dianaschnuth

One Week Of Geekery

That’s all it took to get my blog migrated from Movable Type to WordPress.

There’s going to be plenty of tweaks in the coming days and weeks, but the must-haves are in place and functional (for the most part). My old MT links should redirect to my new WP links, all my content is in its place (including comments), and my Twitter account is successfully feeding into my permanent blog. Of course, if you find something wonky, feel free to post a friendly bug report of sorts here. (I know about the Monthly Archives weirdness already — it’s next on my list.)

I’m looking forward to alternating some actual writing into the geekery to come.

Doing Things The Hard Way

Anyone who follows my RSS feed (the one that includes all my Tweets, that is) might be wondering if I quit Twitter cold-turkey. The answer would be no.

What actually happened was that, only a few months after I ponied up the $10 for the most recent version of the previously-free Movable Type plug-in that automatically pulls in my tweets, Twitter went and changed its API (basically, the way that developers interact with the service). So, now the plug-in doesn’t work. Yes, I did alert the developer, and he said he’s planning to update the plug-in… but it’s honestly not at the top of his priority list. And I totally understand.

Twitter doesn’t keep tweets forever. At least, it doesn’t allow them to be displayed and searched forever: it only keeps a user’s last 3,200 tweets. I’ve been on Twitter since mid-2008, and I have 9,621 tweets. So, over the past four years, I’ve averaged about 180 tweets per month. If my math is right, that means that Twitter will start dropping off my tweets after about a year and a half? My blog goes back to 2001. That’s not gonna fly.

I can’t program Perlscript. I don’t have time to learn. So, if I can’t reprogram this broken plug-in, I guess I’ll pull in my tweets manually, a few at a time.

Yes, I’m that anal about saving all this crap for posterity. Or at least for my future reference.

At least I’m separating the wheat from the chaff, and only pasting in tweets that really matter. Maybe in the future, when the plug-in is back up and running, I’ll have it skip Instagram photos, to keep things a little cleaner.

RSS Subscribers, Take Note!

Are you sick and tired of all my tweets being mixed in with my actual blog entries? Good news! I’ve finally published an RSS feed that only shows my actual long-form blog posts.

Plug this directly into your RSS reader:
http://www.dianaschnuth.net/archives/index.xml

Or go to this page and subscribe via your web browser or reader of choice:
http://www.dianaschnuth.net/archives/

This is a long-awaited feature (especially by my husband and those others who also follow me on Twitter), so a few people will be mighty glad that I’ve finally carved out the half-hour to devote to implementing this.

Cheers!

Brainstorm

Yesterday, I suddenly got the bug to redesign my website. I’ve had this iteration of the design for almost two years — the one previous was the longest run yet, at over three years.

I’m going to do it right this time, though, and rethink everything. The comment form, the design differences between individual entries and the index pages (sidebar or no sidebar?), a fluid layout, a mobile layout. Plus, I’m going to get to the bottom of why dynamic publishing and pagination aren’t working with my installation of Movable Type.

So, it’ll likely take some time, but those of you who actually look at my site every now and then (as opposed to an RSS reader) will see a change sometime in the relatively near future.

Comment Spam

I’ve been getting some amusing Engrish-y comment spam from various permutations of a JoanSmith0999:

This is a inordinate blog and I like reading it every morning reproach you beautifying sharing it!

I certainly enjoyed reading your blog and alliance in back of surreptitiously it both edifying and interesting. I purposefulness be fated to bookmark it and bull-whip it as overweight as I can.

I enjoyed the article and thanks in greetings to posting such valuable tidings as an alternate of all of us to imply to, I become of fall upon it both of publish and educative and I directors to forgive it as again as I can.

I enjoyed the article and thanks because of posting such valuable info seeking all of us to skim, I start it both useful and revealing and I meals to appraise it as again as I can.

Hey, I guess if I’m going to get comment spam, it might as well be amusing, right?

A Narrow Writing Window

It’s funny: I have, let’s see, no less than fifteen ideas for blog entries written in my faux-Moleskine notebook, yet I can’t make myself sit down and write.

