Category Archives: Site news

Blogging about blogging

Shifting my Twits around

I’ve moved my Twitter feed from the right side to the left side navigation area on this page. The “balance” was starting to bug me (i.e.: too much vertical “stuff” on the right versus the left), and for some reason it just seems to make more sense under “recent comments” then above my photo gallery block.

I have not yet really slowed down my rate of “tweeting” yet: by the way, I prefer calling individual Twitter posts “twits”, but apparently that is bad form- sorry. I started on May 14th, and I’m posting somewhere around six to eight updates per day. if you look at my follow cost I seem to have stabilized at just below 400 milliscobles. I’m not feeling any compulsion to tweet: I just do so when something catches my eye and I think other folks might want to hear about it. Probably my main “vanity” when tweeting is that I respond to a few people like badastronomer (Phil Plait) and wilh (Wil Wheaton) on occasion. In part I do this because I’m hoping they might say something back- but generally I actually *do* have a question, I just probably would never have the courage to ask them to their face.   

Continue reading Shifting my Twits around

Cat banner…

I have added a cat banner which will appear periodically at the top of this page, along with my various tree and flower images. Here is a teeny tiny version for your enjoyment:

cat_banner.jpg

A couple of notes about these “rotating” images

  • if you have Javascript enabled, the image should rotate (change) every 20 seconds. If you don’t have Javascript enabled, the image will change each time you refresh the page or navigate to a new one
  • the banner images are 1920 x 150, and the cats are spread out across almost the entire width in their image. That means that most people won’t see all seven of our cats. Sorry: all I can suggest is that you get a larger/higher pixel count monitor 😉
  • All of the photos in the banner are taken by either Irene or myself. Thus they are not professional- that’s what you get on an amateur blog. All of the pictures are “photoshopped” to varying degrees to adjust lighting, size and (in the case of the cat banner) to frankenstein several images into one
  • in order, from left to right, the cats in the image are: Nimbus, Elcee, Coco, Bilbo, Iris, Tuxedo, and Willow. Bilbo is the oldest at 17 years, and Coco is the youngest at about a year and a half I believe. Scale is not accurate: but if you pretend the cats are at varying distances from you, it sort of works…
  • I will eventually add a “computer stuff” banner, with photos of all of my various computers and computer-related gadgets. No promise on exactly when, though. Creating a photoshopped image like the cat banner takes me a couple of hours, and although it is sort of fun, it isn’t something I want to do regularly.

Enjoy!

New layout more or less settled

The Atahualpa theme has been active here on the site now for several days. I haven’t received any positive or negative feedback, but I’m happy enough with it now that I’ve made a few minor tweaks.

  • The banner pictures at the top are now my own photos: I plan on adding in a few cat pictures at some point, but the format requires some fiddling so it may take me a while
  • I’ve corrected some problems that prevented my archives from showing up
  • I have managed to get a twitter feed working that doesn’t require the Flash plugin

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Continue reading New layout more or less settled

Apparently my Gallery had NSFW comments..

Google sent me an email the other day telling me that my site had “inappropriate” content:

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.

Adult? Mature? On *my* site? Hmmm, this required some further investigation. It didn’t take long to find the problem- Google even gave me a sample URL. Apparently, sometime in the last few weeks some comment spammer bot found my photo gallery and started spewing link-farm comments in random spots throughout. And of course, the only person who has to do more work in this process is me.

Continue reading Apparently my Gallery had NSFW comments..

Longest outage of my site in five years

Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…

Continue reading Longest outage of my site in five years

Site restructuring underway

You may noticed that some odd changes here during the past day or so. This is part of a long term plan I’ve had to tidy up and “rethink” the structure of the site.

The plan is to have easily accessible links to posts specific to each category as part of the main site navigation. The categories I’ve selected are:

  • Gear: Computers, video, hardware and general gadgetry
  • Games: computer and console titles, both reviews and general discussion
  • Girls: women that geeks who like women will like… I have work to do here, but expect to see Number 6, Seven of Nine, and others showing up here
  • Geek Miscellany: Science, advanced technology, and related topics that don’t fit in any particular category
  • Rants: My occasional (usually over the top) opinions on things like politics, the news, and other stuff
  • Life: what is happening in my immediate vicinity- family, around the house, and the like
  • Critters: News and information about the animals that share our domicile
  • Site News: posts like this one that talk about this blog

Each of these choices will lead you to a page that gives a brief description of the category and contains only matching posts. Once I get things working the way I want, the main or “Home” page will only list brief summaries of each post. At the moment, the categories are more or less in place, but some of the site navigation features aren’t working quite right yet. I expect to have the main details ironed out in the next couple of days, so bear with me.

Website outage

I discovered a problem with my blog when I posted my rant about my Cisco RV016 earlier today. After all my network shuffling around, the website was loading very, very slowly. The WordPress blog was taking several minutes to render, whereas the other blogs on the server were behaving normally.

I tried a great many things, including running database recovery diagnostics and upgrading my WordPress version, before finally figuring out the cause. My network changes resulting in my server no longer having correct DNS settings: you could find it, but it couldn’t find the rest of the internet. I suspect the page generation delay was happening because of the Google Adsense stuff on the site, which wants to talk to Google… but I’m just speculating.

In any case, the problem appears to be solved now… five hours after I discovered it. I’m going to add this to the list of things I will blame on my Cisco RV016 router/switch…

UPDATE: I have uncovered and repaired more problems, but these ones I can’t blame on my much maligned Cisco RV016

Continue reading Website outage