Infrastructure note

You fix one thing you break another. So it goes.

A month or two ago I updated the very old SQL database on my host to a newer version that would actually let me update wordpress (thus making it less prone to hacking). The process didn’t go as smoothly as I might have hoped and I introduced a bunch of ugly characters into things. Hand wave, unicode, mumble, mumble. I couldn’t figure out a terribly easy way to fix that, so I just exported the blog, did a series of search and replace on the resulting xml to clean up the mess, deleted all the posts, and imported the cleaned up xml file. This mostly seems to have worked. Except it deleted all the categories on all my posts. Presumably I could work out a way to fix up the xml file to keep that from happening and re-import it. More likely I’ll just slowly go back through and categorize posts. Sometimes computers (or possibly just the people who use them) are dumb.

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Stating the obvious

I’m in the process of switching this blog over to a self-hosted word press blog. I might even start writing in it regularly.

So you know, under construction, blah, blah, content coming soon, blah, blah. Etc.

A note

Just as a note I intend to start writing here more. I also am going to be doing some messing around with the template and such so things may periodically be a bit strange.
First up I’m going to try to figure out how to get rid of the “read more of [post title]” note on posts like this that are short enough that I’m not bothering to cut them. If anyone has hints, let me know.

Excuse the dust

Ok. I think last night I fixed the formatting problem. Indeed I think I fixed it in both firefox and I.E. (different renderings of CSS in different browsers are the bane of my webdesigning). I haven’t tested it on any of the Mac browsers so if anything looks rabidly amiss let me know.

And in other news, for anyone reading this via RSS feed, I need to change it. Previously I was using the blogger default, which is all fine and good except I have multiple blogs writing into a single directory and so I keep doing stupid things like overwriting the RSS feed with output from the wrong place.

So the new feed will be http://www.sliz.net/sliz.xml For the time being the old feed will also be active, but since blogger doesn’t allow you to set up two feeds at once, keeping the default feed going requires a manual copy on my part. So you shouldn’t assume I’ll keep both indefinitely.

You know, I didn’t used to be this lazy. Once upon a time, before what I was doing was called a blog, I used to write on my webpage by logging into the server and typing my entry in pico. I also manually copied old entries into an archive folder. In theory technology makes things “easier.” In reality I think it just raises the standards of what you should do, sometimes actually requiring more work. (Here I’m thinking not just of computers but also of the innovations in housework like vacuum cleaners and dishwashers since the evidence suggests that at least initially these innovations did not lead women to do less housework).

New beginnings

For the time being I don’t have a lot to say. The new design is finished (of course most of you won’t have seen my old page or my old design). There’s still some things that need to be updated and dealt with, but for the time being this page is mostly functional.

Soon it will even say interesting things. Really. I promise it will.