Part of the problem, at least for today, is that I let myself get sucked into video games during my tiny bit of productive, brain-is-working time. Part of the problem is that my body has reacted unusually strongly to the time change this year, and demands to be put to bed an hour earlier.

If I want to write a coherent blog entry that’s worth reading, I need to get my ass in my desk chair shortly after dinner, without any TV or gaming. If I want to watch TV or play games, I need to resign myself to that being the only thing that gets done that evening.

Tomorrow is Photo Thursday. That I can do.

Temporarily B0rked

Somehow, between Thursday and Friday evenings, my Movable Type installation got slightly hosed. The permissions on all my cgi scripts were wrong — not sure how or when that happened, since my hosting provider claims they haven’t made any changes — but setting those back didn’t fix everything. At least now I can post from my iPhone again, even though the normal New Entry screen is still hosed.

So, although I have several posts in the mental queue (new scanner, weekend with Amy, various photos), entries may be scarce while I’m having to tickety-tap them out on my iPhone keyboard.

Here’s hoping the nice people on the MT forums will be able to help…

Referrers

Usually, when I’m curious about who finds my blog and what they’re looking for, I check my Google Analytics. It rarely shows me anything I didn’t already know, honestly; for instance, most people find my blog by searching for either CC’s Archibald Barasol joke, t-shirt surgery, or the lyrics for “What the Fuck Chuck” by the Phunk Junkeez.

One thing I’d forgotten, though, is that Google Analytics only works for pages on which I’ve stuck its code; that is, only on my blog proper. This evening, I checked my server’s AWStats page to see usage/hit stats on everything in the dianaschnuth.com domain, including all my archived websites of old. What I found was intriguing.

My top referrer so far this year? A Wikipedia article on the RCA tape cartridge (1958-1964). Back in college, I had a brief fascination with audio recording media, including various cassette media. I created a small sub-site on my personal homepage (circa 1998) that housed all the research I’d done, including a page on this oversized early cassette tape by RCA.

It’s a damn shame I didn’t notice earlier that the Back link was broken. This was an archive of a page I hadn’t touched in YEARS, but wanted to keep for posterity (and because I’d done a decent amount of research). I’m going in right now and fixing broken internal links — but that fantastic late-90s design is staying the same. Again, for posterity, despite the fact that the damn background with that tiny font makes my eyes bleed.

Another surprise was that my review of Fujiyama / Domo on Urbanspoon is generating a decent amount of traffic for me, too. When I look up this stat on Google Analytics and drill through for more detailed info, it seems that people usually only stay on my site for about a minute after clicking through to read my full review, unfortunately.

Sometimes I consider looking into some sort of banner ads for the pages that get the most traffic. But then I realize that a single page getting 100 hits a month is peanuts.

I think I’ll stick with blogging for the sake of blogging. Monetizing this motherfucker would be too much work.

Side Projects

I’ve been thinking up tweaks and minor add-ons for my blog lately, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with me being more secure in my coding prowess, and confident that, given enough time and resources, I could pull some of these ideas off. Or maybe it has to do with the analytical nature of my data warehousing gig. At any rate, I keep scribbling more blog enhancement ideas into my Moleskine and letting them filter through into my Action Items list for the ongoing project of my website.

Until today. Today’s idea was so I-Can-Do-This that I wanted to try it RIGHT NOW. It killed me to have to wait until I home from work to try it out. All it consisted of was a list of Most Visited Sites on my blog, as determined by Google Analytics.

The verdict? It’ll take a little reading up and a little experimentation (especially with authentication), but I can definitely do this. I might even make a little graph to go along with. It’ll be fun!

I’m not kidding myself: I know this is a simple thing that could be done in a day’s work, if tweaking my blog were my full-time job. But, considering that a.) javascript is but one language I know kinda-sorta; and b.) I’ll be doing this when I have time in the evenings, I think I’ll be able to puzzle this out and get it live sooner rather than later.

Is it a major necessity for the site? No, not really. But it’ll be fun to prove to myself that I can do it.

Testing, Testing…

Micfo to the rescue! Their customer support may have saved the day, after their mod_security updates b0rked my blog.

The big test will be whether I can post a link in a post without it barfing on me…