The amazing script! – and an old-fashioned rant
So Rusty wrote a thing to import my old blog (first database, April 2002-January 2004; second database, March 2004-April 2007) into WordPress. Yay! It’s something I’d been wanting to do for a long time but hadn’t felt like doing myself, because I didn’t know how easy or hard it would be, and how much time I’d have to spend poking around in shitty documentation and message board threads full of haughty asses. As it turns out, the PHP was pretty simple – very similar to the PHP for my original blog, actually – it was just finding the WP-friendly XML format that was a pain in the rear. The documentation for that is (surprise!) shitty, and apparently Rusty had to do a lot of hunting around to find the right format. See, that is the kind of thing I don’t have the patience for. Like just today for instance, I was trying to find out how to edit my .htaccess file to restrict virtual directory listings. I actually don’t care that much (if I did, I would’ve done it a long time ago) but for some reason I got a wild hair today and decided it would be a good idea. First I went to see if there was an easy setting to check on or off in the Dreamhost control panel. (Control panels have made me forget a lot of command-line stuff; PHPMyAdmin, in particular. I used to do MySQL by command-line only. Now I just don’t care enough anymore.) There wasn’t. So I did a Google search hoping to find what to add to my .htaccess file. And I couldn’t find it! Everyone was trying to be so damn cute. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s these self-righteous uber-geeks on message boards. Somebody had gone on a message board and asked the very same question I was asking; well, to be precise, they phrased it like, “How can I restrict virtual directory listings?” You know what some asshole wrote in response? “By editing .hatccess.” Thanks for nothing, asshole! And then somebody else was like, you have to set the blah blah option, with a link to the Apache man page. And who can read that thing? Look, I’m a pretty hardcore geek (I just don’t feel like I always have to thump my chest about it and get into a pissing contest over who knows the most obscure terminology) but I don’t have time to sit around and try to decipher that stuff. I know it’s an Apache configuration thing. And you, Smart Guy, on the message board thread, obviously know how to do it. So why not just paste in the line of code, let Google pick it up, and then everybody else searching for it in the future will quickly and easily find their answer and get on with their day, instead of slogging through man pages like a “real” geek, or god knows what.
I’m just so over the days of trying to “prove my creds” as a geek. I just don’t care. I have a Master’s in IT, but even the minute I say that, I look like an ass. But I do. I’m a programmer, and if I have to prove my creds, I can always say I wrote my own blog with PHP. But see, I don’t have to prove anything. When I was in school, there were always those guys (always guys) who would make everything a competition about who was geekier. Does anybody like being around them? That shit is fucking annoying!! And it always stuck in my craw in a particular way because they always assumed I didn’t know anything. Because I was the girl. So surely I must need their “computer help.” I mean, even tonight, I said something on Twitter about importing my old blog into WP, and somebody @ messaged me and said something like, “Let me know if you need help or advice.” And I KNOW this guy was just trying to be nice and friendly, but I’ve heard stuff like that for so many years, from guys who maybe sincerely thought THEY were trying to be nice and friendly, but were assuming I was technologically illiterate, that it rubs me the wrong way.
Anyway, like I said, I’m done feeling like I have to prove anything. I guess it’s like my hardware phase, which was roughly late 2000-early 2003. I collected old computers (mostly Macs). I loved delving under the hood of a Mac. To earn extra money, I did things like install RAM and configure software. I built PCs (but felt dirty doing it, so I stopped; I just couldn’t in good conscience keep foisting Windows onto people). Even well into 2004 I had a server in my bedroom, for godsake.
I remember walking into Best Buy in Athens, with my husband, to buy parts (in my PC-building phase; call me a mercenary, I guess) – inevitably the person (usually a guy) at the front of the store would look at my husband and ask what we needed. And even when I spoke – saying something like we need a blah blah watt power supply – he would REPLY to my husband!! Infuriating!!
But anyway, one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t interested in hardware anymore. It hadn’t happened suddenly. My interest had just faded away, without me noticing, until one day it dawned on me: oh, I no longer care about this stuff. And it’s true. Now, I could not give two shits about hard drive maintenance (I guess that’s more of a mix of software and hardware, but I digress) and finding cheap motherboards on Overstock.com.
