Every so often, I have such an idiot moment that it takes me forever to realise I was a complete moron. One of those moments happened, sadly enough, during the rebirth of the blog on this domain. For folks who’ve been keeping score, I’ve actually shifted blogging platforms twice–once from Movable Type to LiveJournal, and then from LiveJournal to WordPress. In all that time, while folks could always see the old blog over here, that left a gigantic hole on this site–one that quickly filled up with requests for pages that no longer existed. Enter the moronic that is me.

Being that I deal with computers, the interwebs, and things that make both tick on a regular basis, you’d think I’d of clued in on this a lot sooner than I did. Turns out–and I should have known this–search engines, other websites, random spambots etc don’t actually stop looking for a page just because said page stopped existing in 2008. Nor, for that matter, does anyone actually correct broken links it would appear. And, since until this morning I didn’t even have a clue how to go about doing that, they just kind of sat there returning the standard 404 request.

Fortunately, because the year I was on LiveJournal meant I wasn’t using this domain for it, there’s that much fewer posts I had to worry about correcting. That just left the 600 and change from the old MT install. Three hours on Google, various message boards, and other asorted sites later, I came across what I think might just be the almost right solution for that particular problem. After testing it on a handful of posts that I’ve been able to confirm were tossing back 404 errors, and finding them no longer doing so, I can safely say the blog now works entirely–or virtually so, if nothing else–the way I originally intended to.

The how and the why is semi-technical, though if anyone’s interested in the boring details I’ll be more than happy to elaborate. But, the short version goes something like this. Movable Type, for all its usefulness, had one huge drawback. It built static HTML files. Which, okay, made serving posts etc pretty much amazing. But once you got up to a certain amount of activity–the publishing of new posts and comments–the rebuilding of those static HTML files took about a hundred years. It also didn’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility in how you linked to those files. If you changed the post title and wanted to update the permalink to account for the change, MT didn’t give you much support for redirection to the new URL. You pretty much had to change it manually, then provide the redirection manually. Adding to the complication that is MT’s way of doing things, the directory structure it came up with was something like: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/05/some_post_title_here.html . WordPress, on the other hand, goes more along the lines of: http://www.the-jdh.com/2010/06/some-post-title-here/ . Ignoring the arguments as to which one’s better than the other–I don’t really care to be honest, it presented a small problem post-migration. Problem solved.

A little addition in plugin form to WordPress, and the URL you request from the server suddenly serves a secondary purpose. It gets handled in this way.

• If the post and/or page requested exists, serve it as per normal.
• Failing that, scan the current list of posts/pages for a post who’s title matches the keywords available in the URL.
• If a matching post is located, redirect the browser to that post and hope that’s the one they were looking for.
• If nothing is found, return the standard 404 page as per usual and get on with the normal routine.
• If more than one option is found, then, optionally–meaning whenever I get around to implementing it–provide a list of suggested entries similar to what was detected in the URL.
• If none of those applies, then we have a bigger problem than I thought and I really should consider not tweeking the site while half a mile from no sleep.

Since nothing’s blown up at me during my testing, it’s a pretty safe bet things are at least 90% not broken. Or they’re clever about hiding their brokenness. Now, about that half a mile of sleep thing. Time to go fix that next.

I’ve had the domain name now belonging to this blog since January of 2006. For a little over a year starting in 2008, my blog was not primarily hosted here but rather on LiveJournal. Before that, it was proudly hosted here and using Movable Type. As of today, I’ve brought the posts and comments from both blogs back to this site. As of a few moments ago, you can scroll back through over 5 years of entries, 1652 in all, belonging to all 3 blogs. There’s still a crap ton of spam to weed out, but as of this moment, my blogging history is complete.

In slightly unrelated news: I am now prepared for the eventual day when LJ goes sideways. Advanced planning from the guy who avoids at all cost advanced planning. Who knew?

I like to think I’m halfway patient. Kind of. In that way that kind of makes some people consider beating me over the head for being too stubborn for my own good. Still, that having been said, Windows Live Writer just beat the royal hell out of me so far as accessibility goes. Huge.

After fighting to get it to show me the screen to write a blog entry in a manner that doesn’t do hurty things to my head, I discover it wants to create its own standards for entry formatting–including throwing HTML where it really hasn’t got any business throwing it. For right now, it’s imperfect solutions time. Which means I do the majority of my work via Semagic, now that I’ve finally gotten it to play nice with something that isn’t LJ, and what I can’t do with this will get done from the web. In the meantime, the hunt is on for a third party client that is:

• accessible
• flexible
• compatible with WordPress’s newer features
• not necessarily restricted by LiveJournal’s limitations–I’d like to be able to make full use of nested categories, etc.

