Just in case anyone was subscribed to my blogs RSS feeds and expecting a FeedBurner type result in their reader and found the generic excerpt type feeds you can get from anywhere, I had inadvertently missed reactivating a FeedBurner re-direct plugin after an upgrade. One that allowed all my feeds to be redirected through FeedBurner. I’ve since re-activated this plugin and all should be well.
I hate it when I miss something like that. Early senility setting in perhaps?
One of our cat’s, Dingo by name, had obviously had enough of me working on the blog and my usual messing around and shut the whole thing down by jumping up on my computer desk and walking across the keyboard missing every key except the one that shuts down the computer.
Bang! Poof! Gone!
Why did they ever put a shutdown button on a keyboard for? I never even noticed it until Dingo stepped on it. A sleep button is okay—I have one of those too but I forgot all about that shutdown one. Once his mission was apparently accomplished, he fell over (literally) into my chest and I had no choice but to put my arms around the little furball to keep him from any further descent into more sensitive areas which was most likely his ultimate intention anyway.
Of course I had to re-start the darn machine just to write up a short post about, well…all the above actually, so his mission ultimately failed in the end.
Now he’ll just wait until I get to sleep and then….
Many thoughts have abounded in my rather spacious skull of late. The latest being the coaching of a blogging friend of mine who had just gone over to “hosting her own” WP blog and is at the very beginnings of learning how to take proper care of her new pet just like I did a few months ago. So far she’s learning faster than I did when I started. But as I’m showing her the ropes now, so I had someone else (Hi Becky) show me the ropes back then along with my honey who gave me one of her sub-domains of her website (which she built and maintains herself) to put my blog on and helped me with all my questions concerning html code and syntax type of stuff. All this brought one of those rambling thoughts to mind—writing up a set of pages titled something like “WordPress for the absolute beginner series” or “Proper care and feeding of your new obsession”.
Well, maybe not the latter one.
Suffice it to say that anyone thinking of heading in to the marvelous world of doing it yourself with WordPress needs to know that there are certain items that you just have to have. I don’t mean getting into all the technical, SEO, PHP 4 or 5, plugin/theme hacks, sand-boxing joyrides or any of the other 33,476 things you can do to your poor WP blog. That’s why there are wonderful people like Lorelle of Lorelle on WordPress and many others with all sorts of good info for folks who have already gotten past the stage of “OMG! What have I done???“. Just basic tools of the trade if you will. The tools one must have at the very beginning all installed on your PC and ready to go before the new adventurer in WordPress-ing has done more than thought about what domain name they would like to have.
In my long past I spent a good many years as a certified Naval instructor at the New London Submarine base in Groton, CT and I also spent a good number of years doing tech writing among other responsibilities in my past career so the last few days coaching this lady by email has renewed my faith a bit that I still have the ability to teach and write well enough for someone to not only understand what I’m trying to get across but successfully applying it as well. I’m not as good as I used to be of course. There’s a big difference between being young and sharp and…uh…well…about 25 years older or so….if you know what I mean.
So perhaps I’ll start the first of those pages someday real soon. It’s not like I have a deadline or anything of that nature to contend with and with the advent of the WordPress 2.1.x series, I can now save pages as drafts. Like an omen it is.
Now I’m not going to put the link to my friend’s new blog up yet, she’d probably send me an email bomb or something similarly awful if I did so until she at least has her blog’s layout the way she wants it and more than one post put up, I’ll wait for her permission first and then I’ll let everyone know where she is. In the meantime…I’ll think about those pages.
Just a quick post to right a wrong. Seems I missed a follow-up post to Traded Akismet for Spam Karma 2 in which I posted about the problems that Akismet was having with a group of servers awhile back that were causing all sorts of weirdness for those running the plugin.
Note: Just scroll down to the comment section in the above “missed” link and you’ll see where I come in. Look for one of Tyler’s reply comments. Told I was. Running in reverse they said! 
Not to be redundant here but the short of it was that my “Spamments” that the plugin caught were being deleted immediately instead of being held in Akismet’s queue for me to look over, making sure none of the spam were real comments. So to solve the problem temporarily while the crew at Akismet got the server problem straightened out, I disabled Akismet and loaded up SK2 in it’s place which took over the duties just fine.
When the Akismet service came back on line and all was well again, I welcomed Akismet back into the fold, gave it a beer and now I have both SK2 and Akismet running side by side and not one spamment has gotten through (yet). I do like all the extra functions and options that SK2 provides and the two plugins do work very well together as Lorelle from Lorelle on WordPress states in this excerpt from one of her as-usual excellent posts:
Akismet isn’t just for WordPress blogs. According to the Akismet Development List and Resources, Akismet works with Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, Blojsom, Bloxsom, Geeklog, Serendipity, Nucleus, b2evolution, PunBB, Express Engine, Coppermine, Lifetype, Simple Machine Forums, and others. If we all work as a team, from a variety of sources, we might represent a very big hammer against comment spam.
