Category Archives: meta-throbs

Ketchup

  By Rob Eberhardt | 2017 May 24 - 1:32am | ,
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I mean catch-up.
Too much work for too long meant many accrued life complications, so I’m on a purge…

Anthem

Breaking news: Identity theft is a bad thing

One target is paper: The last 3 weekends have included many hours of sorting through paper files for shred, toss, or reuse as scrap.  (Yes, I caught my mother’s frugality, so our family prints on the blank sides of old stuff, which is fun when you discover weird personal history on the flip side years later.)

In the shred category: I award special recognition to Anthem, Discover, and US Bank for taking an extra decade to notice any news about that new-fangled “identity theft”.  (It took them until ~2006 to start removing complete SSNs and account numbers from monthly statements)

The other is Digital: Today I turned to my blog feeds.  15 years had “collected” roughly 450 feed subscriptions in my reader, which I’m still reading daily.  …Well, I knew some of those 450 had gone dark, but managing them has been a recurring pain (browsing feeds by name isn’t easy in Feedly – how about some basic alphabetical sorting?).

Awesome

Awesome

So I decided to clean house on my feeds.  +A couple hours = a couple realizations:

  1. It’s messed up that I can get sentimental about an RSS Feed.  WebMonkey, I still miss your irreverent teaching methods, and I probably owe you my career.   But in culture of obscene plenty, I gotta start dropping some burdens.
  2. Blogs are Dead!  At least half of those feeds are now offline or haven’t been updated in 5-10 years.  Now I know why the huge feed count was only netting a few dozen posts per day.
    But why have bloggers given up?   Facebook and its ilk are obvious.  Long-form takes too long, and “Sharing” is now a grunt-button (yes, a grunt is how much value you’re sharing with those things) .   With grunt-buttons over at the HealthyViralConservatives page (that’s probably a thing), we smart people are all now stealing our own thunder.  But minimal effort = minimal value, so those with nothing to share are sharing the most, and discourse is dead.

…But wait, isn’t this Rob’s like, yearly blog post?  Yeah, I’m not done yet — that’s another comeback in the works.

Not Awesome

Not Awesome

But what direction?  Journaling is a great exercise and enjoyable, but what do I have that interests folks?
Comments would be a great measure, but I’ve never been popular enough for much of them, and folks have even LESS time for comments in the grunt-jab era, so they’re out. But …Akismet brags it’s outright blocked 18,279 spam comments just since I switched to WordPress 2 years ago.  And I get regular notices of spam comments quarantined for review (and that’s easy.  The last blog move was good to me, and I’d like to heartily thank the whole WordPress community.  Posting is way more likely when I’m not just cleaning up.)
So, without bothering on analytics, maybe the spammers know something.  They LOVE two ancient posts in particular:  my write-up on Royal TS (RIP), and another about line-breaks in VBScript.  (Was 2005 special?  It was arguably the golden age of blogging, but I’ve no idea how that could still echo now.)

So I’m gonna go with the topics: “meta-throbs” journally junk like this doesn’t enthrall, but every geek loves good Tools and Tips.  And I’ve always got tons of those, so I’ll try to get back to sharing them here soon.

I’d love requests too, but certainly won’t get my hopes up.  After all, there’s probably a heart-warming new LiberalCatVideo with a grunt-button.

Trans Cat

dasBlog → WordPress

  By Rob Eberhardt | 2015 June 5 - 4:15pm |
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“500 (Internal Server) Error
…that Go Daddy is furiously working to correct.”

It’s been a long time coming, but Go Daddy finally forced my hand by upgrading my dasBlog install to death.

(FYI: Go Daddy no longer has web or email support – chat or phone only.   Because people don’t want options.)

The phone rep at least got me to a useful error and told me they finally moved off IIS6 (Windows 2003?!).   When I figured out dasBlog can’t run on IIS7 (why not 8??) without a rebuild, it was obviously time.

SO, here I am rebuilding into WordPress.  Content is in, but no skin and many links are broken.  Sorry for the mess :T But onward!

Update:
Other than some rough design edges, I’m done! Thanks to Reeves Little‘s tremendous how-to Migrating from Dasblog to WordPress, and Bob Craven‘s illustrated supplement Hello WordPress, Good Bye dasBlog, it was quite straightforward.

And to be fair, the Wordpress world has great addins for absolutely everything I’d’ve otherwise Macguyvered together: importing, HTTP redirection, link checking, contact forms (and those are just migration-related). I’ve built a lot of WordPress sites for other folks, but now the cobbler’s child finally has shoes too!

Might as well use it

  By Rob Eberhardt | 2010 June 10 - 6:50pm | ,
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I finally took some of that new web tech I was talking about here and used it here.  I couldn’t stand the “brick” look anymore, so it’s mostly border-radius and box-shadow, but there’s also an RGBA background color and a webkit transition.  None of this gives joy for IE, though – perhaps I should Chrome Frame it?   …I did also tighten up the Reader feed and search box. 

I realize how long it’s been here, and that Facebook’s walled garden has been catching the vast amount of my sharing.  I’d like to “get out” here more, but til I do, don’t miss me there.

~r

Finally off dotText!

  By Rob Eberhardt | 2006 August 23 - 4:06am | ,
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It took ages, but I’m on dasBlog now.  Good riddance to dotText!  — I bid it lovingly, though, since it served well for a 1st generation blog engine — Somehow a couple hundred legitimate posts + comments garnered many thousands of comment spams.  I expect dasBlog will handle that all better; captchas are a tad annoying but effective, I hear.

That dasBlog is still under active development is a good sign.  I find that quality much more  important these days.  For reference, dotText was last updated almost 2yrs ago (and wasn’t even really released).

So in other news (in the sense that no news is its own news), I haven’t posted much of anything in a couple months, and even then there wasn’t much meat.  I plan to start writing/posting with something like BlogJet.  (Yes, I actually used dotText’s web-based editor, which was text-only in Firefox — I’m entirely too comfortable with code for my own good).  Hopefully this ease will lubricate the writing process.

Regarding the transition: I used two great tools.  One was Aaron Junod’s great dotText to dasBlog converter to migrate the content.  This would have done the trick many moons ago, except that I didn’t want to orphan all my incoming links (a big no-no to a web dev like me).  Fortunately, Scott Hanselman published a Regex to remap URLs from dotText’s format to dasBlog’s (If only I hadn’t fat-fingered that one the first time I tried it way back, it’d actually have worked). 

Finally, some outstanding meta-throbs junk:

  1. Comments were probably lost.  Sorry.  I noticed spammers were usually changing the subject from the default “re: whatever”, so I killed most of the rest. 
  2. Search is gone for the moment.  I’ll add it back in Real Soon Now.
  3. Images and other locally-hosted junk is probably all broken.  I’ll fix that slightly sooner.
  4. Comments are screwy (dotText saved as HTML.  dasBlog doesn’t.)
  5. Layout is messed in IE6.

What happened to the design?

  By Rob Eberhardt | 2006 April 4 - 6:19pm | , ,
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Thanks to Clagnut, I’m observing CSS Naked Day on April 5th.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the
Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

For the remaining dotText-ers out there who want this to automatically kick-in every April 5th, I just added this condition to DTP.aspx:

<%
// suspend styles on April 5 to observe CSS Naked Day - http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
DateTime dtNaked = DateTime.Today; 
if(!(dtNaked.Month==4 && dtNaked.Day==5)){
%>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mystyles.css" />
<%
}
%>