I don’t particularly think I’m being entirely too demanding in this search. I also don’t think such a beast exists, or exists for free in any event. Meantime, if you’re planning to use Windows Live Writer, reconsider. It, for lack of a better word, is crap. From an accessibility perspective, Microsoft fails. Hardcore. I should probably know that already. Ah well, that’ll learn me.

I’ve been doing this long enough now that I think I’m fairly well justified in wanting to look for something that doesn’t require I pull up the website in order to write a post. Not that I don’t like the WordPress interface, but sometimes, I don’t want to wait for the site to load up when I have the option of doing this locally. So, as I’ve been known to do, I took advantage of the fact I wasn’t doing anything overly constructive right now anyway, and started playing around with Windows Live Writer. I know, it’s a Microsoft program and I’m more than a little anti-Microsoft some days. But, unfortunately–yet again–they’re so far the most promising accessibility solution out there at the moment. It does take a tiny bit of creative work with the keyboard to get things set up in such a way that I won’t have to go into the website directly and clean up after it–at least, I’d better bloody well not, which is in my book of absolute lazy a definite +5. Beyond that, and for right at this very moment, with the slightest of tweeking here and there I suspect this may or may not end up being something I can use without pulling my hair out. Now, provided this thing doesn’t do about a hundred different kinds of breaking on me, I shouldn’t in theory need to try and convince Semagic that it really really really wants to play nice with the WordPress API. I’ve noticed LiveJournal clients/services tend to virtually implode on themselves when asked to do non-LJ things. And at the moment, I don’t particularly feel like tinkering with the internals of those protocols. I’m still recovering from the last time, after all.

One of these days, I’ll remind myself I meant last month to remind myself to pick a theme and stay with it. It won’t be today, though. I decided I like the 3-column approach much better, particularly so far as my plans for the site go. Mostly, I’m not cramming everything over on the right hand side, which makes my life just slightly easier. Of course, there’s yet to be a theme created that I haven’t had to slightly modify to meet my tastes. That goes just as well for this one. And, in the process, the blog very nearly went completely sideways–thus further solidifying the fact I should not be messing with PHP, particularly on no sleep. Much as I shouldn’t be blogging on no sleep–I’ve managed to require use of the backspace key roughly a dozen times so far, but that hasn’t stopped me either. Fortunately, WordPress is very good about warning me when I’m about this close to completely and totally screwing things up. And its documentation is plenty good enough that, if I do manage to screw things up entirely too wrongly, unscrewing them isn’t too difficult either. Now, if they just had a similar solution to my ability to screw up posting. Oh well, can’t have it all. Now, perhaps I should consider correcting this no sleep thing. I’ve broken the blog enough for one night.

Every so often, Mike will post some nifty little trick or tool he uses that makes doing X, Y or Z about a hundred times easier than some would argue it has to be–thanks for the Google Analytics pointer, by the way. So it surprised the hell out of me when he wrote this post at the beginning of the month about having to deal with comment spam. And, I had to wonder. How in the hell does a guy who’s been blogging on one platform for longer than I’ve been blogging on 3 deal with it?

In his defense, he uses Movable type, which has okay–though definitely not great–spam catching and destroying abilities. But it needs a *lot* of manual intervension to do it. Part of the reason I got fed up and switched to LiveJournal for a couple years, and then eventually to WordPres–the self-hosted version. They too used to require by default a hell of a lot of manual intervension in the spam department.

Now, though, since I’m not exactly sure which version, they make use of the Akizmet plugin for catching and either holding or deleting spam before it gets posted to the blog. Since making use of this plugin, and granted the blog’s only been around for about 3 months or so, I’ve only ever had perhaps two spam comments make themselves known in this little corner of the intertubes. For comparison’s sake, there are currently 34 comments waiting for me to boot them out of the spam queue, and a total of 129 that were caught altogether by the plugin. Compare that with my old MT blog, now sadly very very neglected and collecting plenty of spam on really old entries. In its prime, on that blog, I’d spend probably an hour a day picking spam comments out of my entries and tossing them in the pile to be later set on fire. I’d of given my first born for an Akizmet-like plugin for use on that platform. And, of course, now that I’m no longer using MT, I learn they have one. If I knew then what I know now, and all that stuff.

