Category: Site Announcements

Twitter

I’ve disabled auto-tweeting back here, and my Twitter is now friends-only.

This is mainly for reasons directly related to my blood pressure. There are … things I would say there that I don’t need everyone and their mother knowing. Feel free to friend me on Twitter, but I will probably be choosy with who I friend in return. ‘kay? ‘kay.

Tags, No Nested Categories, and Imports

A few things have been going on behind the scenes:

  1. I’ve been categorizing the As-Yet Unfiled Entries over the last month. I’ll finish next week. I finally made it happen by just putting a recurring task in Tasks Pro to do 15 a day. I started with 450+ and am now down to 90. 29 Jan: DONE! 😀
  2. I killed the nested categories today. Took a lot of SQL to map nested categories back to their parents, then create tags with WP’s category-to-tag converter. Sucked having to do that by hand, though. One would think that the category-to-tag importer would have an option for doing just that in the conversion; most people that had nested categories, like me, would probably go to the device of parent category as category, child categories as tags. Meh.
  3. I’ve been moving some stuff over from GFMorris.com. That took more SQL-fu, but I finally had an a-ha moment with joins today. I mean, I generated a working join on my own. It was a nice moment to understand WTF the syntax was doing for once.

Been a good thing to occupy time during conference calls today…

Google AdSense

You’ll note that there are now Google AdSense ads down in the footer. I’m trying to defray my server lease costs [which run about … ugh … $4000/yr], and subscription fees for the forums I run and sub-leasing space to friends isn’t defraying the full cost. [Not even close.] So sorry … you get ads.

I’ve tried to find a WordPress plugin that chooses to show ads only to those folks coming in from Google, or perhaps only to people who don’t already have a comment on the site [as the comment sets a cookie locally], but … no dice.

1645: I ran the numbers, and the “not even close” is like $1500. :wince: Why do I do this again?

IJSM.org: Now With Less Cruft

I’ve been spending time with Alex King’s 404 Notifier over the last week or two slowly fixing 404 errors. A lot of mine have to do with images: I’ve had two or three collection points for images, and none of those were ever “right” compared to how images are organized by WP now. [Finally, WP’s solution is good enough that it’s just what I use. I never fire up an FTP client anymore.] I sat down this morning to work on that, and a couple hours later, I’m done.

This was the perfect I’m-sick-and-don’t-want-to-deal-with-anyone task. Honestly, I feel a whole lot better today; I think my left ear will be fairly cleared up by tomorrow, enough that I could go to work and function normally. Ever since Friday night, I’ve been stressed on how I’d work at the office, since … well, it would be hard to answer the phone, and I do a lot of that. But I hear a whole lot better in my left ear today, and my right ear seems to be improving as well [although the wick has come out of it, so I probably need to go back and have another re-inserted].

Full Sidebar Restored, Links Need Work

Folks who look at the front page will note that all of my links are back in the sidebar now, rather than just a random sampling of many of the link categories. Given that I carry a large number of posts on the main page, it’s just fine to do this. I’m also working on my links, but man … that’s really going to take some work. FeedLounge has radically increased my ability to aggregate stuff and handle the data, so … dang, I’m out of date with these.

So, two things: 1) if I should be linking to you, and I’m not, leave a comment, and 2) if you have something you think I should check out, let me know.