Just Thinkin' » Info

Cold Enough and a New Baby is Born

Kirk M — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:42:20 +0000

It’s almost cold enough to freeze tourists out there. Not the worst we’ve ever seen for sure but definitely not the kind of weather for wearing shorts…except possibly for Canadians. It was -12 degrees this morning when the sun peeked over North Country High School’s sports field and so far it’s been a bright and crispy day with a blistering high of zero.

These are the kind of temps we usually get around here this time of year but according to the long range forecast, it will be 25 tomorrow and by Monday we’re looking at 42 and rain? The temps for the next 5 days after that are all going to average above freezing, half those days in the high 30’s to 40. Snowiest December on record and in the 30’s and 40’s the second week of January. Hmmm–I don’t know about this. Makes me wonder a bit.

Anyone ever see The Day After Tomorrow? Are we actually on the brink of a major climatic shift?

On another matter entirely, remember that lady blogger and the possible New Years baby I mentioned in a short post earlier on? Well I’m happy to report that she is now the proud Grandmother of a beautiful baby granddaughter (I think it’s her first Grandchild too). Mother and baby are doing fine also last I heard. Now since this friend of mine and her husband can’t get to a computer at the moment I probably shouldn’t say anymore lest she be angry at me for spilling the beans prematurely and send me hateful and abusive emails. In fact I probably shouldn’t even tell you who I’m talking about should I? No absolutely not.

Alright, it’s Elaine but don’t tell here I said anything okay?

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Tags: new baby, northeast kingdom, winter

Blogger Blows it Big time

Kirk M — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:28:27 +0000

If there’s one main thing that the Blogoshpere revolves around, what would it be?

Back links! That’s what.

Anybody who has ever commented on a blog and happens to also have their own blog as well, knows exactly what this is. Name, Email Address, Website–we all know this so well we don’t even think about it anymore…until now that is. Can anyone say Blogger or perhaps Google?

Well they goofed. They goofed by no longer allowing any blogger other than those with "Blogger" accounts to leave their website address unless it’s within the comment itself. No more selecting "Other" and having that two line form pop up where you can put your name and website address. And considering how well the "DoFollow" movement has caught on since it’s inception and what it means to effectively isolate the rest of the Blogosphere from Blogger type blog owners, this must have been a decision made while under the influence. For example:

"I got a great idea dude, check this out! Let’s…like…tell the whole Blogosphere that ain’t us to bugger off, okay?"

I’m not going to go into all the details here since a couple of blogging type folks have already written good, concise articles on this rather idiotic decision on Google/Blogger’s part so I’ll post the links here and let you folks read all about it.

Google Lets Down The Bloggers (Matts Nutts)

Blogger.com No Longer Allows Links to Non-Blogger Sites in Comments (Suburban Oblivion)

Now I have quite a few fellow blogger’s that have their sites hosted on Blogger and I’m not going to stop commenting on their blogs because of this but I, like others, find this new state of affairs rather disgusting. I would have hoped Google was better than this but apparently not. Do they actually believe this is going to help? More like biting the hand that feeds them. Biting it off that is.

And thanks Elaine, for bringing me up to date about this.

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First Blogger, now LiveJournal

Tags: changing blogosphere

Host changed PHP engines with no notification.

Kirk M — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:38:42 +0000

For anyone that has a WordPress blog hosted by Bluehost, they’re currently busy switching over to PHP 5 and doing away with PHP 4 altogether and as of this post, they have not notified anyone of this in any way shape or form.

This is going to break a large portion of WP blogs hosted by Bluehost due to plugins that will only run on PHP 4 plus numerous “php memory limit exhausted” errors.

I’m trying to avoid this problem on my own blog by deactivating plugins etc and doing the switch before they take out PHP 4 from the server I’m on so things are going to get a bit strange.

Technorati Tags: Bluehost, PHP 5

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Tags: Bluehost

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 is Here!

Kirk M — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:24:06 +0000

Praise the lord and pass the admonition, the new Live Writer is finally here! And of course I had to make a test post just to make sure it worked. The install went without a hitch although I uninstalled beta 1 before hand just in case.

The first problem I encountered was not related to the new beta but actually with my blog’s theme, Misty Look 3.2 that I have modified to my own personal tastes. In fact I remembered (belatedly) that I had run across this problem in the previous version of WLW as well in that WLW couldn’t detect my weblog styles so no Web Layout view. In WLW beta 1 it just told me it couldn’t download the template style and in the new version it seemed to download okay but the Web Layout view was locked out. To solve this problem I simply uploaded the previous version of Misty Look and switched over just long enough to let the weblog styles update in and then switched back to my original theme. Now I have the Web Layout view. No other problems seen so far.