Movable Type made me hate spam. WordPress made me kill it. And Akizmet’s to blame. I’m 3 months virtually spam free, and so far, I’m lovin’ it.

Because not everyone’s going to be absolutely in love with this whole RSS thing, and because, as I’ve been discovering lately, RSS doesn’t necessarily translate to easy access, I’ve finally decided to start with the implementing something that might make things just a little bit more… well, readable for everyone. So now, thanks to my finally getting around to getting off my rear and doing something about it, and thanks to Feedburner making it just slightly less than painless, WTN by email is born. I have no idea how much breakage will be involved, and how much borderline insanity will be the result, but it’s here. You can find the subscription form in the sidebar. Now if I can just figure out how to keep the rest of it from blowing up in my face, I’ll be miles happy.

That’s a large part of the reason I’m on Twitter. Until recently, my blog’s been a very poor reflection of that. Sure, it has comments, and they’re on–posts are commentable for up to 90 days, but unless a habbit was made to check back on a particular post, it’s a little difficult to see when someone decides to reply to you. Particularly since most folks still haven’t quite gotten the hang of RSS feeds–there’s one for comments as well, in case those that do are interested. So, I’ve finally gotten around to fixing that minor malfunction. Now, if someone, including me, replies to a comment you leave on the blog, you’ll get an email with your original comment and the reply. Coming whenever I can find time to do it, receiving entries by email. Because I’m also a fan of lazy. Quite possibly also why I’m on Twitter.

I’ve been trying to convince Jessica to get back into the whole blogging thing for, well, ever. I’ve even gone so far as to threaten her in various ways using various methods. She just wouldn’t budge. Until now. After offering to host her very own non-LJ blog, it running on the same software that powers this one, she’s decided to toss herself back into writing mode. And now, after much consideration given to where she wishes to call her new online home, I give you the nuthouse. It’s still largely under construction, and I’ll be helping her for a while get things to be exactly the way she wants them, but for the moment, it’s operational and mostly fully functioning. Drop in and give her a read at some point–and please do be kind.

Also, for those of you who have her LJ on your friends lists, I’ve set her up to crosspost to LJ in a way similar to what I’m doing, so you’re still able to follow her with a minimal amount of actual effort on your part. Hey, I’m lazy too. I know how it goes. And it goes kinda like this. So enjoy. Maybe wave hello. And don’t forget to leave your valuables here when you leave.

After just over a month, I’ve hit the redesign button. Switched out the old theme, and giving this one a try. Not sure how much different it’ll actually be, but this is it for now. If it turns out the theme absolutely sucks beyond any and all belief, I still have the old one. Mostly though, I’m just using it as an excuse to change styles the lazy way. Oh yeah, and this one does threaded comments. Can’t argue with that.

I’ve been following Toronto Mike since probably early-ish in 2007, when I randomly stumbled on one of his many articles relating to our mutually admired and at the same time hated hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. I was cruising Technoradi–yes, that was back when it was actually good–and his just happened to be one of the blogs I read a bit of. I loved the fact he had absolutely no problem with making his opinion known in no uncertain terms, and most of his readers respected that whether they agreed with it or not.

A short 2 or 3 years later, and Mike’s gone from your average local everyday blogger to a Toronto and area sellebrity. Why? Because he tends to be a lot more straightforward, and a lot more involved, with certain aspects of the news–often times before the more mainstream sources of the news even give a story half a paragraph on page 25 of the paper. Folks see him as a semi-official news source. A journalist without the restrictions of CBC, CTV etc. It’s easy to see how he sees himself. It’s the same as he saw himself 3 years ago, and the same as I see him now–just a Toronto area blogger with a passion for things that generate a lot of interest. Like the craptasticness of our hockey team, or what’s going on with his two favourite local radio personalities post-firing from what, I can only assume, is still his favourite radio station.

Mike, whether your perception of what you do changes or not, I hope you and your writing style never do. If there were more blogs, and bloggers, like yours, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them all. Keep it up. You, sir, deserve your sellebrity.

I know this isn’t a techy type blog, but well, I’m a techy type geek, and it’s my blog. I’ll get back to writings of a more personal nature just as soon as I have something to write about. In the meantime, have a read. You might yet find something relatively interesting.