And now the same is true with a lot of programming-related stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I still think PHP is great. I just don’t sit around at night creating database-driven applications for fun like I did a few years ago. If I need to whip out some PHP, I certainly can; but that’s the thing, nowadays it’s more about need than, I guess, creating a need. I write HTML, CSS, and Javascript – and the occasional smattering of XML and XSL – all day at work and I love my job; but I don’t create random web sites at home for the hell of it anymore. I do think CSS is awesome, of course, but it’s just not the centerpiece that it once was to me. I’m much more focused on getting stuff done, finding the tools to do a job and using them, than messing around with code just because I can.
And yeah, I do get testy when people assume that because I don’t sit up at night coding, that I can’t do a certain code-related task, or that I’m not “geeky enough,” or whatever. Every once in a while someone will start explaining something to me (this reminds me of that NY Times editorial, or maybe it was LA Times, I don’t know, one of those, entitled “Men Who Explain Things”) and I get pretty snippy with them because I don’t like this assumption of ignorance. They always seem so proud of themselves. “Oh let me explain to the girl how the DOM works!” No thanks; I know. Just because I’m not talking about it every second of the day, why must you assume I don’t understand it?
It’s just a matter of how I want to spend my time, and I’ve found other things I choose to devote my time to instead. And this isn’t a judgment on those who DO still enjoy such pursuits; I mean that was me until pretty recently! Just for whatever reason, it’s not fun to me like it used to be. (And I really don’t mean that in the sort of sad way it sounds here.) Such is life.
So all this is a very long-winded way of saying thank you to Rusty for writing the thing to import my old blog! I am very grateful, and better you than me, because I just don’t feel like messing with it, even though I know I can. :) You even converted the old categories to tags… awesome!! :)
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As of this moment, I know I have an issue w/ an unclosed div in the old posts because the comments are closed, but I’ll fix it later. Update: Fixed!
Repost from my Tumblr, thus scoring me another point on the checklist!
I usually hate Gawker but this is hilarious and so true:
Quiz: Are You An Online Jackass?
I IMed Rusty the URL and told him I marked it for him in del.icio.us. I’m surprised that wasn’t on the list!
Georgia Podcast Network redesign is live!
Reposting from Rusty:
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The redesign of the Georgia Podcast Network is live!
The short version of what’s new is:
- Create podcasts, add episodes to them, or add your affiliate podcast to the directory without having to go through an administrator. Podcasts now work sort of like diaries on Tondee’s Tavern and other group blogs. Everybody can have one, but not everything makes the front page.
- Let other members post episodes to your podcast. You can name co-hosts individually, or set the “group podcast” option to let any registered member post an episode. For examples of group podcasts, see (un)ConCast and Politics is Vocal.
- Album art, channel, and other meta information can be attached to podcasts
- Post M4V video in addition to MP3 audio
- Nifty Flash uploader
- Embeddable players and widgets
- iTunes meta information in podcast RSS feeds
- Can redirect podcast RSS feeds to Feedburner
- Webplay and download statistics
- Rebuilt podcast directory
- Pretty new theme
- Better performance. Up to 8 times faster under normal server load
That’s not everything, but that’s the important stuff. There are still some minor CSS issues to work out in Internet Explorer 6, but it should be relatively bug-free other than that. Have a look and let us know what you think!
Possible theme weirdness
Note, I’ll be messing with my theme today, so you might notice some funkiness on the site. I tried to use a plug-in called Preview Theme, where you can specify a theme in the query string and it’ll show it to you if you’re logged in at a certain user level, but it didn’t work. So I’ll just mess with the live site. Fortunately I didn’t have to change any HTML, only CSS (because I rule).
Other than that, my day looks like this:
(Jenny sent me this e-card.)
Cartoon of the day
I know, two days in a row! Weird, huh? But I just keep finding good cartoons.
BarCamp Atlanta: soon to commence
BarCamp Atlanta starts tonight, about an hour from now. Apparently we’ll be having dinner on the top level of a parking deck. Swanky!
