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.

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!

After contemplating it for over a year, I’ve finally upgraded this site to WordPress. Please excuse the classic theme hereI’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 The one on the old site was quite out of date and I’m not sure if I think blogrolls are all that useful anymore.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.

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 ;)