ectoblog.com

Recently, my hosting service (Midphase) has started to come apart at the seams. It’s one thing to have no access to the database and get the consequent “Wordpress Database Error” message; it’s another thing entirely when whole posts get swallowed up into the ether, which is what happened today. Two whole posts….gone.

Midphase has been telling us to bear with them as they move their servers from one farm to another, but that’s been going on for (literally) months now, and what should have been an improvement has resulted in the kind of service I’d expect only from drunken marmots. I didn’t mind…too much…when all I was losing was a little up-time. Now that I’ve lost actual posts, though…probably time to look for someone else. Any suggestions?

So I blog about how clueless teenagers are nowadays and can’t add or subtract to save their lives. Then Arcturus tells me that my “Did you pass math?” plug-in has become dumber than a bag of hammers, a teenage bag of hammers that couldn’t recognize a correct math answer if it got hit over the head with one.

Man! That sounded waaay better when it was still in my skull. Anyway, long story short, you don’t have to pass math anymore to post a comment. I’ll let the dust settle on my wordpress 2.1.2 upgrade (which is the culprit here) for a little while before I try to straighten it out again.

Most (if not all) of the sub-pages are broken right now, including comments and the tabs at the top. You’ll get a 404 error if you try anything. I’ll try to fix it later in the week when I have more time.

Update: Okay, it was an .htaccess thing, not a global file permission thing, so it was fairly easy to run down. The weird “category” hiccup on the right is not nearly so easy, since I recall I had to change a couple lines in a particular file to make that work a few months ago, and I don’t have time to figure out which file that is. It’s pure aesthetics, but it’s going to bug me until I fix it. That one gets put on the backburner, though.

Update 2: fixed.

In my continuing mission to seek out more perfect tools to ensure privacy, I found a website that makes something they call the enkoder. It obfuscates email addresses embedded in webpages by cloaking them with a thick, gooey film of Javascript. That way, robot harvesters don’t recognize them as email addresses and pass them right by.

It doesn’t work in comments or posts, just the actual html of the page. Still, cool.

It beats me why I do this, this cloaking stuff. The internet is, by definition, about the most public place there is, and I go out of my way to hook myself into it via this site. It shouldn’t matter to me at all that anyone could find out my identity. I mean, I’m not Bruce Wayne. I’m not!

But it does matter to me. There are a lot of bad people out there who’d like nothing better than to get their hands on me Lucky Charms. I would very much mind gangsters slouching around, rifling through my stuff. It’s my stuff. And the amount of junkmail I’m avoiding by being a paranoid curmudgeon is probably enormous.

I assume I’ll eventually just erase all the files on the site and replace the index page with an encrypted gif of a night-time picture of the inside of a cave.

Maybe this will work. It seems almost too easy. Now, if you comment on a post, right below the “add comment” button there’s a question along the lines of “What’s 7 plus 2?” If you know the answer, you can comment on the post.

Hopefully I’ve seen the last “Interesting site, good layout, I love you weebmaster!” comment with the obligatory big money or big boobs url attached.

Last night and today the comment spammers have had a field day with this site. Wordpress, if it’s lacking anything, lacks an effective way of keeping the riff raff out while allowing real comments in. Until I find a decent plugin based on image authentication, the best thing I can do is hold for moderation any comment that has a link in it. I had been holding for moderation any comment that had more than one link in it, but that’s stopped working.

I have to have this in place for technical reasons that are too mundane to go into here. It’ll be gone shortly.

Update: I need a plug-in that requires a password to access, that actually works if one inputs the password, and that doesn’t call attention to itself by putting a gigantic “Protected” header on the post. I’ve had 2 recent posts that I posted in order to set “last position” for The Map. I didn’t want to delete them after that function was no longer required because that deletes the comments, too. But there’s no simple way in WP to do that. The “Password-Protect Post” function actually eliminates access to comments even if the correct password is applied, which is blockheaded and in need of repair.

test of flying map center

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

This was weird. I checked Doonesbury a minute ago, and instead of Doonesbury, it was the current Boondocks strip. Everything about the page was Doonesbury, except the actual strip itself, which was Boondocks. I reloaded the page several times. The fourth reload (that’s right, I reloaded it four times—I couldn’t believe my eyes) the correct strip loaded in.

I have both strips bookmarked, so I’m assuming it was a Firefox thing. Never had that one before, though.

