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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :/

I really hate CSS.

I’ve got a nasty style sheet bug. Something about the photos is causing the text in the right-side main column to refuse to flow properly alongside the left side nav bar. Tomorrow I’ll make a whole lot more annoying test posts to see if I can get it to work right.

43 Things poses the question: What do you want to do with your life?

You can keep a list of your goals, or you can choose from a big list of what other people have been answering. Each page shows a continuously-updated display of every one else’s goals. Its a social goal-keeping site.

I’m finding what other people are posting to be completely fascinating. There’s a lot of predictable stuff here; 1006 people want to be happy, 800 people want to get laid and 467 want to stop wasting time. Books seem to rank pretty high on people’s lists; 215 people want to write a novel; 166 people just want to read more books. There’s also plenty of romantic goals (fall in love (556 people), kiss in the rain (220 people), meet the right girl for me (18 people), get him to notice me (11 people)), and self-improvement (lose 10 pounds (126 people) and exercise more (341 people, learn ruby (115 people)).

And then there’s the goals that are more strange, like Amass a mighty army of animals and overthrow mankind (6, uh, mammals?) . And goals I really relate to like leave this site now (2 people) and destroy the person who made this (1 person, not me).

A great way to waste a couple of hours, whether you want to or not.

(I got it from Thinking Chaos, Thinking Fences.)

Seems like a lot of my blogging recently has been extended silences followed by me apologizing for my extended silences and explaining what I’ve been doing instead. So, here I am again doing just that. I’ve been working a lot. But I just finished up that little mini-contract so now I can get back to what’s really important, eg, reading, sleeping in, and yes, blogging.

Yesterday I was busy doing what is only right for thanksgiving, which is of course: eating and drinking until I wanted to die. I went to a potluck with a bunch of friends, and there was much feasting of turkey and stuffing and risotto and potatoes and yams and green beans and wine and wine and more wine. I brought an apple and pumpkin pie for dessert, and there was much rejoicing. I have no leftovers. I am good at pie. It is comforting to know that if this tech writing thing doesn’t work out, I can always sell pie.

I have a whole pile of links and half-written posts I need to catch up on here, so brace yourselves for an onslaught of stuff in the next few days.

The Dolmette, a motorcycle powered by 24 chainsaw engines.

That is fucked up.

(I got it from metafilter)

FluWatch.com – The Official Site of National Flu Surveillance Network. Includes flu incidence maps and lookup by state and zip code. Also an animation of how the flu spread in past seasons.

Goody! Now I can indulge my disease hobby in real time.

(I got it from Metafilter.)

This guy is collecting vintage bicycle chainring designs and getting a full-sleeve tattoo of them on his arm. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of chainring, or that they were so pretty. Very cool.

(I got it from Velorution.)

I’ve made a whole bunch of backstage changes to the blog to turn on comments. You may think all one would need to do is to click the button that says “Allow Comments by Default,” but NO.

There were two related problems here. A. I upgraded to MT3, which was probably a bad idea, and B. I was paranoid about comment spam. Actually, it was because of my paranoia about comment spam that led me to upgrade to MT3, because I had an understanding that MT3 was better about controlling it. We shall see.

MT3 led to MT-blacklist 2.01b, which after the installation travails of a few days ago looks excellent. But to enable the new comment registration features in MT3 I also had to completely rework all my templates, and in the process I discovered massive bugs in my style sheets, and one of these days I will redesign the whole site (bleah!) and fix it all (ahahah!) but right now: comments work.

For future reference I found the entries on Concerning Spam and TypeKey Authentication for Comments on Elise’s http://www.elise.com/mt/ site to be enormously helpful for understanding and preventing MT comment and trackback spam, and from there I was pointed to the tutorial on template upgrades at Anzi Design which helped me move and update all my templates from MT2 to MT3.

You may post comments willy-nilly for the time being. You’ll need to include a name and email to post (but, you know, it doesn’t check if you’re secretive about that sort of thing) If I have trouble I may turn on moderation. If you sign up with Typekey you can post straight through without even logging in but you get the dorky typekey icon on your post (and you are contributing to Six Apart hegemony <– joke).

I did look into alternative authentication methods for MT3 but it appears the only one out there right now is TinyOrwell, which allows a local per-blog user name and password file. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a way to let you sign up; I’d have to edit the password file by hand to add you. It was a little too tiny.

Onward and back to actual writing rather than site maintenance. I heard once that blogging was supposed to be fun.

How quickly will this MT 3 retrofit blow up? I vote <2 minutes.

Monster Says It Could Enter Japan by Mid-2005 (Reuters)