The holidays are insane on a good day, which accounts for most of my time spent doing things not related to blogging. What accounts for the rest? A mutual friend of both Shane and myself came down with some pretty nifty little medical issues–some of which, some of you are already familiar with. That’s required we be a lot more not near electronics than usual around here while those get fixed and otherwise taken care of. Thankfully, she’s kind of on her way towards recovery now, which means–you guessed it–back to business as usual around here.

It’s been pretty low key on the familial front. Mother’s still working too much, dad’s still working too much, brother’s still–well, okay, nothing he does is low key but there’s not enough room in this entry for that. Oh, and–surprise of surprises–I’m single again. The reasons behind it aren’t worth going into detail publicly–again, some of you already know and the rest, well, probably have theories. But suffice it to say I kind of saw it coming. For those of you who read Jessica’s blog when she posts to it, it’ll be up again just as soon as she figures out what she’s doing with it–and if it’s actually going to get any kind of continued use. Outside of that, it’s been a pretty routine month and a bit–where routine equals anything but. but now, there’s time. And where there’s time, there’s all kinds of random. New year, which means new posting habbits, new mockery, and a new year end show to be kicked off at 9:00 tonight on Mojo Radio. Drop in, say hello, and have a listen (links are over here), while we do 2011 right–and get trashed. Look for more blog content from this corner–including my 2011 review, starting… well… later tonight or early tomorrow. Maybe. But it’s coming. In the meantime, we now return you to whatever you were doing before I distracted you.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• When your network takes a crap, and takes your email with it.

A lot of reconnecting was done, and plenty of amusing fun was the result. She came in on Friday, and we went to Pembroke right from the station for my aunt and uncle’s 25th anniversary. We were able to introduce her to more of my extended family who, as I suspected, strongly approved. A ton of fun was had, alcohol–the bar variety–was consumed and dancing was done. Afterwards, it was back to Ottawa and the awesome waiting there.

Monday was getting Jessica used to the place, since she hadm’t been here before. Tuesday was our first official show on Mojo Radio, in preparation for something we’ve been working on for a few months. We test our usual setup for such things in a week or two if all goes well. Wednesday was more relaxing, and getting ready for Thursday.

One of the things Jessica wanted to get done was to meet up with a local friend of ours–you may know him as Blind Bandit. So we did the least recommended thing and mixed that with booze. The result? Posted on Shane’s blog and not fit for public consumption. Friday was more relaxing, and today, we sadly have to return her.

The week wasn’t all party and insanity, though. Sjhe cane up to belatedly wish me a happy birthday. And, in so doing, might have just removed my biggest–or, at least, second biggest–knock against the iPhone. I’ve been saying the thing needed a dedicated, physical keyboard since before I got one, and nearly screaming it after. Because she has that whole listening thing down to an art, she went and picked one up for my birthday. Hence, this post is being finished while on the road. I’ll write a review of this thing when I get home. As for now, I should probably go say goodbye to my girlfriend.

Randomly related: I should not be left to my own devices with this blog, PHP, and a WordPress plugin library. Just an observation.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• I may or may not have just broken the blog.
• Finding new and interesting ways to torment the fiance.
• Coming up on go time, and…
• Things I didn’t have time to blog about, a list by me.
• You know too much is happening when you don’t have time to blog.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Comments, 2.0.
• I think I can see a patern in the slowly increasing volume of spam comments.
• From the spam box: they don’t come much more random.
• Virtually spam free, and lovin’ it.
• Well now. Ain’t that just peachy.

• Moving: Jessica got herself all moved in, relatively in one piece and with most of what sanity she has left after dating and being engaged to me intact. Her stuff, thankfully, also made it to the other end in one pice. Find her take on that and several million other things over on her blog. Go now. I’ll wait.
• Technology: I’d started the process before I left, and finished it while down there–in and around the above mentioned move. Shortly before my return to Canada–where I’m currently flaed out now, the new laptop I’d been aiming for met me here. It’s nifty cool, in the wicked sense. Still getting used to using Windows 7 on a more than occasional basis, but hey, so far I’m not complaining much.
• The stupid: there’s acrap ton of it. It starts with local cab companies, and it’ll all warrant separate entries. Again, see the need for more brain power.
• Hockey: the playoffs are closing rappidly in on us. There will be playoff mockery involved. There will not be Leafs recaps involved–again. Ah well. You saw it coming.
• Leafs: I quit. At least for this season. I haven’t done a recap since mid-February. To recap this many games would be both exceedingly spammy and a very good reason to develop a migraine. Naturally it would also double as an excellent exercise in frustration–like all mid to late season attempts at playing the comeback kid do. You’re just not that team, Toronto. Sorry.
• Mockery: Oh, dear lord, the mockery. Not in this post, but the mockery. I’m buried in it. It’ll get posted over the next couple days. Trust me–it’ll be more than worth the wayt.

