fun with WordPress

Well I just spent I don’t know how long uninstalling and re-installing WordPress. Fun times, let me tell you! *dead*

A little backstory: went to bed at 4:30 in the morning (technically yesterday…), was woken up off and on from 9 to 11 by someone working with a chainsaw, didn’t get up until 1:30. I spent the day very very tired.

I don’t know when I messed up, maybe it was 11:30 pm? I accidentally uploaded the WordPress config file to the wp-content folder. I thought, Oh crap, and just deleted it. No biggie, right? Wrong.

(I’m going through my old entries and closing entries I don’t like, recategorizing entries, tagging entries… I do this too often, I know. I’m an organization freak.)

I go to edit an entry and find that there’s no place to edit tags. I thought it was the plug-in Simple Tags, so I kept turning that on and off, but that wasn’t it. I kept turning on and off all my other plug-ins, but that wasn’t the problem. (That created more problems, actually. It’s sort of irritating having to rely on plug-ins for my blog to display correctly…)

I realized that not only were tags missing, but all the Advanced Options weren’t nicely hidden away like they usually are.

I tried re-installing WordPress, just keeping my wp-content folder, but that didn’t change anything, so I moved on to deleting my MySQL database and re-importing the SQL file. That didn’t work either, though. (I got a scary message, “Error in ZIP archive: CRC32 checksum is not equal with the value in header information.” Found out I should try to import from the .sql file, not the .zip file. Luckily Steadfast allows importing of sql files up to roughly 8 mb! [Don’t remember the exact number; don’t sue me.] Yes, my blog .sql file is over 3 mb big now. *meep*)

That didn’t fix my problem, though, so I just scrapped my whole blog and put in a completely fresh install, all new uploaded files, all new MySQL database, and re-imported my .sql file.

The problem seems to be fixed now. Except … I realized while writing this post that the post page I was working on was messed up still. Argh! At least I was able to save it, then through editing the draft I got the regular page back…

Hm, nope. Every Create New Post page comes up with that blank look. >_< ARGH! Why won’t WordPress fix itself?!

edit: Wow, I guess it was just that one tab in Firefox (2) that wouldn’t display the page correctly. I spent over two hours trying to fix this on my site when it was just the browser?! *falls over*

current state, a review

I feel like my blog has become some review site for random things. Mostly books, though.

All the entry ideas sitting in my head (or on my desktop in a Sticky): 3Musketeers Mint review, Burt’s Beeswax lip balm review, Across the Wall review, pixel size vs. point size vs. em size, Scarlett Johansson’s new album review…

Even as I list the topics I find it hard to call them “reviews” because, well, I’m no professional critic (yay for that), and a lot of the things I comment on probably never even crossed people’s minds. I don’t talk about writing style (in books) or acting ability (in movies or on television) or storyline or anything.

I guess it’s not that bad, since I’m really not interested in those things. If I like something, I like it. I don’t … argh, stupid brain, that word where you inspect why you like it or not, what are good and bad parts, like in literature classes … which I generally can’t stand, by the way. But anyway! Getting off track.

If I were to not post reviews, then there would be virtually nothing new on this blog. And if I were to scrap the posts that contained vitriol (not the sulfate. *blink* word dork popping out again), then there would be literally nothing new here!

I could go back to recording my life daily, like I did a year and a half ago. But nothing interesting goes on in my life at the moment. Today: went to lecture, had an impromptu critique of our sketches for newspaper design, and took a class photo for the cover of our magazine. Am now considering a nap, but should really be working on my newspaper (uuuugh, even less interested in than magazine) and washing the dishes.

Yesterday, went to class, had a lecture about happiness (in an Estimating class *grin*), went to other lecture, learned about the Manhattan Project and saw a video on the uber secretive pilots who flew the bomb to Hiroshima. (Why doesn’t the History Channel, etc./Discovery Channel, etc./TLC show cool history shows like that anymore? Well, I guess the History channel is going through a Hitler phase right now.)

Most interesting thing from the video that I remember now: the B29s (planes) made regular flights to test dropping one bomb, solo or in a group of three (planes), so the Japanese grew accustomed to seeing them. :O Although now that I think about it, Laurence Yep wrote in Hiroshima that planes were not an uncommon sight. Scary.

Some other things I remember: the group of pilots (forgot the military term XO troop? division?) that was training for this mission didn’t know what they were training for. I think only one official there knew what was going on. They were told often, if you don’t want to live under all this mysteriousness and secrecy, you’re free to leave. Also the other pilots on Tinian would make fun of that group, because all they did was fly short missions to drop one bomb (versus the many, many bombs that others dropped), and it was thought that the other B29 pilots were carrying a much heavier workload to make up for what the special group wasn’t accomplishing.

