Categories
Burningbird

No Pings I

Another side effect of the move is that trackback pings were not working on my sites, and the trackback templates were broken with the photo blogs.

However, I am a highly trained technical person, with over 20 years of experience, a degree in computer science and skills beyond most mortal men. Women too. I put my keen sense of troubleshooting to work, determined to hunt down this error and kill it, kill it dead.

It was grueling. It was a true battle between woman and machine – a struggle of monumental proportions. However my talents pervailed and I found the error – somehow the Template.pm file didn’t get copied to each of my sites. Trackback didn’t work because, in effect, Trackback wasn’t there.

This move has been a tough move. This week has been a long week. If you’ve pinged me this week, you might want to send that ping my way again. Sorry.

(And at this point, Loren is frantically making backup copies of all of his files before I move his site first thing in the morning.)

Categories
Just Shelley

Wanna chocolate?

Many thanks for the kind words about my birthday.

My roommate took me out for an Italian dinner that would violate every aspect of an Atkins diet. We had bruschetta for an appetizer, home made garlic breadsticks with the dinner, which happened to be chicken, artichoke, sun dried tomato, and shitake mushroom sauteed in garlic and virgin olive oil, served with smoked cheese, and tossed with pasta. It was beyond good.

For dessert? Godiva chocolates, baby. First class, all the way.

Following Loren’s good advice in comments yesterday, I went for a vigorous four mile walk today, burning off some of the goodies. I can’t believe how much better I feel lately. I feel like a new woman, rested and healthy and ready for trouble. Tomorrow we’re expecting 75 degree weather, this weekend snow, so you can imagine what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

(If you guessed working on the computer and writing to this weblog, you’re ill. Get help.)

Speaking of weblogging, I managed to get the Practical RDF weblog up and running, Mirror Self is running with about half of the photo weblogs, but the For Poets sites are just not importing well. Two imported, one failed during import, and one is generating build errors when I try to rebuild the pages. Normally when I move a Movable Type weblog, I’ll do a dump of the SQL and copy the files. However, with the weblog split, I wanted to start clean. I have things to do, though, so I’m not going to screw with it much longer. Luckily none of the sites is big and I can just copy the posts, though I’ll lose the comments.

Friday I finish moving the rest of the sites: LorenMichael, and Malcolm. Good. Once we’re moved, all tucked in with our favorite blankies and hot cocoa, we can return to telling each other our favorite bedtime stories.

virtualchocolates.jpg

Categories
Just Shelley

A song on my 49th birthday

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I turned 49 today. Or, more precisely, I turned 49 this morning at 7:02am. I’ve reached the age where I’ve lived too long to die and leave a beautiful corpse. The the only other option open to me now is to live long enough to become a burden on society.

In one more year I’ll reach the age of 50, and then all the rules will have changed. I’m heading into a time when chest pain is cause for concern rather than a move to loosen my bra. Gone are the years where I was asked if I had any kids – now the questions drift more towards grandkids then not. I never thought I would miss the good old days when I’d have to to fend off issues of choosing not to have children (“Well, you still have time to change your mind”).

The middle years of twixt and tween, of being over 50 but before being old – dying before now is a tragedy but after is a blessing. If I were to die now, I would just die, with nothing much more than: “Well, it’s sad, true, but we all have to go sometime.”

And where is the taut, smooth flesh of yesteryear? Who snuck in and left this old, well, older woman?

I turned 49 today and in exactly one year I’ll turn 50. I will kill the first person to give me a black balloon and consider the time spent in prison worth it.

I woke up with visions of black clouds vaguely resembling balloons and I didn’t _quite_ kick the cat, and I didn’t _quite_ slit my wrists. In fact, my coffee tasted remarkably good this morning as I looked out at the clouds lightening to that silver grey, thinking how lovely they are. I’m not one to look on the down side for long, a trait that I seem to grow into more each year. Yes in a year I’ll turn 50, but what can happen in that year?

I’ll write a million or so words and from these a few will come together that I’ll read again and again and I’ll feel that deep satisfaction a writer gets when they know, regardless of what anyone says, they’re good.

