Category: blogging

This is pretty much here for archival purposes. Practically forget it exists. No fingers lifted, right? Until you’re hacked! So now we’re on a newer version of PHP, which supports the newest version of WordPress and kills the old Expression Engine version of the earlier Blogblivion content once and for all barring special measures (manually adding posts here or finagling a site together of the static pages – 150 of them – I saved to have it in viewable form, not just database entries and memories.

Everything in WP was hacked. Even the lone clog that was already on the latest version after being hacked a couple weeks back without all this company. Unless the hosting has completely gone south, it seems that it’s some combinations of PHP version, WP version, updating themes and plugins, and finally figuring WTF it was on about with refusing to use HTTPS to load the blogs. You have to set the URL to that in the WP settings! Done across the board. I’ll update every password for everything for good measure along the way. This is the second blog with shiny new WP today. The third one on the hosting worked after changing PHP. I deleted a handful of specialty blogs. Easy to fix on the one hand, but more things to deal with on the other. Only a single one is completely cleaned of the crud – mostly hidden links in the posts. This one has almost 700 posts. It’s either go through every post and edit the ones affected, or do the same basic thing through MySQL. It appears that the stuff trails off by around halfway through, or did in a blog with a fraction of this number of posts. Posts near the beginning are more likely to contain more than one. Easy but tedious and slow. I’m hiring one of the kids to help with some of it. Deb’s old crochet blog was affected, for instance.

I really didn’t want to take the whole thing down. Even the places I took down may see content placed elsewhere or may return in the end. This is the early years of the kids. That’s why I carefully saved and organized 150 web pages worth of the early Blogblivion content that I knew I couldn’t keep from crashing when PHP was updated.

Anyway, until one of us goes through it, you should be able to see the weirdness the hack caused if you pay any attention at all to some of the subsequent posts.

At the very least, WordPress being updated might make things snappier and avoid errors that might ultimately make this as unreadable as an old Expression Engine blog that’s been obsoleted by version changes to PHP on the server. Kind of hard to be archival if it can’t be read, eh?

I’ve spent a lot of years having but not much posting on a bunch of blogs, starting with the one that this replaced eons ago despite my better judgement. This may be changing.

Here we go again. Updated WordPress to the latest I know our database can support. Updated our theme to this awesome new one. Managed to lose my Sitemeter in the process, and don’t even know what e-mail address I don’t get any more they have for that account. Plan to start posting here extensively, so stay tuned. There’s a backlog, but time is often limited.

Another blog I remember fondly is Drumwaster’s Rants, which somewhere along the line – not all that long ago – turned into a domain parking page. I never did learn Drumwaster’s real name, but he was part of the overlapping blog circles I was in or touched upon after I started blogging in 2003.

Most notably, we were quiz buddies. I’d take a silly internet quiz and post it. He’d see it and take the same one. Or vice-versa.

We were more or less in related political circles, though in his later blogging, and that of his eventual co-bloggers, he seemed a bit hard right. Which, I should write a post about sometime, I am not, despite overlapping enough to have been naturally friendly with bloggers who are vehement in ways or degrees I am not, or who might be startled by where I stand in some cases.

In the past 2-3 years or so I’d tended to forget to visit there as often as I could have , but still enjoyed seeing what they had to say. It’s sad to see it gone.

A big one in the list of bloggers I miss is MedicMom, AKA Sonia, from Alabama. Not sure I should even say that much about her here, given her concerns that led her to abandon her blog. Which is apparently not to be confused with a newer one of the same name that came up when I searched just for giggles.

She was one of those bloggers I’d particularly wished to meet someday, and one who left me intrigued by the idea of possibly living in Alabama.

Again on the topic of old blogs, I also miss Ian Hamet. His ianhamet.com, which featured a blog named Banana Oil in my early days of blogging, seems to belong to someone else. He had a temporary blog, Upbeat Cynicism, that was last active in 2009.

Perhaps he will see this and make himself known.