Um. Back to original thought. If I can remember it … I think I was going to quickly review what I listed. But this entry is quite long as it is (history is so interesting!), and you should know that I can never write short entries no matter how hard I try. So I might write another entry. Maybe.

Oh, now I remember. I wanted to comment on spam that I’m getting on this blog. The other day I deleted 600-plus comments from Akismet’s hold. Today I’ve got 34 in there, and since there were so few I decided to read through them. These aren’t as bad as they used to be, with dozens of links to porn or sex pills. I have two or three comments pushing those, but there are only a couple links.

Most of the comments are on my entry where I complained about mixing paints. A lot of the comments say, “Great site!” Oh yeah? If you really think so, wouldn’t you comment on the latest entry, not a really mundane, old one?

Some comments add stuff like “Keep up this great resource.” and “…a lot of useful information” and “Found invaluable information. Just what I was looking for :-)” (Oh look, a smiley face! They must be really earnest!!!) So … paint mixing is a hot topic nowadays, is it? It’s replacing all those knitting and crocheting sites out there? To think, I got in on this trend from the get-go! And don’t forget, Yellow-Green should never be mixed with Magenta-Purple, because they’re not exact complements! lololol!

One comment read, “I would love to hear more about this …” So, an update. Since I wrote how I felt about the results in the entry following that one, I’ll show some pictures. Here’s a photo of a towel I used to clean off my brush while working on some project. And here’s a photo of my brush after one project. Then here’s a photo of all the masking tape I pulled off of one part of the last project. And finally, the project.

Now can I stop getting spam on that entry? Or at least write a real, constructive comment. I have no problem with allowing real comments even if they are just writing to get a link to their site. My blog doesn’t have any sort of Google pagerank to ruin, much less a substantial one.

try always

Tweaked the layout, so now it’s more normalish and not all above the fold with scrolling divs. Yay! Not sure how I like how it looks in 800×600 resolutions though. (The sidebar goes all the way to the bottom of the page in order to not create a horizontal scrollbar. :/)

Um, I noticed that in the “Write Post” page of WordPress, the selected categories are no longer at the top of the list… Why was that changed? I was a little annoyed when they first switched from alphabetizing all categories regardless of if they were selected to having selected categories on the top, but I got over that. It was very handy knowing without having to scroll what categories I’d placed the post under.

It’s doubly annoying now because the Categories window is so freaking tiny now. (Height-wise, I mean.) Scroll a little bit and I can barely see where the window scrolled to. Three lines? Five lines? I can never tell! Very disorienting.

edit: Vote for this idea! “Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3”

WordPress 2.5

Bran’ Spankin’ New version of WordPress … I’m not a big fan of it. Hah. I hate to complain. I’m not against change. But I am against changing my workflow!

I just don’t like how much scrolling I have to do on the Write Post page. (I have to go all the way down there to add a password?! Or even to categorize my post? Which also involves much more scrolling…) It seems to me like there’s so much wasted space to the right … because I don’t use a lot of the stuff there, haha.

And the tags thing … maybe it’s just me. I’m used to Simple Tags. WP’s tag guessing thing is so slow. boo. Then again, Simple Tags could slow down my system a fraction of a second. But … at least the reaction to my typing, say, “bu” (completely random letters, yes), wouldn’t take a whole second (more?) to show up.

Also, why can’t I customize this page? I was able to change the last version’s around. Well, sorta. Going from one WordPress blog panel on this domain to another, the position of those things (widgets?) changed back to default. mrrr. But … theoretical customization, come on, people!

I dunno. I suppose I’ll get used to it. I have to, don’t I? *grin*

the jester and the monk went out one night

New layout. Yay! After I complained in some previous post that I had no inspiration for a new layout I went out to a scrapbooking store (for class supplies) and saw a paper design that I liked (the diamond pattern) so I matched it up with this image I’d found earlier while on the lookout for old woodcuts (for class). I like it all right at the moment. Will probably tire of it soon. But I think I can wrangle the layout into a non-overflow one once that happens.

I still have to work on style for the text. It’s what kept me from making this post yesterday when the layout went up, but since I spent most of today working on my book (for the same class mentioned previously), I never got around to finishing it, and would rather say yay new layout before it’s done than a few days after it first went up.

I’ll probably split the “sidebar” into three sections instead of two. I’ll probably toss in the RSS feed from LibraryThing and Last.fm. I feel somehow like I’m following the latest trend by doing that, but oh well. It’ll make this blog look less abandoned in between posts. XD;

I also want to add a colophon. Why? I’m a dork I guess. I love the idea of it. I first read one in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I had no idea what it was, but I liked knowing what typeface they used. It edged me a little bit deeper into loving book design. *grin*