhere else that I’m actually more than happy to make everything unified this time. Perhaps not surprisingly, my blog section is a bit more… colorful. Easel gives you lots of options, and if you have any graphics or PHP chops at all, you can coax it into giving you even more options. It’s the best WordPress theme I’ve encountered thus far. Really.

The “season to taste” menu is still there, though it may go away soon. It’ll allow you to swing things back over to the faux-Facebook look, though I’m gonna come right out and say that I’m becoming less and less enamoured with Facebook with every change they roll out. I suspect that the “timeline” thing they dump on us by the end of this year may be a make-or-break for me. And for a lot of other people. I don’t just automatically dislike every Facebook alteration that lands on our doorstep; it’s this jacked-up “OHCRAPWENEEDTOADDTHISBEFOREGOOGLEPLUSTHINKSOFIT!” stuff that’s really annoying. They’re really feeling threatened by Google Plus, aren’t they? Here’s a hint, Zuckerberg: making constant changes to a system that people have liked and enjoyed is what drives them to Google Plus. Just a crazy thought. Anyway, that being said, you can switch back to the Faux Facebook look if you like. While supplies last.

Drifting dangerously closer to my original point: the near-psychedelic background artwork for this section is my invention and mine alone, and had a lot to do with the state of mind I was in on Friday when I put it together.

Puzzling

Puzzling, isn’t it?… Read more

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Cooking With Code

Minor housekeeping note

If the blawg suddenly looks vastly different:

1. I’ve reconfigured things so that the “dominant”/default theme is Smells Like Facebook. I figure most people who read this thing anymore are probably following a link from Facebook to read it, might as well make ’em feel at home. If you liked the Mahigawa theme (the one with the “metal diamondplate” background, it’s still selectable as an option; look in the sidebar menu under “season to taste.”

2. I’ve deleted the Inanis Glass theme that was previously an option. Without going into too much detail, I thwarted a hack attempt on the site the other night that seemed to start from this section, and in so doing saw that there was a new version of Inanis that I was being asked to auto-update to. On the wild hunch that maybe there was a vulnerability in the old version, I simply took it off the site. The passwords have been changed across the whole site and stuff’s been locked down. Whoever it was: nice try, nicely played. What you didn’t count on was that I don’t actually sleep a whole lot and caught the hack in progress. Thanks for playing. Why you’d want to have a go at a no-longer-very-money-making site with a small audience is anybody’s guess. If it’s something personal, you know how to reach me. State your beef (min) and begone.

3. There is no #3.… Read more

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Cooking With Code

Deadjournal

In a minor housekeeping note that’ll alarm absolutely no one: I’ve killed my Livejournal account. No big drama involved – actually, I’d forgotten it was there. I haven’t made an entry on it that wasn’t automatically transplanted from here in a couple of years; that’s about how long it’s been since I’ve read anyone’s stuff there. Most of my entries were private (and are manually linked to Facebook anyway); just about anyone who’s been reading on Facebook is the same crowd who would’ve been reading it on Livejournal, assuming anyone actually visits Livejournal anymore. The WordPress plugin that crossposted to LJ automatically has been causing some minor issues and I thought I’d just bip the whole thing in the nuds.

Surely you guys know where to find me by now.… Read more

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Cooking With Code

In Romania, I’m HUGE

Who is this guyA minor admin note: I help admin a friend’s forum and he’s been getting hit by a ridonkulous number of spambots lately; when I went to check my own forums it wasn’t so bad, but when I checked here… WOOOO! I’m apparently big in Romania with users who have names identical to users who already comment on the blog plus one or two letters (my favorites were “PapaStud” and “Gapporina” and “softsoftwebsXXX”). So needless to say, I deleted a bunch (~250) of bogus blog accounts today that had never commented. If I deleted a valid account – one not signed up for by a toaster – in error, my apologies.

I don’t know who’s decided to beef up their spambot game all of a sudden, but between the two sites… they’re gettin’ on my nerves.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Home Base

Thank you for not blogging

This blog has become a bit of a no-blogging zone here lately. The whole site has. I’m working on that a bit, but it’s been slow going. My hours aren’t conducive to me getting… well… much of anything done. (I just mowed my yard this week after getting a long-distance call from the guys aboard the International Space Station, asking me to do something about the fact that my grass was tall enough to brush up against their windows when their orbit carried them over Arkansas.) Daddy duty is taking more of my time as little E reaches the age where he wants to explore things, learn more stuff, and have conversations. I love the little conversations we have. It’s the whole reason one’s in the dad business. He cracks me up sometimes, especially when he comes up with some humorous response that’s like something I would say in the same situation. He really is turning into a little me. (I want him to turn out better than that!)