I challenged myself yesterday to find something that would equal or better the stats package I’ve been running locally since the opening of the blog. And, in fact, challenged myself to even give Google Analytics a try for the sole purpose of letting it take its best shot at proving it can do a better job of it. In so doing, I fear I may have come across something of an accidental discovery. I’ve been suspecting my current stats package of missing things every so often, but wasn’t entirely sure exactly how accurate my suspicion was. So I installed another plugin to run a comparison. Already, just in a brief test run of the two side-by-side–really, I don’t do that very often, but I was curious–the newly installed one’s picked up on things the current doesn’t. For the curious, the plugin that’s currently being challenged is StatPress Reloaded. The challenger is the more recently updated and, at least on initial outlook anyway, more flexible Wassup plugin. So far, on initial testing, the latter seems to come out slightly more on top. Not sure yet how well it’ll work with a fully implemented WP Supercache, but that’ll be my next step after putting it through its paces like this. In the meantime, I shall now sit back, and watch the thing periodically refresh, thus giving me a few more stats to enjoy. While StatPress likely misses a few.

Since I started this blog, I’ve been running a local tracking tool for the purposes of generating stats of mostly general interest to me–how people got here, what people read when they got here, did they come back, where did they go when they left, all that interesting to me but completely useless to anyone else stuff. It’s also how I generated yesterday’s breakdown of what got the most attention in November. And, while it does give me a lot of information, I can’t help but wonder if I’m still missing a thing of interest or two.

So, I’m finally deciding to take advice long ago given to me by Mike among others, and installing Google Analytics to go along with it. I very very briefly played around with it some time ago, but never actually ended up really getting anywhere with it beyond mildly confused, but that’s mostly due to the fact I haven’t had the time to mess with it in detail. Since I do, and since I’m curious what these two packages combined will do to possibly complement each other, I figured what the hell. Worst case, I decide to pick one and ditch the other. Best case, I keep both. In any event, the comparison over time should be mildly distracting. I’ll be quite interested to see which one misses more and by how much. As for right now, though, I’m almost missing a hockey game.

When I opened up this site again for actual regular use for reasons beyond just collecting dust and as a place to test whatever cool new toy I happen to be considering implementing, I noticed that even though I hadn’t actually *used* the site for its originally intended purposes in about 2 and a half years, people and things were still being referred to files and other such niftyness that no longer existed here. For example, entries that I’d written during the early days of the original blog. I saw the occasional referrer pointing someone to a file I’d uploaded 3 years ago, and later moved to the old blog’s new, retirement location. That got me thinking, just how long do search engines actually keep this stuff around? If you look hard enough, could you potentially find something resembling a website still in the search results that hadn’t been updated since the early part of the decade? Even if that website doesn’t exist? Of course, if search engines wanted to, they need only crawl the Wayback machine–it’s full of sites that existed 10 years ago and don’t now. You perform the right search, you could pull up a very different Yahoo! homepage than what you’d see were you to go there now. Here’s the way the blog looked close to its retirement date. This is the most recent update where content actually existed pre-wordpress. Just… ignore the frame with the 404 error showing itself off there. I was including something in a frame that I’m no longer running here, mostly just as an excuse to play with stuff. My, how times change.

At some point during the night last night, and rather inconveniently after Jessica and I had run off to bed and so I couldn’t immediately determine that it was a network issue, this blog, a rarely updated–and, in fact, rather neglected for a couple weeks–political blog, and our email among other things, decided to take a rather gigantic crap on our front lawn. The first ever self-hosted version of the blog–link’s over there in the right sidebar–was started on this network, hosted by DreamHost, in January of 2006. Since then, I’ve always had something going over here. If not a blog, then some little utility or web app I was playing around with just because I can. Or a forum I was testing for one of the RP projects I’m either involved in or dedicating resources to. So I’ve been with them a while.

In that time, I think I’ve only ever really personally encountered… maybe 4 major, “OMG I can’t access a thing” type failures. It may, in fact, even be less than 4. So when I woke up to a screen full of “can’t connect” messages (thanks, Outlook), I was more than a little bit surprised–albeit temporarily. And, admittedly, more than a little bit frustrated–emails I should have received overnight hadn’t actually hit my mailbox yet. Once I managed to get my end of the cleanup out of the way, though, I started looking into something I hadn’t really looked at since, well, the last time DreamHost’s network went and crapped out.

