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jpreardon — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:45:55 +0000

The main content and comments feeds are now being redirected to Feedburner. If you are a subscriber, and you are reading this in your reader, all is good. If, however, you are experiencing some problems, please let me know.

WordPress Installations & Upgrades with Subversion

jpreardon — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:39:17 +0000

If you’ve hosted a WordPress blog for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the traditional upgrade procedure. It is fairly painless, but it involves downloading and copying files. If you have some custom files somewhere, you run the risk of forgetting one or two (like .htaccess) which might lead to undesirable results. Even when everything goes well, it still takes time to copy things around on your server.

There is a much easier way. By using Subversion, you avoid all of the downloading and copying. There are some excellent instructions for installing/updating WordPress with Subversion on the WordPress site. Once your blog installation is set up with Subversion, upgrading to a new version only requires one command–two if you make a backup, which is highly recommended.

Long Time Lost

jpreardon — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:38:57 +0000

Update 2007-08-02: The server at www.longtimelost.com is no longer responding. I’ll assume they are no longer around. The link has been removed from this page. Sorry

Long Time Lost helps reconnect people through the internet. Basically, you enter some information about the people you are looking for at Long Time Lost which is then put on a web page that will be indexed by search engines. Then, when one of the people you are looking for does a vanity search, they should find the Long Time Lost page, and you!

Perhaps the Long Time Lost pages will get better PageRanks than such lists on individual sites. Even so, I’ve opted to use my own site for these purposes rather than someone else’s. There is now a short list of names tacked to the end of the about page. We’ll see if anyone finds it.

via lifehacker

via

jpreardon — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:25:58 +0000

Dave points out that there should be a better way to cite multiple sources in a blog post. I agree, but I don’t want to add a sentence describing the trail of blogs that ultimately led to mine in each applicable post.

Instead, I’ll start including the chain at the bottom of the post. Items I lift directly from somewhere else without directly citing the source in the post get a “via” link anyway. Now I’ll click back to find the source–which is probably a good idea anyway. I can’t promise extensive research, but the sorts of things I am writing about here are probably no more than two or three posts away from the originator.

Here is an example of what the “via” link would look like on a recent post where I originally cited only lifehacker:

via A Whole Lotta Nothing :: lifehacker

In this case, it only lists one additional site, but you get the idea. The first link listed is first reference I found and the last link is the place that I first read about it. In some cases, there could be a few sites in between. This effort won’t take much more time on my part and it will give some credit where credit is due.

Search and Ye Shall Find

jpreardon — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:50:47 +0000

Sometimes, the search criteria people are using to get to a site is is downright puzzling. For instance, well over 20% of the people that clicked through to this site in October from a search engine were looking for “halloween costume ideas”.

So, for those of you who arrived here looking for some costume ideas, you should know that I have a hard time coming up with a reasonable costume for myself. So, I really have no ideas to spare, sorry. I will point out the solitary post on this site that will give you an idea or two. Good luck!

Change is Good

jpreardon — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 22:56:30 +0000

After contemplating it for over a year, I’ve finally upgraded this site to WordPress. ~~Please excuse the classic theme here~~I’m using Patricia Muller’s “Connections” theme, I’m still undecided about whether or not to bring back the old “jpreardon.com” theme. I’ll also apologize in advance for anything that might be broken here. There are a couple things that I don’t think I’ll be bringing back such as the blogroll. The one on the old site was quite out of date and I’m not sure if I think blogrolls are all that useful anymore. The Flickr Photostream will probably be back in some form in the near future though.

Just a few words about WordPress which I have used on a couple other projects with minimal difficulty. The export/import process was without pain for the most part. In fact, I had the site running with all of my previous posts from my Moveable Type installation in under 15 minutes. It would have taken less time if my original export file was under 5 megabytes. The thing pushing it over 5 megs was trackback spam. I had been pretty vigilant about comment spam, but the trackback stuff was happening under my radar. I rectified this situation by deleting the crap out of the Moveable Type database before exporting for the second try. Hopefully the trackback spam will not be an issue on WordPress.

If you happen to encounter any problems with the site, please leave a comment on this post.

Thanks!

