Feb: Here’s an interesting mix of articles about public imaging. [Just say "Cheese!"]

Mar: According to the Clarion Ledger article “18 running for Jackson [Mississippi] mayor“, “Incumbent Mayor Frank Melton is one of 18 candidates for the top spot, including the man he beat four years ago, the tax collector who threatened to auction his home and the former district attorney who tried to put him in jail.” [Who isn’t running for mayor?] (actually, this is the 2nd post)

Apr: When I was a kid, I’d help my mom with the occasional defrosting and cleanup of the deep freezer in the utility room. [Need to know]

May: Lately I’ve been watching The History Channel’s “Engineering an Empire” documentaries. [Engineering of Empires]

Jun: I think I must have missed a transition somewhere along the way, where the qualifiers “sorta” or “not really” became implicit for words like “Complete” or “Uninstall”. [Complete installs and uninstalls]

Jul: In desperate times … [Asteroids: The Movie]

Aug: Usually I drink only coffee — lots and lots of coffee. [Radiant Orange Soda]

Sep: Are you passionate enough about anything to leave on a one-way trip — no way, no hope of return — that will likely result in your early death? [Point of no return]

Oct: I originally posted about this in June. [MS smacks MS deadline]

Nov: This has been an interesting, if somewhat draining, week at work — filled with meetings, professional development sessions, and even an afternoon of bowling for the entire staff. [Planning, conflict, MBTI, and bowling]

Dec: In a moment of insanity I decided to learn Japanese. [Learning Japanese: Introduction]

Previously: 2008

I just wanted to stop in and say how-do-you-do to everyone. I wanted to acquaint myself, my name is Ashley. Hello all, my name is Keith.how-do-you-do to all, I am recent here and my name is Samantha.

I determined to post today because I think community as a whole is very functional and informal. I love looking at all of the issues and posts here and being that I am not much of a poster, I came to the conclusion to make my very initial thread.

To dedicate back to the community, I have made up my mind that I wanted to post a recent good experience that I have had with another website I used. This website is honest and very professional.

That company is ImSoStupid.com and they offer online http://www.imsostupid.example.com – pc repair

The code is based on Ian Stewart’s “How To Create a WordPress Theme: The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial“, which I highly recommend.

I’ve hacked up the code and had a lot of tedious fun sorting out the CSS ordering dependencies. Don’t be surprised if there is some breakage here and there, since I’m still learning and experimenting. If you notice anything odd or broken, please let me know.

Obviously, I’m not a designer — I just tweaked the CSS to get something up and running. I’ll worry about esthetics and images, if any, later. Once I’m through the initial hacking and playing around, I’ll post a writeup and provide a download link, in case anyone is interested.

Update: 2009-07-30
I’ll actually explain what I’ve done in a later post, but just in case you look at the CSS or view source, some things will look a little squished … because they are. I prefer to work on code with plenty of whitespace and formatting, but spurious w/s can play havoc with layout, so I run my code through this before installing:

All handled automatically with make, by the way.

First, the SQL statement to get the list; put it in a file called list-spammers.sql:

You can execute it from the command line or a script like so:

Which produces a list like this (the locations were added by hand just because I was curious):

Finally, a sample stanza from .htaccess:

Note I’m taking out not just particular addresses but in some cases entire ranges. Sometimes it sucks to be you when you share a network with spammers.

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1. unpacked the 2.7.1 kit into a scratch directory
2. backed up my current installation (see the “pull” script below)
3. copied (and updated) my original .htaccess and wp-config.php files into the scratch tree
4. deactivated all my plugins
5. rsync‘d the scratch tree on top of my remote blog tree
6. re-enabled my plugins
7. checked settings and hit various links to make sure the code and theme were behaving

If you’ve modified the WordPress code, you’ll have to re-apply your changes to the new code of course. Because the only significant changes I’ve made are to my theme, I didn’t have to do that. For those interested, here are the scripts I used (be careful with cut-n-paste: it willscrew up the various kinds of quotes):

The actual update transfer is a single command:

I made the backup using this “pull” script, which makes a complete backup (via rsync) of my remote account to my laptop. That’s the entire account, not just the blog directory tree. I also make a nightly backup of the blog’s database on the remote host, so that’s included as well. Here’s the script, which I run ad hoc every day or so, when it’s convenient:

Here’s the MySQL backup script, run nightly via cron. By including the weekday name, I have a rotating backup of the last seven days:

Feel free to comment here or email me if you have any suggestions or questions.

VMware Server 1.08 on Fedora 9 is by far my most popular post; mostly searches looking for the patches to make VMWare run on the latest kernel in Fedora 9 — VMWare is pretty slow about updating for new kernels.

Windows Genuine Pain In the Ass is the next most popular. I can’t imagine why.

Another top-ranked page is Choosing Unique Baby Names, apparently because a lot of people search for that. My post was just a snarky comment about “global branding” and “Google-unique” names.

Mostly I just have fun making drive-by posts about interesting links I’ve stumbled across. It’s a lot harder than I thought to take the time to write a good post, so I mostly don’t, lol. Still, I’ve enjoyed the past year of random blogging and hope to continue. Maybe one day I’ll develop the discipline to produce some decent content. When I get around to it, I’m going to switch to a simpler theme, or at least de-clutter this one a bit. I’ve worked through Small Potato’s theme tutorial at WPDesigner, so maybe I’ll play with my own design — don’t expect miracles.

If you’re curious, check out a complete list of posts, or just click on the Random link in the menu at the top of the page.

By February 28th, all FeedBurner accounts should have been moved to Google accounts. The main FeedBurner site has changed from feedburner.com to feedburner.google.com, but subscriptions and such should continue to work indefinitely with the old addresses. However, it would be wise to convert when you get a chance — in most cases, just replace “feeds.feedburner.com” with “feeds2.feedburner.com“.

I believe I’ve correctly updated the subscription links for this blog, so you may find it easier to unsubscribe and then resubscribe. In any case, if you have any problems or questions, please let me know.