So that’s kind of where I’ve been. Now, where’d I put my caffeine?

I still didn’t do it with the expectation of milions of readers and thousands of comments–good thing, as I think I managed maybe half a dozen at one time, but I did it because it was there for something to do. 5 years later, I still post whatever comes to mind–or across my desk via RSS feeds. And I still do it for something to do. I’m not expecting 80 million readers, though when I write something that catches on I don’t exactly shake my head at it. I do it because. And hey, sometimes, I actually offer something up that other people don’t know. And sometimes, other people drop by and I learn a thing or two. Okay, so maybe that’s why I do it.

I keep trying to invent something inciteful/witty/whatever, but I got nothin’. Not a very impressive showing for 5 years. So instead, have 5 of my favourite posts from all 3 incarnations of the blog.

• You know you’re from Pembroke when…
• The best pitcher in baseball is perfect–just not in Toronto.
• Technical support rules, the dummy’s version.
• You know when you’re from ottawa when…
• This kid trumps any 2 of yours. And she’s not even related to me. (this post gets a follow-up later today or tomorrow.)

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• When your network takes a crap, and takes your email with it.

With the exception of a 4-month break last year, I’ve been fairly non-stop blogging in one way, shape or form for nearly 5 years. But for some reason, the 1-year mark of this particular version of this particular blog sticks out for me. Probably because when I started this blog, I’d just settled in after a move out of Ottawa to try and save me a little coin and now, just a month after the blog’s 1-year anniversary (Do blogs *have* anniversaries?), I’m investigating another creative little move in an attempt at saving me money. Whatever it is, and whyever it’s stuck out for me, there you have it. Happy belated anniversary to the blog. Next milestone? Five years blogging in general.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• The year of the earthquake?
• The-jdh.com turns 5, and my incitefulness takes a walk.
• 5 years of blog, now in one convenient location.
• Do we need another political blog? And, would I get help?
• This blog turns 2 today!

Things have started to calm down now in most if not all areas previously of concern. Mom’s recovery’s going amazingly well–she was out with dad and I for the afternoon, which she wouldn’t have been able to do a week ago, which is a definite indicator. The computer my parents have been hanging onto for the last 10 years or so, who I’ve affectionately–okay, maybe not so much–nicknamed the frankenputer, has finally officially been declared dead, and been replaced with one that doesn’t look like it was put together from parts of a few other, less fortunate machines–and runs Windoes 7 like a dream, just for the record. Good things happen when the geek goes shopping. And life has generally stopped spinning in a hundred different directions at once. Which gives me plenty more time to get back to my regularly scheduled mockery of any and all things mockworthy.

I loved being super busy and internet restricted for a few days. Particularly seeing as I had plenty of offline things to keep me busy during that time. But as she who is my current patient, for lack of a better way to describe her, is slowly getting back to her usual self, I’m going to gradually have less offline things to do–which means a return to that which is my normal, everyday, usual routine. As much as I loved the last couple weeks, I’m going to love the slow return to normality just about as much. Or maybe it’s the excuses I’ll invent to play with a computer that can bring Facebook up in about 5 seconds, as opposed to 15 minutes–hey, the father unit checked that out for himself. I’m still resisting. Either way, I’m going to like this very nearly, if not equally, as much. Now let’s go see if I can find the rest of November.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• In which WordPress and my server conspire to psych me out.
• In which ConfigServer quite possibly breaks WordPress. Oof.

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.

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?

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• The blog turns a year old without me noticing.

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.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Introducing KNFB’s new fail in a box.
• Testing out the Windows Live Writer.
• Why linux is for the epic motherfucking win.
• Ha. Epic fail.
• What type of writer should you be?

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Windows Live Writer review: epic accessibility fail.

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.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Death to spam comments. Or, at least, generous amounts of pain.
• I think I can see a patern in the slowly increasing volume of spam comments.
• Wo. GMail is a spam bucket.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Finding new and interesting ways to break the blog. this time, get updates by email!
• This is a public service announcement, brought to you by Comments R Busted.

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.

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 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.

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.

Other posts you might enjoy. Or not.

• Canada’s democratic process not democratic enough for Brigette DePape. Or the PSAC, apparently.
• Random website browsing is a good time.