After reading Nick Bradbury’s post on choosing a format, I have decided to do exactly that.

I have had only one choice visible, but my head links have contain 3 choices. Today I have removed all but one choice, and that choice is Atom. I am not one to join in the which-format-will-rule-the-world, but I also believe that sitting on the fence helps no one either. So, don’t flame me for the choice that I have made. I merely picked one.

If you know how to find the other feeds, they are there for now while I consider doing redirects as Sam has (I am thinking that I will).

In the future, I am sure there are many converters that could give you the format you really need, if that format is not Atom.

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Title says it all. Pretty urgent security fix, and easy enough to upgrade now that I moved my customizations to a theme.

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Used the opportunity of working with Alex to update the site yesterday. You will notice a few things:

• Updated side bar: ads are now gone from the side, and shown inline after the first post, but only for the most insecure browser on the planet. The feeds heading was changed to subscriptions, to be easier to understand for the non-tech folk, along with a better description of the feed. I removed the search button, since just pressing enter will work just fine. The calendar got a style uplift (better whitespace and a colored header), and all li tags actually are contained by ul tags now (doh!)
• Post titles are a bit bigger, so they should be easier to read/get your attention.
• Each day now gets the desk calendar treatment. A box that looks like a desk calendar shows up on the right side of the content area.
• Categories are now called ‘tags’ in the post area, to be more ‘hip’
• Removed the feedmap badge, since it was slowing down the rendering of the site.

I am sure there are more little tweaks, but that is all I can remember for now. I will be updating my Wordpress install with a few plugins to help me out in the near future, and I will let you know how that goes as well.

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If you see this post, it is because your reader is intelligent (good for it)

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This is just a warning to let you know that in about 24 hours, I will be permanently redirecting any /blog/wp-rss2.php requests to /blog/feed/rss2.

Also note that I will be doing the same thing to the atom and rdf feeds. If you don’t see a post in 72 hours, that means your reader is probably screwed up, and you will have to manually change the subscription information. Sorry if that is the case.

This will serve as a test for all feed readers currently reading my site.

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I just spent the last 1.5 hours upgrading to the new WordPress ‘Strayhorn’ 1.5 release. The database upgrade actually went OK this time, and the customizations upgrade was a bit trickier. The upgrade instructions could have been a little more clear, as I have always used my main sites CSS file to serve styling info for the blog as well. Note that when you ‘make’ a theme, you MUST create an index.php as well as a style.css, and that style.css MUST contain a comment header that Wordpress then parses to list the themes in the admin screens. Just an FYI.

I must say that the WordPress team is starting to get the hang of this whole upgrade thing, but they still have a ways to go before they catch up with the upgrade sweetness that Alex has in Tasks Pro.

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Says it all. Now, how long will it take before comment spam actually dies? Quite a long time (2+ years in my opinion), and it will get worse before it gets better. At least the search engine community is responding to a negative situation in a positive and timely fashion.

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From the documentation:

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Even if the machines are on different operating systems, this is dead easy. On the source machine, simply ‘dump’ the repository:

Then login to the new machine, and set up the new repo:

That’s all there is to it. Then you can of course delete the dump files, the .tgz files, and even the source repo if you are brave.

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(Adapted to my needs from the original at http://www.apache-ssl.org/#FAQ)

First, you create the cert:

Then, you edit the site config, adding the following lines:

Then, you restart apache, while crossing your fingers:

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Upgraded the server to Subversion 1.1.2 tonight.

It went down something like this:

Once the server has restarted, make sure that it is back up. The process was painless, and the server was back up and running in no time.

Now it is time to upgrade the client machines. TortoiseSVN 1.1.2 for Windows boxen, and fink update svn for Mac OS X, as well as not forgetting scplugin.

I also cannot stress enough the importance of reading “The Book“.

If only WordPress upgrades were this easy…

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Just upgraded from WordPress 1.0.1 to 1.2 on Alex’s recommendation (mass comment editing, for deleting commnet spam), and the upgrade said it succeeded.

Now I can’t log in. WTF!!!

Turns out that the cookies in the browser were preventing me from logging in. Clearing the cookies for Wordpress on my site fixed the problem.

One other bug that I found was in requesting a new password. A new password was sent to me in email, for the user “”, but WordPress did NOT update the database. Anyhoo, I figured it out and everything worked out it the end.

Why can’t everything upgrade as smooth as tasks? This is NOT a rhetorical question.

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I have been getting a lot of comment spam lately, and I was just wondering how people are dealing with it. I don’t get many valid comments, but I do NOT want to turn them off.

How do you deal with comment spam?

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Checking my latest webstats, it seems that the broswer wars have about evened out, at least for my audience. From a ‘finger-in-the-air’ normalization (excluding GoogleBot, MSNBot, YahooSlurp, etc), I am seeing that IE6 has a slight lead (10% more) over Mozilla (5% more) over Safari.

It seems that Safari is growing rapidly, Mozilla is growing moderately, and IE 6 is shrinking significantly. Of course, most of the user agents hitting this sight are RSS readers, so I threw those out of the stats as well

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Pretty painless, compared to other Wordpress upgrades. I think Alex working over there may start having an effect on them, eventually. Upgraded to Tasks Pro 1.0b9 at the same time, and other than getting file permissions wrong, everything worked perfectly. I only hope in the future that the install vs. upgrade script can be the same script, based on looking at the database, and it could do everything in one shot. That would be ultra cool.

Wordpress 1.0.1 is on my site now, mostly because I’m an upgrade whore, but also because I needed/wanted the multiple category support, and the permalink syntax using mod_rewrite isn’t bad either. And any application that writes the mod_rewrite rules for you pretty much kick ass!!!

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Required a dump/load cycle since the database schema change, but it was generally painless. Great instructions from the svn book. Took about 1 hour to download, build, dump, load, and verify 6 repos. This sysadmin stuff is getting easier, but it is still too hard…

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Mostly painless. Updated to latest Apache (2.0.47), Subversion (0.25), and PHP (4.3.2). Also upgraded tasks to 1.6.1.

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The dotnot site is now under source control, with the help of Subversion. Let me know if anything seems weird (permissions problems?), etc.

Alex and Jason, I accidentally delete the .htpasswd file for tasks, so we need to do that again.

Now that it’s under source control, now I can start adding the content. Step 3: profit!

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…for email is now implemented, so we can subvert BayeSpam as necessary

It was simple enough, its more just the debugging to make it happen.

I have not had 3 problems in the last 2500 emails with BayeSpam being backed up by Apple Mail’s latent semantic analysis. They have been working well together. Alex is having a few more problems, and Amanda is getting nothing but spam even today, so a small balcklist for Viagra will make her happier

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Just upgraded to Tasks 1.6.1. Edited config.php and database.php, check the README, and it was good to go. This is also the test to make sure that I can blog from tasks to WordPress.

Alex, as an FYI, tasks has also been tested on Linux running Apache 2.0.45 and PHP 4.3.0

Popularity: 14%