I haven’t had any time yet to check out all the new functions yet but there seems to be a load of new features and a couple of major bug fixes like the infamous duplicate image uploads when editing and existing post that contains images. I’ll also have to check to see if those god awful long image names that the old version used to add are gone in this version.

And I’m loving the inline spell checking!

So good job all around to Joe Cheng and all the rest of the Writer team. My favorite blog editor seems to have made the grade. I’ll post a more “in depth” review at a later date just to add another to the pile of reviews I’m sure that will show up throughout the Blogosphere in short order.

Happy writing all.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer beta 2, WLW, blog editors, Live Writer beta 2

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Tags: windows live writer

Spring Cleaning the Blog

Kirk M — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:56:40 +0000

A few changes have occurred here over the last few days in attempts to streamline the backend of things. What most folks may not realize when they visit my little corner of blogdom is that there is a heck of a lot of content that has gone into Justhinkin’ over the last year and 4 months and a rather large database that backs it up. Along with this are the several plugins that I installed and have been using to make the blog function as it does and it was time to clean house. So for those that are interested, here’s what the “Spring Cleaning” has brought about.

Tagging:

After many months (and successful hacks) of Christine Davis’s, Ultimate Tag Warrior I came to the point where I had to finally bid farewell to the venerable plugin in favor of the newer Simple Tagging plugin by Amaury Balmer. Since I used UTW for the Related Posts only, a function that tied similar posts together, I had been on the lookout for some time for a replacement that wasn’t quite so “industrial strength”. The plugin isn’t perfect and has it’s own set of problems (but so did UTW) but the overall function works just fine and it imported all of my UTW tags and assignments without a hitch. Continued development of the plugin is also happening which is a plus. It’s also less of a load on the blog overall so the loading time is bit faster.

For those of you wondering what’s going to happen when Wordpress 2.3 arrives and there is no option to import the tags from Simple Tagging into the new built in tagging system as there will be for UTW, fear not…there is a plugin already made for it. (only alpha builds at the moment).

Spamments:

I’ve dropped Bad Behavior finally and am just using Akismet backed up with Spam Karma 2.3 and the Simple Trackback Validation plugins to handle all my spam. The reason for this was to eliminate one more set of tables in my database. My database was getting rather large due to all the plugins that installed these additional tables and it was slowing things down to where it was noticeable. I could stand to lose at least one of my anti-spam plugins and Bad Behavior (which was occasionally blocked more than it should), was it. Nothing against this great anti-spam plugin, it just became rather redundant after awhile and since my host allots a huge amount of bandwidth per month, the extra bandwidth used by not having Bad Behavior installed is minor. So far, everything spammish is just fine and dandy and I’ve picked up even a bit more speed as well.

Text Link Ads:

And last but not least, I’ve removed the Text Link Ads: script and plugin from Just Thinkin as well. It never did produce anything since I installed it even though I have a PR 5 rating and an improving Alexa rank. Nothing against these guys but it eliminated yet another two tables from the database and things are breathing easier in all respects. Perhaps someone finding themselves with several hundred visitors a day will have better luck than I did.

Finally, I used my old WP-PhpMyAdmin plugin to bang into my database and cleaned things up by deleting these unused tables and optimizing all the ones that showed any overhead. The latter, like defragmenting your hard drive, never lasts but it never hurts either. The above plugin has been out of development for a while now it seems but it’s never failed to perform through the upgrades and beats the you-know-what out of having to go into my host’s Cpanel and getting to the database that way.

Anyway, the blog has a bit more breathing room now and it seems to have a much more solid feel to it much like your car does after a thorough tune up. And I have increased my level of experience in the ever changing world of WP blogging another notch.

That’s it for now. Because of the way I’ve been feeling of late it took me an unbelievable amount of time just to pound out this little blurb here. I intended to have three done while I was down and out today but it obviously didn’t happen. And I don’t see any improving on the health situation anywhere in the near future and I’m sure things here are going to suffer here because of it but until I and the good folks at the VA can get a handle on things, it’s just something I have to deal with. I’ll keep plugging along of course and there will be more of my amazing blurbs here for all to read but things are simply going to have to slow down for awhile.

Have a good night all.

Technorati tags: UTW, simple tagging, tagging, anti spam, wordpress, text link ads

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Tags: bad behavior, ultimate tag warrior