I guess there will be a lot of these memorial blog posts, depending how quickly I go through the blogroll at AV. And this is sort of active, still… there, anyway, it’s just that Acidman died. If you never visited or want to revisit Gut Rumbles, there are regular reposts. I’ll keep it linked from Accidental Verbosity, since that remains blogrolled there, and it will remind me of Rob to see it now and then. As if I need reminding! I still miss him, sometimes wonder what he’d say about current things, and think about how close we came to using Henry Robert instead of Henry Adam.

I’m going through the old blogroll at AV, grabbing stuff to link elsewhere and purging what no longer exists. This could take a while. This also provides fodder for one of the things I’d decided Blogblivion would have as a topic when I mostly stopped posting at it: blogging generally, and obsolete blogs we miss or remember fondly or were influenced by or whatnot.

One of my early blog friends was Ith and other at or connected with the blog that became Absinthe & Cookies, dead of apparent blog software and/or database issues, and never recovered. Ith is still around, and the root of that domain remains valid, but the blog is gone.

What bothers me is the difficulty I am having remembering the original name. It was some number of girls… and a guy. Which really amount to 2 girls, whether the official number was 3, 5 or what. It was great fun.

To Venemous Kate, who started out at almost the same time I did. A lot of us did, from mid-2002 through mid-2003 or so. Mine was February 25th.

When Kate exploded onto the scene, I assumed she’d been long established, she was that polished, prolific, and savvy at generating an audience.

Hardly seems like eight years.

A sad announcement. Paul, was lost to cancer in July.

First, I’ve increased my blogging, but most of it you will find elsewhere. Some of that is strategic, building a new set of blogs explicitly around the things I want to cover, purposefully for brand and prospective revenue building. Some of it is staleness. Hey, we were here far longer than at Accidental Verbosity, and Deb wanted a change from that after only that short time. I wasn’t as keen on the change, but loved the idea of this domain name after one of us coined (we thought) the word “blogblivion.” People still like the AV thing, but I don’t see any going back there because that more than this was really our marital blog. The timing of this place was like an unintentional demarcation point.

Because the brand has merit and it’s a revenue generator, if a dying one, I don’t plan to cease posting here altogether. That may yet come to pass. It’s quite possible to generate a few residual ad bucks off of a retired blog and Just Move On. At the same time, I don’t want or plan as yet to tear it down (more than I already did with the half-assed switch from Expression Engine to WordPress, which needs to be reversed or completed but is not up high on my huge agenda) (how is it possible for an underemployed single dad to have this many full plates spinning overhead?) completely and start fresh with a new concept. So…

I may put some of the family stuff here. Obviously I’ve slacked at putting up pictures, and I am not sure what will happen with them, except that they should go somewhere in reasonable quantity and frequency. Hold that thought. The big thing is I’d like to segue into fitting some of the new content to the name. I have a lot of blogging history behind me, and am well aware of blogs and trends having come and gone. I’d like to attempt to post about blogs and bloggers past, perhaps about blogging itself, as the place moves forward. The theme also needs updating. Bored now. Long ago. We’ll see what happens. Google hates this place currently, and I am not sure how readily that can be recovered. It’s not just ads we ran, though some of them probably didn’t help. It’s also probably the change of content when moving from EE to WP, and possibly the lack of posting. Though that has not hurt other sites at all.

Eventually I might port everything to an entirely new domain for safekeeping. At the least, I am liable to port selected posts I’ve written here or there. The pictures of kids may get their own site, for no other purpose. However…

I didn’t mention the other new blog I’ve been developing, alongside Frugal Guy Cook. It’s called Divine Hamster, a name inspired by an employee of my former big client. The content there is about kids, culture – especially with respect to kids, my memories and childhood, and the memories being made now as my kids have their childhood. That is why I am pondering putting some, if not all, pictures of the kids there, or at least posting some of the cool art they (mainly Sadie) create. I’m still working out the parameters and hitting my stride there.