I’ll have more chances to take the kind of photographs that when I look at them later, I break into a smile and I holler out loud regardless of who is around: Look! Look what I have created!

I will have another year to try foods that I’ve turned my nose up at in the past. It may even be raw octopus with suckers still fresh enough to grip the insides of my cheeks. I may not like it – I may absolutely hate it – but I’ll have tried it. There won’t be a moment before the end when I’ll think to myself, “I wish I had tried raw octopus.”

In the next 12 months, I may meet one or two people who will end up being a close friend for the rest of my life – or I may realize that I’ve already met the person and have just not experienced the epiphany of the act. We may be sharing a coffee or a beer and I’ll look at the person and think how lucky I am, how much richer my life is because I had a chance to get to know them.

Within these 52 weeks, I may meet someone who I become fond of, or even fall in love with. We could be sharing a laugh, and I’ll know at the moment when my mouth widens into a smile why the other is laughing, and this knowledge becomes an act of immense sensuality. Or perhaps we’ll be on a couch together, me in his arms, or him in mine, or even just sitting beside each other, watching an old movie and the very air will crack with eroticism more intense than anything generated from a strip tease or edible panties.

Or maybe I’ll watch that movie alone and still feel the sensuality of the moment; and experience the arousal that a good film, or book, or song, can generate when it touches you.

In 365 days, I can redefine who I am in 365 ways.

In 8760 hours, a lot can happen. And if in all those hours and days and weeks and months my dreams have not been met, and I’m lucky to reach 50, then I know I’ll continue to have time to meet them, or to dream new dreams.

Categories
Burningbird

I’m here. Where are you?

If you see this, then you’re seeing Burningbird in the new home. Expect rough times this week, as I continue the move. For instance, I’ve had to drop my recent comments/trackback list, though I am working an alternative. I also have several trackback pings that I have to find a way to move from there to here.

Hopefully the move is a smooth experience for SiFarrago and the ever popular and far too quiet Mr. Golby.

Moving on Monday (17th): Joe Duemer’s Reading & Writing (new digs in that direction)(Done), and the ever infamous Stavros the Wonder Chicken’s Empty Bottle – the site that proves yes, chickens can be scary.

I’m glad that I’m splitting For Poets sites from the Burningbird installation, and putting the photos into their own domain, mirrorself.com – but what a lot of work this has been. Work that’s continuing, but I can’t hold the rest of the gang up while I screw around.

Still, it will be very nice to be all clean and sparkly, and ready to do some front-end design.

Update:

Many thanks to Girlie Matters for a dirify function in PHP I was able to incorporate into my recent trackbacks/comments. This emulates the Movable Type dirify function that converts titles to file/directory naming compatibility.

Categories
Burningbird Technology

You might see this

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

You won’t see this. It doesn’t exist.

Or at least, it doesn’t exist – yet – in the new Burningbird home, but does in the old.

I had hoped to be farther along in the transfer, but limitations in the software in the shared environment are slowing things. Rather than being able to log into each system using SSH and FTP files directly, I’m having to download them to my PC and then upload them to the new site. The first of many limitations I’ll face moving from the dedicated server to the shared environment.

However, once moved, the limitations will be offset by not having to worry about constant software upgrades or installing patches. A good trade, all in all.

I did implement the new file system naming here in the old site to make sure it would work on the new. Worked beautifully. You have to love Movable Type templates.

Yes I am aware that my recent comment/trackback functionality is broken with the new naming system. I am looking at solutions, or the possibility of using something else on the new site. You’ll need to click through to the individual page for now to see these items.

I’ve also added a link to the PostCon RDF file for each individual page. Right now all the link does is pull up the RDF meta file. When I’m finished, it will provide either a raw RDF feed, or a prettified HTML feed. I still want to see what RDF vocabularies created elsewhere I can incorporate in. If you see anything, let me know. The files are created by a template – let me know if you want a copy.

I’m itching to get into the design on some of the pages, I’m in a re-design mood. First things first, get everyone safely moved and working, and then I can play. Since I have 9 webloggers, and 15 weblogs (10 of which are MT), with about 23 domains, I think I have enough to do.