I’ve been eyeing on and off, usually while the blog etc is offline, the idea of moving most if not all of my various outlets fully away from a managed environment. I’ve been running the DH VPS for a few months now, plus I’ve been running two of my own, unmanaged VPS’s for a couple years. Mostly, it’s been a sort of learning environment for me–see how many different ways I can break the system, then reinstall it, and start all over again. And yet, every time something like this happens, I always toss around the idea for a few days of actually expanding my knowledge overall of the Linux environment, and at the same time put into development my own email, and possibly web, solution–one independant from any particular web host. But I never actually get around to doing that.

I’ve done much of the actual research already–the most likely candidate for when I actually decide to take that leap will probably end up being one that centers around Postfix and MySQL, now I just need to find the energy, motivation, and maybe get frustrated enough with my current setup that I finally just say screw it and go with it. It’s probably gonna suck, but at least then I’ll be able to actually figure out for myself what’s up and died on me. Meanwhile, hey, DH, can we get a more stable network please? I really don’t like being forced into considering enduring the necessary brain damage to actually set something like that up. At least not at such a young age.

I have no idea why, but sometimes, just for random amusement or because I’m way too lazy to do much of anything else, the best way I find to get my point(s) across on here is in list format. I actually started it while I was still using LJ–and, in fact, probably picked it up from Michelle–as a way of writing things down that I either don’t want to, or don’t plan to right now, go into further detail on. Probably also explains why I’m starting to get back into Twitter at about the same time I considered getting back into blogging. I’m probably just as likely to release a brief blurb about something as I am to go into elaborate detail about it, so they kind of fit rather well together, I think. What I’m likely to go into list format about–in list format:

• Random, possibly unrelated points with little to no explanation behind them
• Thoughts of the day, as they happen and as I remember to write them
• To do lists–I occasionally make those
• Recaps of possibly related posts, where appropriate
• Ideas for a project that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet
• Entries not unlike this one

Of course, there’s just a lot of things that make it to Twitter that don’t really need any further explanation–or, for that matter, belong on a blog. Or if they do, they belong there after events have happened that actually give them context. That’s also why my Twitter feed’s in the sidebar, and why you can follow it here. I may also make 2 or 3 obscure mentions of something, either on Twitter or on the blog, that don’t get expanded upon for a couple days. That’s generally what happens when I get particularly lazy. And, possibly, it may be a semi-good reason to not be so quick to switch to bullet points/list format/whatever you want to call it. But, it’s worked for me. If it ever stops working for me, then I’ll think about changing my ways. If it doesn’t take too much effort–see the lazyness claim above.

After a little over 4 months not maintaining a personal blog, I decided to get back into it again. And, while Live Journal served its purposes when I eventually moved away from Movable Type, I kind of liked being able to actually know what’s happening insofar as the blog was concerned. I could have–okay, so some folks will probably insist should have–gone back to MT, but I’ve also become quite fascinated with WordPress of late. Specificly, the amount of flexibility it gives you–and that without needing to know all that much about PHP. Which, well, is great, considering the only thing to this point I’ve managed to do in that language with any degree of success is break it.

The down side is, of course, I’ve yet to actually find a program I like that will allow me to update this blog without needing to have a browser open. But, hell. This loads easier and faster than the old site anyway. And because it’s self-contained, I’m not quite as dependant on other people’s ability to figure out what went splork.

All this to say I’m trying to start up with the regular blogging again. If it’s random, amusing, or just plain makes me wonder what in the 7 levels of hell someone’s thinking, or even if it just involves me–some folks seem to be under the misguided impression I lead an interesting life, it’ll go here. It’ll also go on my LJ, though that’s mostly for the folks who still have me on their friends lists and don’t know about the change yet. And for my next trick, an entry that actually relates to what I’m up to. Hint: it involves another move.

And am thussly now on Twitter. Anyone who wants my username, tap me on the shoulder. Or something. Anyone not on Twitter, it’ll be cross-posted to LJ. Assuming I actually use the thing. And with me, registered does not always equate to using.

It took some eventual encouraging, but I’ve decided to give good old LJ another shot. With… my typical, rather unusual but charmingly so twist. Eventually, hopefully by this time tomorrow night… the website address that used to belong to my old blog will find itself redirecting to this one. Since there’s a shitload of randomness on that there other blog, I’ve stuck it over here so that I might at some point refer back to it when I decide to get on one of my, uh, moron of the year award rants. And they will happen. But for now, oh, for now… I find things to do that don’t involve messing with websites. At least until the next interesting news article comes up.