Update: I spent a bit more time ensuring that all of my old posts from MT redirected to the new WP version. This is accomplished with a combination of Alex King’s Movable Type individual entry template and some mod_rewrite fun. After I rebuilt the old MT individual entries, I deleted just about everything but those files from the old blog. All seems to work well. I could have made the redirect for the old archive pages more graceful (they just redirect to the home page now), but I think it works well enough. More detailed instructions for migrating from MT to WP are available on the WordPress site.

High Infrequency

jpreardon — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:17:28 +0000

I quietly launched a new photoblog called high infrequency a couple weeks ago. Since the purchase of a new camera, I’ve wanted a better place to show photos than the gallery on this site. So, please, check it out if (…)

Read the rest of this entry »

Trackback Spam

jpreardon — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:56:58 +0000

Last night I was thinking “Hey, I haven’t seen any comment spam in a while. Perhaps the rel=nofollow initiative has slowed things down a bit.” Apparently, I spoke to soon; I awoke this morning to find my blog blanketed with trackback spam. This was a first for me although it does not seem to be any more or less of a pain in the ass to deal with than comment spam has been. At any rate, since I was still getting spammed this morning, I have disabled trackback pings. I think I see a weblog software upgrade in the near future…

Update: From comments, but worthy of the link: Anthony points to an interview with a comment spammer; then promptly calls me a bastard. He clarifies things in a later comment by pointing out that the spammer was to be the target of the “bastard” comment and not me. Obviously Anthony doesn’t know me that well

Site Changes

jpreardon — Sat, 13 Dec 2003 20:27:28 +0000

All of the blog archive files on this site have been renamed from *.html to *.php. If you encounter any problems with missing files, please let me know. If you are interested in how the redirects were done so that all the existing links and bookmarks to this site were not broken, keep reading.

Moving and renaming files is easy, but anyone coming from a bookmark or search engine link will be greeted with a 404 error unless something else is done. Enter mod_rewrite, a powerful Apache module. It can do a lot of great stuff, but what I needed to accomplish was fairly straightforward. For example, incoming requests for page.html should be redirected to page.php. There are several ways to accomplish this. The simplest way is to enter a redirect line in the .htaccess file for each renamed file. This site contains hundreds of files so editing the .htaccess file would have taken hours. A better option in this case was to insert a slightly more complex rule. The text of the rule I inserted in my .htaccess file appears below:

#   backward compatibility ruleset for
#   rewriting document.html to document.php
#   when and only when document.php exists
#   but no longer document.html
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase   /blog/front/
#   parse out basename, but remember the fact
RewriteRule   ^(.*)\.html$              $1      [C,E=WasHTML:yes]
#   rewrite to document.php if exists
RewriteCond   %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule   ^(.*)$ $1.php                     [S=1,R=301]
#   else reverse the previous basename cutout
RewriteCond   %{ENV:WasHTML}            ^yes$
RewriteRule   ^(.*)$ $1.html

This rule is basically a cut and paste job from the Apache site with three exceptions:

The RewriteBase directive needs to be changed to suit the site/directory the .htaccess file is living in.
The example on the Apache site renames *.html to *.phtml so all instances of phtml have been changed to php.
The option [S=1] was changed to [S=1,R]. At first, I found that while Firebird happily changed the URL in the address bar from *.html to *.php, Internet Explorer did not. I suspect that the return code passed back to the browser was not 301 – Moved Permanently. Adding the “R” option seems to have solved that. Update 2006-10-03: 3 years on, I’ve realized that “R” alone is not correct. One must also pass the “301″ code, otherwise, it redirects without sending the “Moved Permanently” code. I’ve corrected the code snippet above to reflect this. Sorry…

Hopefully this page will save someone some headaches in the future if they find themselves in a similar situation.

Still Here

jpreardon — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 01:34:13 +0000

Updates have been few and far between lately. I have a load of stuff to write about but little time to write. I promise I’ll get back to posting on at least a semi-daily basis this week. Since today is officially the first day of the week, I guess I should start today…

I have posted some pictures from my California trip which I took a couple weeks ago. None of these pictures are especially good, I think I need to make a point of taking better pictures. It also wouldn’t hurt if I knew how to sharpen them up a bit in Photoshop although most of these are beyond Photoshop’s help.

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