Being Amber Rhea

Has RSS caused blog comments to dramatically decline? Is it an effect of one’s blog getting more popular? Is it random?

None of those answers make much sense to me, but I and several of my friends (Dacia, Rusty, Jen, Duane… just to name a few) have noticed that we don’t get nearly as many comments as we used to.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Quality is way more important than quantity. The “great post!” comments are certainly nice, but if those are the only comments, well, something is lacking. And I certainly don’t want assholish or outright trollish comments. I mean why do you think I banned valeko, Andisheh, and a few other repeat offenders?

Interesting conversation is what we all want, right? And shit, people, that’s not unique to blogs. That’s life.

And yeah, unfortunately, sometimes when there’s been a lot of conversation on a post I’ve written, it happened to coincide with a very busy time in my off-blog life, so that I simply wasn’t able to sit down and write in-depth replies. Other times, I admit, the flurry of conversation has been a little over-stimulating, and I’ve been content to sit back and enjoy it vicariously - and I don’t mean that in a negative way; what I mean is, I like listening to smart, interesting people talk!

So I hope you all will comment more. I know that lots of smart, interesting people read my blog (flattery will get me everywhere!), and we have lots of good conversations elsewhere (even if they’re getting kind of fragmented, with things like Twitter and Tumblr) - so yeah I guess I’m being selfish and saying, I want some good conversation here!

I don’t want flaming, or stupidity, or trolling… but good conversation. Like hanging out at a (non-smokey, not too loud) bar, except you don’t have to leave your house or spend money. (Unless you want to!)

(I am resisting the urge to create a “navel-gazing” tag to use with this post. Frankly I’m sick of my own self-deprecation. As Fred Stoeker would say, “It stops here!”)

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.)

The birthday of the Beast

Originally uploaded by cesarastudillo

Today my blog turns six. (It’s also the one-year anniversary of me moving to WordPress. Oh, and I’m celebrating by being at work and being sick.) Hard to believe all that’s happened in that timespan! I’ve graduated from college, started and graduated from grad school, gotten the biggest shock of my life, moved to Texas, gotten divorced, moved to Atlanta, worked at… let’s see… at least five different jobs, met some great new friends, reconnected with some old friends, and most importantly, met the GDBF (and our three-year anniversary is coming up in a few weeks!).

What will be the next chapter in my life with a blog?

Just reposting what Thomas wrote, since it applies to this site as well.

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Got a notice from Dreamhost that the web server that hosts my blog (that’s this blog, this one right here) is going to be undergoing a physical move from one data center to another on Friday night, from 10pm PST until 6am PST the next day. In all likelihood, this isn’t going to be a big deal and everything will be right back to normal by Saturday afternoon.

Of course, if the Prius (or Mini Cooper or Yugo or some other mode of vehicular transport) carrying my web server gets a flat tire or something more detrimental … well, we’ll just try not to think much about it and hope for the best.

We’re heading to Augusta for a few days. We’ll also be doing another excursion to small Georgia towns for photos and exploring. Not sure how much I’ll be on the computer over the next few days, but before the year is over I will put up a 2007 In Pictures post, following the meme Rusty started!

Also, remember to call 678.389.9441 if you have anything for our end-of-year podcast!

Until further notice, anyone who needs to email me should do so at my Gmail address, instead of my gapodcastnetwork.com or tangerinecs.com address. The latter two are forwarding-only addresses that forward to Gmail, but because of the reasons outlined here, it’s been taking hours or days for me to get messages sent to either of those addresses. That being said, if you’ve sent me any emails in the past few days and I haven’t responded, this is probably the explanation. (Or, laziness on my part.)

I feel the self-censorship coming on again… argh. That is part of the reason why I haven’t been writing as many “real” blog posts lately, and instead just posting announcements. Well, that, and being legitimately busy. But still… there have been some things I’ve wanted to write about that I’ve ended up not writing about, because of the anticipated reactions and drama. Seems like I go through this cycle every 6 months or so. :P

I almost didn’t even post the Tipping post, because I was expecting people to show up and tell me what a horrible bougie asshole I am, and isn’t it nice that I have the privilege of griping about not knowing when to tip, when the service industry people are busy thinking about things like how they’re going to pay rent this month (because, obviously, I would know nothing about such concerns, being a bougie asshole; and one blog post tells the story of my whole life; yadda yadda etc. blah bleh BLERGH).