For now, it is my intention to keep blogging, and increase it, at Bizosphere (business, economics, jobs) and Reality Bucket (intended for politics and a touch of stuff like culture and economics, with a snarky edge). I love the names/brands involved, even though they may take some rebuilding and recovery. I’m more focused on the others, though. I’ll blog somewhere on a general and personal level. There are a couple options I not only already have, but that are well respected by That Which Would Not Be Evil. I am ambivalent about both, and both need sprucing up or more. I moved Carnival of the Capitalists, which gets too little attention but does happen periodically from links I accumulate of my own accord.

I don’t have plans to do any tech blogging. Which seems silly, with Geek Practitioners pretty popular for advertising and not in the doghouse. I seldom feel inspired to post along those lines, though more than I had been. I don’t anticipate getting back into that as a field, though I have had doubts given some outbreaks of tech gibberish people have been amused and mystified by lately. The place will sit there bringing in revenue without further intervention for a while. I don’t like the domain, and the historical accident of it being a .net instead of .com bothers me. The .com was supposed to be a business and the .net was supposed to be the affiliated/feeder blog. Then I changed the business name. Then I de facto went out of that business too, for all the site remains in place, awaiting other plans and getting me near daily spam calls from an SEO service. If I decide to tech blog again, I am liable to start something new, with a name I prefer, even if I do import all the old content.

The big thing is to produce content. Write and write and see where it goes. I already know that money can be made from building up the blogging. If that juices the writing, which is something I can do, increasingly so, alone in the house with the kids (and less one kid for part of each weekday, come September), perhaps it leads beyond mere blogs. It’s hard to treat it like a job when so much else vies for my attention, but that’s the trick… for job I love values of “job.” I’m trying to spread the content around logically, without totally abandoning what I’ve already built, but also building some excitingly new aspects that are all my own.

What follows is a reprint of this post from August 20, 2003, which I found amusing.

Abode Musings

My older brother is currently staying at my grandmother’s house, crashing on a cot in a corner of the attic. She hates having him there, but then she’s suffering that aging symptom of hating everything these days. She also does nothing but gripe about my mother, who also lives there, and on whom my grandmother is increasingly dependent. She collects a significant amount of money from my mother, which is how she can afford to keep the house. When my grandmother is gone, everything will be sold and split, and my mother will be out on the street. But I digress. Same kind of thing is happening with my brother. She’s collecting significant money from him and complaining to everyone how she’s losing money by having him there. Patently absurd on the face of it.

So my brother needs to go somewhere else eventually, of course subject to what happens with his divorce and whether he gets his house back. He’s been talking with my cousin, who – if I am remembering right – is getting an apartment because his house isn’t done yet. They may share a place, then later my brother may be able to take a room in my cousin’s house.

If not, he’s approaching me about the idea of sharing a place when the time comes.

I have mixed feelings. He can be tempestuous, but mostly he was fine to live with when I rented a room from him for a couple years up through and just beyond the end of college. It was meeting the ill-fated wife he’ll be divorcing that he became crazy, and she made a concerted effort to “encourage” me to want to leave. For a year or so, I really liked living there. Whatever happens, I’d rather he move into a place that is already mine, or we move into a place together, so there can’t be any “this is my apartment” bullshit. Though that didn’t start until he’d met her.

I try to avoid sharing an apartment with anyone. I’m the esaiest going person in the world, but I can’t stand living with people who aren’t that way, or take advantage of my good nature. On the other hand, I really can’t afford to keep on paying rent on an entire apartment myself, not at this price. It’s a tough call. It would help us both.

Anyway, because he is talking next spring at least, it’s so far in the future as to be highly speculative. I’d like to have moved by then myself.

All of which affects the broadband I spoke of in the previous post. I can’t commit to a year, knowing I expect and want to move. Then again, with my level of inertia, I could be here that much longer. Which is bad; I’ll end up frantically trying to move when I get a notice that rent is going up. Amazed I haven’t been hit with that yet.

Well, we’ll see what happens. I’ve had slow connections this long.

This was going to be a post about my sixth blogiversary today, and some other blogging-related stuff I’d had in my queue of potential posts.

It is not done, or even close enough to publish what I do have.

This is a placeholder so a “yay, my blogiversary!” gets posted on the day of same, pending my completion of the actual post with which to replace or follow this. Stay tuned…