As always, if you leave a comment and notice that it doesn’t appear right away, email me. It might have gotten caught in the filter. (Sounds like a dirty pool man story doesn’t it?)
I’m also tinkering with a new tag to tell my friends+me account not to repost blog posts. If you see a category or hastag of #ns, it isn’t really for sorting anything secret. lol
First off, if you visit the blog via the web, you’ll notice a theme change. I’m moving to themes that are built as mobile compliant vs having to have a plugin convert if for me. Of course, you should notice a new mobile version if you access let blog on a mobile device.
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I hate having to share stuff between my myriad social media accounts. It is a constant pain to share in one place and then fret because I haven’t shared in others. I know, big #FirstWorldProblem. Who cares right? Well, if you subscribe to said blog, you might get a few updates from me today via email. I tried disabling by post but it seems to be ignoring that tiny but important setting. hehe. Apologies if you are getting several emails today about trivial stuff. I’m trying to make it less painful by including pretty pictures.
I’m moving things around. As many of you know, I prefer to manage everything via my blog then share it out to social media. It’s now an easy task when plugins never support all the varied platforms all in one. My biggest thorn has been google+. Because they have a closed API, there are no plugins to accomplish this task so I have to manually share a post. Clearly, that doesn’t always happen. haha But…
I switched to a Jetpack plugin today on my self-hosted WordPress and it supports posting to google. Yay! It used to only support WordPress hosted blogs. Now it supports self-hosted. I’m turning off some of the old plugins and testing the Jetpack one as it posts out to FB and twitter as well. If this works as hoped, I can finally switch back to posting pics, etc to my blog FIRST and have it filter out to my social sites from there.
Moby will be a happy camper if it all works as planned! Anyway, if you could care less about all this, feel free to enjoy this lovely pic of one of my original blogger meetings so so many years ago. It does include brettcajun and homer.
Because I’m deleting upwards of 2-3 hundred fake user accounts every month now, I’ve installed a new hidden captcha plugin. You as the user should never see it. It doesn’t depend on the traditional method of captcha pictures to solve, which I detest with a passion.
Instead, it uses a rather interesting javascript output and cookie combo that effectively (for the moment) prevents most autobots from registering fake accounts. There are very few people who refuse to use javascript so I don’t forsee this as a problem. However, should you encounter errors, email me.
I also reviewed a lot of comments and feedback on the authors site. None were problems with it’s functionality so I feel comfortable it will not interfere with most of you.
Wish me luck! lol
I accidentally deleted a whole slew of registered users today by mistake! If you notice your user account is gone, just recreate it. Apologies.
To allow social log-ins to work, I have to allow the anyone can register in the settings. Of course, the bad guys try to use this to create more spam for my blog. I get on average about 30-50 fake accounts every week. I usually let them build up and then mass delete them. Today I wasn’t paying attention and deleted a page of users from the wrong user group. Oops!
None of the private user accounts were affected so those of you in that group should be fine. Speaking of, I get a lot of questions about the private parts of my blog. Yes, I have a private section. Yes, it deals mostly with adult content. I’ll also be adding soon some of the fictional short stories I’ve written. I keep them private to avoid poaching.
My blog is and will remain public but there are restricted parts and even parts that are solely for me. There are certain things the general public, including my co-workers, just don’t need to know about me. [1]I’m sure they’d tell you I’m probably already too open with them at work. lol No, it is not about porn. While I do sometimes post slightly NSFW pics, I rarely post anything graphic, sorry. Yes, that is why I usually post a quick blurb about “are you logged in?” No, I don’t charge for access.
That said, I do require something specific. You must take it upon yourself to email me personally and introduce yourself. [2]Click the email icon lower right of page A face pic is always welcome and gets higher consideration but not required. I like having a feel for my readers and your introduction gets filed with your user account. I don’t require anything overly specific but the more open and honest you are the more likely I am to grant access. Yes, I realize it’s the honor system and you could be disingenuous, but that has never been the point. I do run your attached IP thru a couple filters to verify it is not spoofed or on black-lists. Once I approve you, I’ll notify you directly. From then on, as long as you are logged in, you can see private posts.