I have no idea what to expect from BarCamp, but I’m looking forward to finding out. This will be my first hardcore, totally purist unconference (as in, no pre-planned schedule). I’ll try to do as much liveblogging (or pseudo-liveblogging) as possible and take lots of photos.
Kudos to Jeff Haynie for putting this together!
Brilliant
First Duane sent me this cartoon, and then I saw it at Feministe. I’ve been meaning to post it, because it kicks ass.
Heh.
Tale of two blogs
My old blog is still in the Technorati top 10k and has an “authority” ranking of 506 (not that I know what that actually means). Damn, I wish I could somehow “redirect” my Technorati creds to beingamberrhea.com. :P
In other Technorati news, I saw on Twitter today a few people saying you can claim your Twitter on Techorati? But I don’t see how/where to do it.
Browser stats
Breakdown of my blog visitors by browser, according to StatCounter:
| 37.00% | Firefox 2.0.0 |
| 23.00% | MSIE 6.0 |
| 16.00% | MSIE 7.0 |
| 11.00% | Safari 1.2 |
| 6.00% | Firefox 1.5.0 |
| 2.00% | Firefox 1.0 |
| 2.00% | Mozilla 5.0 |
| 1.00% | Opera 9.21 |
| 1.00% | Opera 9.20 |
| 1.00% | Opera 9.00 |
So I don’t feel too terrible about feeding IE a stripped-down version, due to One True Layout problems.
Site hacked
Yep, my site was hacked. So was my other domain, sotsforum.net. That one is still in its hacked stage as of this writing. I have two service tickets outstanding with Dreamhost, but in the meantime, I found that I fortunately had a generic WordPress installation saved on my work computer, which is how I was able to get my blog back up.
Basically what happened was, someone accessed my FTP account illegally (I have since changed the password) and replaced my index.php files with pages full of ads. In the case of beingamberrhea.com, the site wouldn’t load and instead showed a MySQL error, but viewing the file on the server showed that it had indeed been modified at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon. The same thing happened in the wp-admin directory. I renamed both of the hacked files index_HACKED.php for Dreamhost’s reference, when/if they get to my support tickets (I’m guessing they’re swamped, ’cause this kind of thing happened to other accounts too) and uploaded the correct index.php files from the WordPress folder on my hard drive.
Meanwhile, amber.tangerinecs.com has its own problems; it was also hacked, but I had a full back-up of that as well, so I easily replaced index.php. However, I had inadvertently let the domain expire and had to renew it. :P It was registered w/ GoDaddy instead of Dreamhost, and I was not getting emails about registration. Hopefully all should be well, and Dreamhost still has my MySQL database with my 5 years worth of blog posts in it.
Side thought: I need to find a way to backup a site in its human-readable form, not just as a SQL dump!
Anyway. I don’t know when sotsforum.net will be back up, and I feel bad because I had been taking a pretty hands-off approach with that site lately anyway. But it seemed to be a self-sustaining community. Thank god for my WordPress stuff saved on this computer! I was feeling so weird and violated without my blog. I still feel weird and violated because of the hacking, but at least now my blog loads and I can tell y’all what’s up.
Add to that the fact that I woke up with a headache and stomach ache, and it just has not been a good day so far today!
As for my hosting situation after this… I’m not sure. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for over 3 years and have been satisfied for the most part, and I know security breaches can happen to anyone despite the best laid plans, but still… I’m considering switching. On the other hand, I don’t know if I want to deal with the hassle of switching hosts. Will laziness win out? I do like Dreamhost’s web panel, and I remember back when I switched sotsforum.net from its previous home at HostReflex, what a pain in my ass that was.
Anyway… just wanted to let everyone know what’s up. Gotta work now. I wasn’t on the computer at all yesterday, so I’ll try to catch up w/ email and blog reading today as time permits (which it might not). On the bright side, Rusty and I had a great time with Figleaf yesterday. Photos from the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be posted tonight.
Update, 3:45 p.m. – Still no word from Dreamhost. It’s a good thing I had a WordPress backup! :P This means sotsforum.net is still a spam page, though. I’m sure Dreamhost is really freaking busy right about now, but damn, it’s been all day.