I know nothing about .php and very little about site management. Did I already mention that? My site host uses something called “fantastico” to make wordpress installation painless, and it almost was. However, it installed version 1.5 instead of the latest, greatest version 2.0, and over the last couple days I’ve made two feeble attempts at upgrading.

I’m wily enough to back up all the files that worked and stash them in a directory that I can access if something goes wrong. I’m that wily. The problem arose with the mySQL database.

I’ve never worked with databases. So I’m a kind of primitive gerbil skittering between cereal boxes and mousetraps; I have no idea what treasures and bombs lie there. About an hour ago I tried to upgrade once more and got a little farther into the cheerios than I had before. Instead of running the install script and just getting gibberish, this time I got a very polite message telling me I seemed to already have Wordpress installed, and that before reinstalling would I please clear my database tables first?

So I turned from the cheerios and sniffed the bomb. Database, eh? I could do that; I knew exactly where on my admin Cpanel to find that. I’d sniffed around there only yesterday, beating a hasty retreat only after I inadvertently added a new column to the tables when all I wanted to do was look at the data. That extra column hadn’t done anything grim to my website. How bad could clearing the tables be, if Wordpress was telling me to do it? Was that a fuse I saw, lit end toward my paw?

The thing is, I know I’m a gerbil; that’s what saved me in the end. I googled “you appear to already have wordpress installed” to see how other gerbils had handled this. I never like re-inventing the wheel when I can steal somebody else’s. The search led from one site to another, finally back to the Wordpress codex. There I learned that “clearing my database tables” is in fact code for “Armageddon.” That was nice to find out.

I dragged all my WP 1.5 files back to the root directory after deleting all the 2.0 files, only hyperventilating once when I couldn’t find a clean, old copy of config.php. I finally found one in my \temp folder, and now everything’s back the way it was.

I’m trying again tomorrow. Gerbils are stupid that way.

This is a hell of a lot easier than the Frontpage/Blogger/cuteFTP kludge that depressed me so last summer. I may even use it. David was kind enough to offer a piece of his site before Christmas to upload my blog to, which in part provided me with enough gumption to look at the whole blogging thing again. Long story short, turns out my website host was shitty, unbeknownst to me. I got a new one yesterday (as ectoblog was coming up for renewal) called Midphase. I don’t know how good they are, but they’re certainly several shitloads better than my last one. WordPress installed like a champ, and the site looks and runs thousands of times better than it did last year.

I’m a website novice. I have a dim understanding, won only through clicking many many buttons, of how my website works. Therefore, when I noticed that a click on www.mach∏.com led not to my index page, but to a “page cannot be found” page, I had no idea how to fix it. It’s a problem that could’ve happened recently, given the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to try to straighten out my Blogger fiasco, or it could’ve happened long ago, since I normally click on links that link to particular named pages on the site, not the root. I had no idea. But I like to think of myself as a fairly logical person, so I tackled the problem, thinking that if I clicked enough buttons, carefully enough, I’d eventually click them in the right order to straighten everything out.

That strategy can work for any problem, and it has served me, if not well, then like a slave that at least pretends to work when I’m around. But sometimes there are just too many ways to press too many buttons to possibly arrive at a solution in a reasonable length of time. I sometimes run across problems like that, and this was one of those.

I am not even slightly interested in how websites work, so when mine stops working, I don’t treat it as an adventure, I treat it as a turd that someone left on my doorstep. A fantastically odoriferous turd.

As a disinterested website novice, I have to try all permutations, no matter how weird or ludicrous, because I simply don’t know what I’m doing in any but the most trivial of ways. In fact, the difference between a website expert and myself is that he can recognize what’s impossible and what’s ludicrous, and I cannot. All I have to work with, since I have no real understanding of how websites work, is logic. Logically I know that if I change enough values, carefully enough, in enough different ways, and can remember how to return to the base-state to try other things, eventually I’ll fix the problem. But I have to sift through a ridiculous amount of chaff compared to someone who knows what he’s doing, and that takes time.

Long story short, six days into this problem, I fixed it by renaming my “Index.htm” file to “index.htm”.

That’s one aromatic turd.

I wanted to get rid of the vast expanses of white I had before, which were hurting my eyes. I’m still trying to figure out how to format the header in blogger, though, and for a person of my nearly complete ignorance of HTML, it’s no fun at all.