Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Category: Webloging Software

  • Blog Restored

    This blog came under heavy attack starting in late 2020 (presumably from cultists who objected to my spreading heretical information) and my hosting provider was unable to cope. I now have a new provider, so I restored it from a backup. We’ll see if my new provider can keep a WordPress install secure. Unfortunately the backup was only text, so various media files (such as heretical videos I rescued from YouTube before they could be censored) were lost.

  • Blog fixed

    The problem I was having with my blog software has been fixed, thanks to MacHighway’s support people. It’s nice to do business with a company that actually cares about their customers!

  • Blog glitch

    In the past few days something has started interfering with WordPress’s XML-RPC interface. That’s a problem because MarsEdit, the client app I use, depends on it. Although they initially denied it, my hosting provider is now admitting that it’s their fault. I’m hoping I can convince them to fix the problem.

  • Old theme back

    I’ve gone back to the previous WordPress theme, which is called Ahimsa.

  • Theme Change

    I’m trying out the Twenty Twelve theme that came with the WordPress 3.5 update.

  • Comment spam

    The Akismet plugin, which I use to block comment spam here, has a display of how much comment spam I’ve received. The amount has been going up ever since I turned commenting back on, with the total spam for January being 2,279. That’s more than twice the amount of email spam I received in the same period, despite have had the same email address (widely distributed across multiple websites) for sixteen years. I don’t really see why people would bother generating so much comment spam–I can’t even remember the last time I saw a spam comment get through to somebody’s weblog.

  • Blog spam

    A while back I had to turn off commenting on my weblog after the anti-spam plugin I had been using stopped working with newer WordPress versions. About a month ago I started using the Akismet plugin, which made it possible to turn commenting back on. One of the features of Akismet is a display of total spam and total real comments over time, and according to that display for the month of July (the first full month that I used it) my weblog received 489 spam comments and two real comments.

  • WordPress glitch

    Over the weekend my weblog, which is handled by WordPress 3.1.3, stopped responding–any attempt to load a page in the weblog or the administration panel resulted in a blank page. A bit of Googling turned up that this is a known problem called a “white screen of death” which affects WordPress and has multiple causes. Fortunately, I was able to fix it by renaming my plugins folder to “pluginsoff,” at which point I could log into the administrative interface (with all my plugins disabled). After that, changing the name of the folder back to “plugins” restored everything to normal function.

    My best guess is that the WPtouch plugin, which I had updated shortly before I noticed the problem, either didn’t like being updated or got corrupted somehow. I’m not sure I’ll bother with further investigation, since the plugin is meant to show a nice iPhone/iPod Touch-friendly version when my weblog is viewed from those devices, and I haven’t really used my iPod for anything but listening to music since I bought an iPad.

  • Radio Weblog posts imported

    I finally got around to solving the problem that interfered with importing the posts from my old Radio UserLand weblog when I switched software. The import wasn’t perfect–I had to delete a whole bunch of duplicates. There are also some formatting oddities with the imported posts. Radio didn’t require titles for posts, so all the imported posts now have titles automatically generated from the first few words of the post’s content, and also block quotes were broken in the original export and came through as “bq” in front of a regular paragraph of text.

  • To tag or not to tag

    I’m trying out the “tags” feature of WordPress as an experiment.