I can’t believe what a difference cleaning out the old Burningbird made – from 3000+ entries down to about 1100 or so. Most of these were drafts never posted, or entries used for the photo blogs. And the new naming system is based on category and title – I don’t care much for the date-based directory.

The kicker is going to be doing a string substitution in the database to replace the old photograph URLs with the new one for mirrorself.com. Can’t do that, though, until the DNS change for the domain makes it through. I have a feeling this is going to be slow, and we’re going to be in for interesting times this week.

DNS. You can see start to see increasing problems with DNS. For those who asked about my prediction for a rough year next year, here’s what I wrote in an email (with some edits):

Why bad? It’s a contentious US election year, with a much more web enabled populace, not only in the US but throughout the rest of the world. More software is being built with holes in it, managed by more web holders who know little or nothing about web technology. ISPs, to stay competitive, are adding more people to individual servers so they can cut costs. And more sites like slashdot and other sites that serve up mass traffic attacks act as a DoS because we just can’t handle any variation in established access patterns. Nothing has room to give.

As more and more webloggers voice an opinion on political issues, or religion, or even spammers, more and more sites will become the targets of DoS attacks. But this doesn’t just burden the site – it burdens the entire system.

Other forms of ‘junk’ connectivity are being outlawed, including junk mail and phone solicitation. The only avenues left to the swarms determined to separate us from our money is door to door, and your computer.

Add to this an increasing privacy issue: with governments becoming more aware of how web enabled their populaces are. My site being scanned by the California tax organization is just one example. And other governments will block, but they’ll use our own paranoia to do so. For instance, some of the original comment spammers had a Chinese IP address, and people were blocking entire networks of Chinese readers because of it.

Which leads to blacklisting. Blacklisting is going to grow as a problem, which means huge blocks of IP addresses are going to get into SPEWs and others lists like this, tainting them so they can’t be used again. IP addressing is enough of a problem now without this.

(Do you know that once an IP is ‘dead’ to a spammer, its released back for some poor old soul to use for their legitimate site? Do you know how long it can take to clear an IP address from all the lists?)

To protect against the bad guys we’re loading our systems down with software that checks this list or that, lists of which are growing exponentially in size. Each of us doing so burdens already over-burdened CPUs on machines holding more and more people, each added to keep costs down in a Net, which is becoming increasingly cheaper to get into, but still being supported on the same architecture that existed years ago.

Used to be you needed to be a smart hacker to cause problems. No longer – not with today’s new user friendly destructiveness. There is DoS software you can download and run without any programming experience. There is software you can get from the W3C that will allow you to post comment spam. And people are hurting themselves – they still won’t stop opening attachments!

How about IM, chat rooms, IRC, moblogging, audio files, video files – do you think that bandwidth grows out of thin air?

We webloggers have to accept that our own actions are adding to the increased burden – very few sites update, check, or send bots out like webloggers. Tell me, how many times were your index.xml and index.rdf files accessed in this last hour? We’re putting significant burdens on the system in comparison to our numbers.

And all of this hits us at our most vulnerable spot – the DNS and the routers.

All in all what we have is a badly educated populace using the Net more and more, buggy software, smarter hackers, and a great deal of overreaction. And just to make things fun – lets put voting online.

I was glad to see I’m not the only one talking about the problems of blacklists by URL or IP – Mark Pilgrim has also covered it, and many of the same concerns I’ve had. (And I love Mark’s new header.)

I’ve already had two ‘poisen pill’ blacklist entries with URLs for weblogs.com and fda.gov. Mark talks about reactions to his writing that are similiar to what I’ve had – why am I saying this negative stuff? Where’s my solutions?

You want a solution? Drop your weblog, sell your computer, have the electrical company turn off electricity to your home, or better yet – move to a cabin on a mountaintop somewhere. Use paper and pen, and get yourself a carrier pigeon – the spammers haven’t gotten to them yet.

I’m not dooming and glooming to scare people away from the Net, but more to get people to realize that comment spammers happen, down times happen, s__t happens – but overreaction just makes it worse.

And knowledge. Knowledge is power in this environment. The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to ride the rough tides without getting wet. Speaking of which, I added a new For Poets site: MySql/SQL for Poets.

Back to work. Hoo-rha.