Combined with Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 WordPress Plugins, you can put your comment spam fighting battle to rest. If one fails, you have a backup plan in place.
So far, SK2 (2.2 r3) has followed all my upgrades through WP 2.1.2 without a hiccup though I suppose I ought to wander over to Dr.Dave’s office to see if there’s been an update recently. Something else I’m behind on. Oh well, can’t quit the day job ya’ know.
Alright…better late than never. I feel much better now.
Bluehost, the people that host my wife’s website and my blog had a server corrupt on them and that particular server just happened to have been the one that our websites were on so everything went away including her business email and both of our personal email accounts as well . Okay, so it happens occasionally especially these days when every punk and slimeball that has a computer are foaming at the mouth with the desire to take down every computer and server they can find simply to prove that they can do it. I have a few other choice words for these kind of people but I’ll refrain from expressing myself further. I like to keep the blog mostly clean ya’ know.
These things do happen like I said and it’s not the fact that it happens, every host goes through this once in awhile no matter who it is. What’s really important here is how fast they get it fixed and since it appears they had to rebuild the server from scratch and then re-load all the data from back-up, the folks running the servers at Bluehost did a fine job all around.
This plus the fact they were happy to tell me what was going on when I called them about how long it might be before things were restored instead of giving me the run around.
But wait…that’s not all.
My computer started to act up too and wouldn’t load my desktop when I re-started it. Just the background and nothing else. Oh, just dandy! Well, I fixed that quickly enough (only an hour or so) and put things back the way they were and low and behold, Bluehost had things up and running again so there was my honey’s website and my blog all safe, sound and complete.
But wait…there’s still more! Upon logging into my blog’s Admin, I saw an announcement on the dashboard that the latest version of WordPress (version 2.1.1) had been classified as Dangerous and the download and the server it was stored on had been taken down and everyone who recently upgraded to this version (like me for instance) now had to upgrade once again to WP 2.1.2:
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Normally I wouldn’t have minded this at all but after a day dealing with the lost websites, a busted computer and feeling generally miserable health-wise, one might imagine that upgrading my WordPress install was not on my list of things to do today. However, due to those aforementioned morons that I referred to in the first paragraph, I had no choice and 40 minutes later—all is well again.
I hope.
Now let’s try another re-start…
I was banging around my usual virtual haunts that I usually bang around during the workweek (less work and more weak this week unfortunately) and looked at the clock on the wall and figured it might be nice to pound out a short post before I retire. Just a sort of round up, thought of day as it were.
So let’s see here…
FeedBurner was back up and running normaly by the time I checked my feeds at lunch. The statistics had been accumulating all along, just not being displayed on the site as they usually do. I had a bit of a surprise though when I checked my comments feed and saw that Eric Olsen of FeedBurner had left a comment my previous post stating that all was in hand (this was around 10:35 am according to the comment) and that things should be showing up normally soon. Now I don’t know about you folks but that’s a real nice touch since I’m sure that Eric had plenty of other business to attend to today yet he took the time out to hunt down my backwoods type blog and leave a short “how-do-you-do” on my post. Definitely no complaints there.
Now this brings a question to my feeble little mind. Why is it that there are always certain people that seem to feel they have a right to get mad at an organization that offers a quality free service like the site metrics that FeedBurner provides, when a small glitch shows up and throws wrench into the works, stopping the free service for a short time? All the virtual YELLING and COMPLAINING that goes on is truly amazing. The indignation and affronted-ness flying around the forums as if these people were actually paying FeedBurner for their free service. Sure, there are a few that pay for the ProStats version but these weren’t the ones doing the complaining.
Alright, I understand that if a company or an organization like FeedBurner, WordPress, Google or any of the others that provide quality services or software for no charge to the user should at least make the effort to put some reliability into it or should not bother offering it in the first place. Let’s face it, these folks that are providing all this wonderful free stuff are making money somehow but as far as those (like you and me) who make use of these free services are concerned, we ain’t the ones paying them that money so when that glitch does come around and things stop working for awhile (and it will, I guarantee it), drop a [polite] note to them about it and as for the rest of it…keep your fingers off the CAPS LOCK, hush up and let ‘em fix it.
In the meantime…have a nice evening all. 
FeedBurner seems to be having a bit of a problem this morning, so if anyone who has subscribed to this wonderfully written, absolutely awesome type blog (all 15 or so of you) and are wondering where their cherished feeds are, I can safely assume the folks at FeedBurner are currently working on it. From the look of the forums, I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.
Let’s hope they didn’t get caught up in one of the latest virtual drive by shootings that has been talked about all over the news lately.