So maybe I will write the other post that’s floating around in my head, or maybe not. Ah, I’ll probably write it, and then sometime around April or May I’ll be due to go through this song-and-dance one more time. :P

Following the example of Tony (who’s been doing this for years) and Rusty, I decided to look up and post some search strings for my site. Unfortunately, mine are boring and surprisingly topical compared to theirs. But here are a few:

• sex in progress
• olde tyme wife spanking videos
• “[semi trucks]” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment” -”no comments”
• “best to be stuck in handcuffs with”
• +spring4th +”atlanta” +”party” +”halloween” -children +adult
• amazing “ass to mouth” blog
• amber zip bag
• area where i can get porno cd in greensboro
• atlanta sex roof
• craigslist oboe cabart
• do men get jealous when women watch porn
• example bad redaction
• fascination with ass to mouth
• how to hold down dust in your appartment
• itinerary of conference with classy words
• myspace all fun until poke eye with dick
• squirt distance

Why the hell has no one commented here in several days? Oh, maybe because I haven’t been posting much? Well, just for that, I’m putting this up as a blog post instead of a Twitter tweet. (And just so you know, that “blogger outreach” post took me hours to write! Hours, I tell you!)

While I’m waiting for things to settle down around here so I can get back to blogging on a semi-regular basis, I’d love it if y’all would take my Blog Reader Project survey.

Susie Bright had one a few weeks ago, which I took, and subsequently viewed the results in attractive Web 2.0-ish charts and graphs. (I seem to recall Figleaf having one a while back, too.) Since I like taking surveys, and seeing the results of surveys, I figured I’d create my own!

The results of this survey will in no way influence my content, nor will they help me make decisions about targeted ads and such. This is purely a curiosity thing. I’m just dying to know how many of you floss regularly. (If you don’t, you should. Your gums will thank you.)

Reader “Jim” doesn’t like that I have password-protected posts. Heavens!

What intrigues me is that after you’ve openly discussed having sex at a swinger’s club, what aspects of one’s life might warrant a password protected post. After some thought, I’ve concluded the two go hand in hand. If I wanted to share a private thought with friends, I’d send an email. Heck, I might even pick up a phone. But if I were an exhibitionist, I’d do the blog-equivalent of “I’ve got a secret.”

You got a sweet theory, boy!

I emailed him:

I was going to respond to your rather nebulous post about me on your blog, but since you don’t have comments, I can’t. There’s a lesson in there about glass houses and stones, I think. If I cared enough to bother playing such a game, that is.

Sorry if you don’t like the password protected thing, but oh well, it’s my blog. It’s amusing to me that you think going to a sex club is OMG TEH MOST PRIVATE PERSONAL THING EVAR!!!!1!1! - as if real people’s real lives aren’t actually much more complicated than that. Perhaps for your next trick, you could post your full medical records?

Anyway, kisses, and thanks for being a fan. In the interest of transparency, I’ll be sure to blog this email, as well.

This is now completely recursive.

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.

What the hell? Why did my July 8th Twitter updates get posted about 30 times??

I deleted all the excess, but good god, was that disconcerting. Sorry about that, y’all. If it happens again I’m just going to have to disable Twitter Tools.

Breakdown of my blog visitors by browser, according to StatCounter:

So I don’t feel too terrible about feeding IE a stripped-down version, due to One True Layout problems.

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.

Is del.icio.us automatic blog posting just dead for everybody?

Hmph. It was nice while it lasted.

Anyone else getting errors from their daily del.icio.us posting thingy?

That interface sure does suck. I guess I’ll just wait until tomorrow and see if it works normally then.

Okay, I’m exhausted… time for bed now. There are people to whom I owe emails and assorted other deliverables, but that’ll have to happen tomorrow.

If things look weird around here during the next few days, particularly in the comments section, don’t worry your pretty little heads about it. I noticed that when comment threads get past a certain length, things start to look fucked up - specifically, the page doesn’t expand as far as it’s supposed to, and you end up with text on top of text. This baffles me because I’m usually basically the same code as I did on the old blog; but nevertheless, there is fucked-upedness, and I will address it as I get time.

One day, I imagine I’ll set up a dev server for this kind of UI testing - but that day is not today. So just deal until all is well.

Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.

When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.

But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).

I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.

So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!

You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.

The old site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.

I look forward to seeing y’all around here!

Old blog Technorati ranking: 3,435 (1,162 links from 692 sites).

New blog Technorati ranking: 1,939,419 (1 links from 1 sites).

Old blog TTLB ecosystem ranking: Marauding Marsupial (#1379).

New blog TTLB ecosystem ranking: Not even on the radar screen yet.

Ah, the perils of moving…

I really did it… I installed WordPress.