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.
So just out of interest, what were you thinking about when you came up with the name of this site?
.-= Grandad´s last ramble ..Apologising =-.
Grandad – Well, I was just thinkin’ at the time….
Oh! Rather obscure?
.-= Grandad´s last ramble ..Apologising =-.
Alright, to tell the truth of it, I was rather miffed at the time over the fact that some bonehead had already registered the domain “conversationlost.com” (Conversation Lost) which was the original name of the blog–and never used it!
So I was just thinkin’ about another name at the time…
I liked the name, it reminded me of a time long ago, when I had hair and great eyesight and drove from Toronto to Boston though the byways and your mountains. It was a late summer if I remember rightly and one R M Nixon was in deep trouble and I was young and happy. The car was rubbish and conked when we got to Boston. As to the blog, I of course understood all the simple terms like, and, but, to, and stuff like that but nothing else. Long before my trip I had learned to type and the tech bit stopped there. I bought my first computer because I was stunned by the spell check on WS1512. Then after I got it I discovered this really smart bit of analysis paper called a spreadsheet and was hooked. Off course to get it to work I had to RTFM, but I never went beyond that.
One of the daughter caught me reading the blog one night and asked me why I was. This from a woman who has never read a manual in her life and does it all by osmosis. I was able to reply that it gave me a thin veneer of respectability to do so.
KevinB – Good lord, I actually remember the time when a spreadsheet program came with an actual manual. Then again, I also recall when word processing and spreadsheet programs came with a keyboard overlay.
Don’t worry though, I’ll return future tech/geek type posts back to this site like it used to be just as soon as (real life) things settle down a bit. Should be around July 1st the way things are going.