From the category archives:
It is nice when months of fretting pays off in a ten-minute update with only a few dumbass PHP errors.
There are still some messy bits here and old links are broken. I have some new images to put in later on when I finish drawing them. And the “www” part of the site is still old. But it’ll be easier to fix everything now that the new blog is settled into its new home.
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I’ve closed down comments on all the posts here in preparation for a big blog move. I’m migrating all my web sites over to WordPress, with a new simpler structure and an integrated redesign. I think I’ve planned everything out, and I’ve done most of the work on a testing site, but who knows how well it’ll actually work when I put it all in place. This old site you’re looking at is a really old movable type installation with a lot of hand-built customizations, most of which were really stupid in retrospect (my urge to tinker won out over basic common sense). The conversion has been a lot more painful as a result.
The biggest change for many of you will be a new feed URL. The old blog supported every variety of feed flavor; the new blog will have only one feed (RSS) and it’ll be at a different URL. (http://blog.lauralemay.com/feed)
I’ll redirect all the old feed URLs to the new feed but I don’t know how well that’ll work for feed readers. I’ll also put up a reminder post in the old feeds when the conversion goes through.
This is not like putting a lander on mars or anything, but my goal for all this brouhaha is to make it easier for me to actually, you know, write.
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Over the last few days my site has been under attack from zombies. Pharmaceutical zombies. Its yet another one of those incredibly irritating referrer attacks, except most of the time when I get one of those its only one or two referrers and they’re all coming from one IP. A couple hundred hits, I block them, they go away. This time: hundreds and hundreds of referrers, all for different drugs (viagra, vicodin, cialis, levitra, xanax). And all of them are coming from different IP addresses all over the world. Zombies. Its thousands and thousands of hits a day.
I’m dropping keywords into my block list all the time (fioricet. alprazolam. hydrocodone. phentermine. ambien.) but new ones are popping up every day. If you are a real human and you happen to be reading this from some legitimate pharmaceutical site, I’m sorry: you’re collateral damage.
This is really @*(#*@& annoying.
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Ye gods, Movable Type’s 3.2 style sheets are complicated. I’ve spent the last couple of days restyling my blog as part of a giant combo workover of everything that may eventually see the light of day — yes, I do have a development machine now, so I am not continually messing up the live blog. I have a design that I like now but its still built around the existing MT CSS and there’s like 800 lines of extraneous complex stuff in here that I don’t need. Plus: hardcoded widths and font sizes. ew.
I’m torn. On the one hand I could strip down the style sheets to about a quarter of what’s there and have much cleaner and simpler code that was easier to change and maintain, but then I’d end up forked from MT and I’d probably eventually have to come back and restart from the defaults again some time in the future (which is what I’m doing now after taking that step with my initial MT 2.x install).
On the other hand, the CSS people at MT actually know what they are doing. I know CSS reasonably well at this point, but I am not up on the multitude of cross-browser hacks and workarounds so I’m opening myself up to lots of bugs and issues and worry down the line. If I stuck with the existing style sheets I could have some confidence of not having to deal with that and, more importantly, I could just go on with my life.
I think I’ll have a couple cups of coffee and think about it. (it’ll take less time if I’m caffeinated).
Update: I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my decision. I merged and cut everything down. Yes, its true: I am forked.
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Who knew if you made one little typo in your .htaccess file it would completely blow up your web server. Oopsie.
My apologies to anyone who got 500 errors trying to visit here between the time I restricted access to all those porn site referrers at 7:30 this morning and now.
Guess I won’t be getting a job as a web admin any time soon. :/
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