Being Amber Rhea

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!

If you want to disable WordPress smilies, the relevant function is in wp-includes/formatting.php. It’s called convert_smilies.

The smilies were annoying me. So I just commented out most of the function.

If you want to do this, just leave $output = $text; and return $output; and you’ll be fine.

Update: Never mind, the option is in the WP admin! Somehow I had managed to miss it, but Shelby pointed me in the right direction.

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!

So excited. I think I have the comment spam under control! (Fingers crossed.)

Today I successfully implemented Akismet, which is best known as a Wordpress plug-in, but is versatile enough to be used with basically any web app. (The code is impressive… sleek, simple, modular. Excellent example of programming “best practices” [my apologies re: the buzzword].)

I used Bret Kuhn’s Akismet PHP class. I created a separate spam table in my database (just a copy of the comments table structure), and that’s where I’m sending the spam comments. So far? Akismet has caught 11 spam comments, all real comments have been going through, and there have been no false positives or spam that slipped through!

I am so freaking excited about this. I feel like doing a little dance or something.

Instead, I’ll probably write a post about it on Download Squad later.

Jeff Moore has consolidated some of the articles out there comparing PHP and ASP. This debate is getting almost as heated as the perennial “Mac vs. PC” debate, or the even nerdier “vi vs. emacs” debate. I think you all know where I stand on this, so I won’t start pontificating.

I fixed the timestamp issue.

Actually, Chris is a genius, for contributing the code which I had to modify only slightly.

Here’s the magic line:

$theTime = date("Y-m-d")." ".(date("H")+3).date(":i").date(":s");

Sweet. Cross that off the list! Next up: answer emails…

Ok, so, to set the time 3 hours in the future, I think I have to use the mktime() function… which, for some reason, seems more confusing than it should be. I probably pass date("h")+3 as one of the arguments, right?

Anybody have a clue?

Unkymoods, the site where I get my cute li’l mood icons, has converted from ASP to PHP. The site as a whole is now much faster, there are more features, and there is a non-Javascript option for placing the icon on one’s site (so it’s not going to be slowing down my site anymore). I think this is very cool. Friendster, of course, converted from JSP to PHP several months ago, and the speed improvement is phenomenal. I used to never want to use Friendster because it was soooo agonizingly slow. Now it’s downright zippy!

Even though they’re [usually] faster than client-side scripting, not all server-side languages are created equal!

From InfoWorld article: “The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid“:

IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and .Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages — particularly PHP. This scripting language has been around for a decade now, and millions of Yahoo pages are served by PHP each day.

…

The stateless “shared-nothing” architecture of PHP means that each request is handled independently of all others, and simple horizontal scaling means adding more boxes. Any bottlenecks are limited to scaling a back-end database. Languages such as PHP might not be the right solution for everyone, but pre-emptively pushing scripting languages aside when there are proven scalability successes is a mistake.

Oh yeah, if you didn’t know… Yahoo uses PHP. A billion page requests per day, beeatch!

Ok, I fixed the PHP error that was preventing stuff from showing up now that it’s December. Sort ascending is still fux0red, but does anybody really use that?

I’m starting to get kind of discouraged about my development of this blogware. I wanted to flesh it out into something that other people could really use, because I thought I had made a really good program. But now… it seems like there are so many bugs, and most of them are stupid bugs that shouldn’t be there if I really know what I’m doing as a programmer (which, I still think I do, but there are always people out there ready to criticize every little thing), and as I fix some bugs new ones appear (like the fact that the Next/Previous links in the admin tool aren’t working now)… it’s just getting discouraging. Plus the fact that I don’t have a lot of free time to work on it anymore. At this point, I kind of feel like, I’ll fix the biggest remaining bugs (like the two I’ve mentioned herein), update Charles’s blog with all the changes, and then call it quits on development, at least for now. I really do believe I am a very competent programmer; but I just don’t have the time, and I don’t like getting discouraged.

My new favorite thing (as of about an hour ago): PHP Function Index for Mac OS X. Very cool!