Once upon a time, back in 2008 sometime, I had an inspiration to split off all my technical/geekish type posts from this site and give them a home on site of their own. Thus was born “Green Mountain Geek” (Okay, it was a stupid name. I was eating Brussels sprouts at the time I thought of it so I claim no responsibility.)
For awhile me and it did well enough, publishing posts about WordPress, Firefox, OSS (Open Source Stuff) and various other geekish and non-geekish type subjects of interest. People even read it.
Now it’s 2010 and the last real post to the site was back in the Fall of 2009 sometime. It became readily apparent to me that I really had no intention nor inclination to write anything more for my poor attempt at a (personal?) tech site. That was okay though. There are 1,536,679.5 similar websites out there already so I doubt anyone would miss it very much if and when I chose to take it down.
But I ended up leaving the site be since there were 2 or 3 of the more popular posts that were still getting a fair amount of traffic. It wasn’t costing me anything anyway to leave it online and the domain renewal was still months away. And keeping it updated with the latest WordPress bug and security fix point releases and plugins took up very little of my time.
Then it started to act up.
Strange things began happening. Things like empty directories and files being created within the WordPress core files, the Dashboard RSS feed widgets not loading when plugins were activated and just general weirdness within the WordPress Admin itself.
Since Green Mountain Geek was basically a duplicate of this site in every way, shape and form (albeit with different content), built with the same version of WordPress and plugins along with the fact that I couldn’t find hide nor hair of any sort of hack or SQL injection attack—I was thoroughly stumped.
It was sometime during the third day of working on the problem that it finally dawned on me that I was wasting a lot of valuable time on a site that I hadn’t actually posted to for months and that I really had no intention on doing so in the foreseeable future. So why am I trying to fix it? The time had obviously come.
So I rolled up the database into a nice .gz file and downloaded it, downloaded and zipped up the “Uploads” folder since the images might come in handy one day and stuffed both of them in their own folder located at the far end of my Home directory on my local hard drive.
Then I nuked the site. The resulting explosion was quite colorful.
No regrets. I came, I saw, I wrote, I quit. Besides, a site with a name like “Green Mountain Geek” was probably doomed to failure from the start so no big loss there. I did learn one invaluable lesson though…
Never try to think up a name for a new site while eating Brussels sprouts.









Can you read this? (and other online complaints)
I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile now. I just had to wait long enough to get good and peeved about things until I did. Well, today is the day although It may very well turn into a multi-parter as I find other things to complain about. And it’s all to do with my daily romp on the Internet and my problems with it.
(Warning: This is a long, rambling post and a complete rant on my part. Just so you know.)
Can you read this?
This is my top complaint, especially in the light that I don’t remember things really being this bad before.
Can you read this? Is it legible to you? Do you consider this comfortable reading? It certainly isn’t to me:
No kidding, this is the actual size of the font and this is a main stream news/opinion site—The Huffington Post. The thing that really gets me is that their headlines are HUGE(!) and the article title fonts and image captions are very readable and usually in bold. But the body text? You have a microscope handy?
Not main stream enough for you? How about eWeek? The text is no better believe me. And it’s not my browser settings either in this case as other websites I meander through on a daily basis have proper sized fonts that are easily readable.
Okay, so I could spend extra time zooming in and out of websites that insist on using these teeny, tiny fonts until I can actually read the thing but that blows up the images into a pixelated mess. Zooming just the text also has a problem in that many of these sites don’t scale properly with the increased text size and captions, links and buttons often go missing.
The point is that there is no reason for using these idiotically small fonts—none whatsoever. With display size being what it is these days, these site owners can afford to increase the font size to something more readable so that the reader doesn’t have to resort to using a magnifying glass. Virtual or otherwise.
Not everyone in this world has 20/20 vision, especially older folks like myself. Or am I just so much chopped liver?
Newest comment first?!!?
(Does not apply to social sites. They’re just weird and illogical by their very nature)
Look, I’m a nice guy most of the time and tend not to criticize when I know damn well that my discontent is more subjective than objective but this new thing of having a comments thread start with the newest comment rather than the oldest makes absolutely no sense to me.
A comment thread is supposed to be progressive in nature, not regressive. I don’t know about you folks but my thought processes don’t run in reverse.
So how am I supposed to follow a line of thought in a comments thread if I get the reply to a comment before the originating comment? It’s completely bass-ackwards. Makes no sense to have the most recent comment first unless it’s based on some ego thing, making the latest commentator feel special or something and even then it makes no sense.
Alright, so I can live with this illogical reverse-comment-threading thing as long as there’s an options section at the top of the comments that allow me to arrange the comments in a more logical order, meaning oldest first.
But then there are those other sites that don’t provide these options. They just go ahead and decide to list the newest comment first, like it or leave it, which forces me to navigate to the last comments page and scroll up??!! I’ve actually stopped reading certain sites because of this as the comments on any given article/post are sometimes just as relevant as the article/post itself.
But not when they’re in reverse order they’re not.
So to all you site owners who have opted for this newest comment first thing, please provide the option to rearrange the comment thread to something that makes a bit more sense?
It’s losing not loosing! (or proofreading is everything)
I’ll readily admit that grammar, sentence structure and proper punctuation aren’t exactly my strongest suits but I’m no piker when it comes to putting together a post or comment either. That being said I offer this singular advice:
It’s ‘losing’ not ‘loosing’!
So why do I pick this one out above all the other misuses of words and their meaning? Because this is the one I see all the time, especially in the comments section. And I don’t mean from folks whose native language is not English either, I’ll never berate them for trying to express themselves in one of the most complicated and confusing languages the human race ever invented (especially American English). No, these are people who were born and bred to the English language that I’m speaking of.
It’s not even a hard one to distinguish between one and the other as even the different spellings rather obviously reflect the correct pronunciation and/or meaning (unlike ‘there’, ‘they’re’, and ‘their’).
Here’s an example for you:
“Are the Republicans loosing their minds or what?”
Wrong.
The proper spelling is:
“Are the Republicans losing their minds or what?”
The word “loosing” is a verb:
Or another way to put it…
“The elf stood at the tree line overlooking the battle loosing his arrows so quickly that the enemy below began to believe that there were a line of archers firing into their ranks.”
Same applies with the word “loose”.
“It sounds like the guy is about to loose his mind.”
Nope.
“It sounds like the guy is about to lose his mind”.
“Loose, loosed and loosing” are pronounced as they appear; with a long “S” sound. While “lose and losing” are pronounced using a “Z” sound as in; ‘looz’ and ‘loozing’.
Okay, everybody got that? Make sure, there’ll be a quiz later.
If anyone gets the idea that I’m just picking on them, I’m not. When writing a post or an article or even just leaving a comment you’re probably trying to make some point or get some idea across to those who read the post, article or comment, right? So you can believe me when I say that this kind of mistake can lower the credibility of what you write by a not insignificant amount.
Alright, this post is getting a bit long here so I’ll stop now. But I’ll probably start up again with another post later down the road as more of these pet peeves come my way. Don’t misunderstand me though, as I know very well that I’m far and away from perfect when it comes to my own writing ability. If you don’t believe me (heh-heh, right…) then check out some of my other posts and you’ll have no doubt.
But at least my fonts are of proper size, my comments are in logical order and I know the difference between “loose” and “lose”.