I’m trying to figure out what to do with theLogBook.com. Daily updates, frankly, ain’t gonna happen anymore. It was a valiant try, but at this point I think it’s all about finding clever ways to leverage what’s already on the site. You’ll be seeing quite a few instances of “It aired today X years ago!” stuff soon, as we’re going into the time of year that American TV shows generally premiere – it’s kind of a no-brainer. I wish the forums were generating more activity that I could point to without having to go in and constantly goose it, but I guess this is to be expected when I pretty much fell off the grid for about a week or so (without really planning or preparing to do so, it has to be said). Responsibility for the site going comatose lies solely at my feet.

At the core of the issue is: I have less time to do all the watching / listening / reading that I used to do, to say nothing ofr writing about all the watching / listening / reading that makes up the site. My schedule has really become more about drive-by forum postings (and an awful lot of them are links to other places) when I have the time – perhaps a little too much influence from Facebook, but really much more of a function of my schedule.

I’m open to ideas on how to make it work. I’m not ready to give up yet, even though by any measure that includes common sense, I probably should be.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Music

The worst podcast ever…

… has been made by me, and you can enjoy (or, perhaps more appropriately, endure) it here. It’s just me playing some music that I liked from last year. Unfortunately, it’s also me rambling on without a script, “ah”-ing and “um”-ing a lot, and sounding like deep fried crap because my allergies were giving me trouble that day. (The whole thing was recorded several weeks ago, but honestly, I’ve been sitting on it since then and pondering whether or not it would be possible for me to make it suck less. Ultimately I decided the answer was “probably not, this is me we’re talking about here.”) … Read more

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Cooking With Code

The hostest without the mostest

Pizza and bail bonds? WHERE DO WE SIGN UP AS INVESTORS?As I write this, my FTP client is firing an enormous amount of stuff at a server which will hopefully, in very short order, become the new home of my website.

It’s ironic that, in a year in which I’ve made such a big honkin’ deal about some of the site’s core content being 20 years old, and having been on the web for over 10 years (and at the same domain name for exactly 10 as of Memorial Day weekend), my site, which I’ll admit may well be celebrated this much only by its owner, has spent so much time being DOWN.

After spending a good deal of May fending off repeated hacking attempts, I held my breath as my hosting service sent out an e-mail to announce that they have new owners and management. I was hoping for some improvement – Globat.com (my web host since late 2003) had been steadily going downhill, with the most frustrating incidation of that in recent years being the tendency for their database server to collapse under even fairly mild loads of activity. As theLogBook.com has increasingly become a database-driven site (for the better, in my opinion), this was more than a little bit unacceptable.

I turns out that the new management and technical teams are, in fact, a step down from where Globat already was. I think these people were unfrozen from 2002 or something: their .htaccess defaults (which govern how your site can be accessed and by whom) was hardwired to favor Microsoft Frontpage, a web authoring platform that even Microsoft has stopped supporting. Additionally, their CHMOD settings – basically, the security level of your files and directories, governing who can write/change stuff – is hardwired to a setting of 777: in effect, anyone can change just about anything on your site. When you’ve been fighting off as many hacks as I have for the past month, this is so far beyond unacceptable that the light from unacceptable will take four billion years to shine on me.

The final straw? In an attempt to fix my blog, Globat apparently toasted the database. It’s gone. The post I wrote from the hospital on the night my son was born, and the accompanying congratulations from my friends? Gone. There is a backup, but it’s fairly old – thankfully, my blog posts have been automatically mirrored in two places (Facebook and Livejournal), so I can cut-and-paste missing entries back in once I get things set up at the new hosting service.

I’m incredibly impressed with the new place; not only was the price right, but the options and amenities are mind-blowing, and they go out of their way to show you how to do stuff, including migrating your site and databases from another site. It sure beats the hell out of unreadable-going-on-cryptic “support tickets” written in some sub-dialect of Engrish.

My site is not only one of my proudest (and certainly longest-lived) achievements, but it’s also a vital cog in my attempts to support my family and myself. With the site down and even my e-mail inaccessible, not only is no money being made, but I can’t even solicit future business or sell stuff I’ve already made. It’s having a tangible impact, not having the site working.

So it’s without much of a heavy heart that I plan to bid farewell to Globat very soon. If nothing else, I think the upgrade will be a fitting 20th birthday present for the old thing.

I’ll have more updates soon; for the moment, there’s a massive amount of files to move in order to make the whole thing work. Do not adjust your set.… Read more