I usually approve users en-masse, regardless of access. This means you may not get a response from me right away. I simply do not have the time to do each request individually as they come in. I ask that you please be patient. Back to my original topic, all the deletions today were public subscribers. Again, apologies for the hassle. If you were one of the unlucky few and want to receive email updates, you’ll have to go thru the short but tedious process of re-registering.
I’m all moved to my new site now. Unfortunately, I was unable to merge the old blog. Apparently, WordPress only supports xml imports up to 2megs and mine was 9megs.
*sigh* I just set it up the way it was before so nothing has really changed. All the old links were kept intact as well so I guess there is that.
Now I get to finally fire 1and1.com and their shitty customer service!
For those few of you who still visit my blog via the web vs RSS, mobile, etc, you should notice a (hopefully) unobtrusive first time visitor message right before the first post on the blog. As soon as you reload or revisit it should disappear. I hate popup windows so opted to make it show as easily as possible w/o interfering w/your visit.
It sets a small cookie [1]which you can delete anytime showing you’ve been here before. For you security minded folks, I’ve examined the cookie and it only collects enough info to function.
As my site visits increase, I felt the need to post messages for new visitors. I’m just experimenting for now. This one seems the most stable and the least intrusive so I’m trying it out first.
References
| ↑1 | which you can delete anytime |
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Ok, I’m officially in my new hosting space. Apparently, I setup my account a bit wrong so they had to move everything around internally. I must say, while there were a few unexpected delays, the customer support team has been great. I opted for 1 month of managed shared hosting, which is a fancy way of saying I paid them to help me. It comes with 24/7 tech support by phone, chat, email, and/or online.
I think I’m gonna be happier with them. I’m still discovering more and more how shitty 1and1 was in so many ways. I have direct access to chron jobs, apache, mysql [1]To be fair, 1and1 did give me mysql access, email filtering, IP blocking, etc. For basicaly a dollar more a month, I have so much more control over my domain and how it functions now. Some of these items are not for novices but it’s nice knowing I can use it, if and when I need it. I’ll definitely be using the chron jobs now.
In other news, I’m gonna attempt to import my old blog data into this one so I can do away with the duplicate setups. I figured since I’m moving all this stuff around, I might as well go for broke! lol I’m gonna try an XML import to avoid conflicting issues with API keys, blah blah blah. You shouldn’t notice anything significant. Well, if something goes horribly wrong you might see the domain go blank while I fix it again. lol
Another post coming today so sorry in advance for doube emails. I turned off subscribers so as to avoid bombarding everyone with emails.
References
| ↑1 | To be fair, 1and1 did give me mysql access |
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As I settle into my new digs, you should begin to notice “likes” from Facebook showing up in the comments section. Imagine my surprise when they suddenly started showing up! I’m discovering several of my plug-in errors were caused by not by poor coding skills but my old host, 1and1.com. [1]Needless to say, I do NOT recommend anyone EVER using them. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be on a new host. If I’d know it would be this easy, I would have dumped 1and1 ages ago.
If anyone is interested, I’m now on lunarpages. My only beef so far is their tech support is only avail 24 hours by email. They do tech support by phone 7a to 7p. Not the end of the world but in this day and age you’d think it would be ubiquitous. Anyway, I’m now going back over a few of my old plug-ins to see if the original errors have been fixed.
In related news, I have like 10 or so posts backed up. lol It’s funny when I was holding off on posting due to the move, I wanted to blog about everything. heeheee Instead of dumping them on you all at once, I’ve scheduled them out every other day. Some I’ve already had to edit for relevance.
References
| ↑1 | Needless to say, I do NOT recommend anyone EVER using them. |
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So for some unknown reason, my last post about Google’s new +1 service isn’t allowing comments and is throwing a 404 page when you try to post a comment. I have no idea why its doing that. lol Anyway, if you have a gmail account (that is public) and want an invite when they reopen them. Comment here instead since I can’t seem to fix.
Noticed a problem with the comment box. Testing
