I spent a bit of time on Monday adding a PHP code snippet to my WordPress site that outputs a total monthly word count and average word count per post to the archives page. This is far from a complex bit of code, and I used AI to get the basics, but here it is.
(more…)
This is my response per the August 4th Group project prompt from Krikket => https://nerdgirlthoughts.game.blog/2026/07/23/blaugust-2026-calendar-weekly-prompts-group-projects/
(more…)
I’ve been doing something akin to ‘blogging’ on the Internet for quite a few years. I don’t have an exact date that I started and the definition of ‘blogging’ is kind of tenuous. But my notes indicate that I began sharing my thoughts and opinions on the web sometime around 1998 or 1999.
Every once in a while, though, I get some reminder of the durability of this strange pastime of mine. Today I noticed I had an ‘achievement’ from WordPress in my notifications that got me thinking.
I’ve completed the site theme update as I mentioned yesterday. It isn’t completely finished: some things are still broken (sorry, macOS Safari users), and I’m not happy yet with some elements of the appearance.
But I did accomplish the main objectives I had. Ubergeek Kelly’s World is now using a more ‘modern’ theme that works with the plugins that were causing problems with the Twenty Fourteen theme I was using previously. And as part of the change I implemented the permalinks change (wth redirects from the old structure) I wanted to make. There are some additional details below for the ‘tech-curious’.
(more…)
No one has liked any of my posts or comments in months. Actually, that isn’t really true- the actual truth is that a small number of people who visit my site without using a browser have liked some of my posts. Nope, that still isn’t completely true: people may like my posts, but they can’t push a button recording the idea that they like them.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that the ‘like’ button that is supposed to appear on posts and comments has been broken. So badly broken, in fact, that I turned the feature off. Well, you can now rejoice! The Like button is back (although as always you need to log in…), and boy is that a story…
(more…)
How did I get started blogging and why? And why do I continue to periodically ‘shout into the endless void’ that modern blogging seems to have become?
I suppose it started out of a sort of arrogance. I have thoughts and ideas that I sometimes believe others might like to hear. There is also a more generous aspect of my reasoning that imagines my experiences might help someone else in some way.
This post assembles a bit of my blogging history and includes my attempt to explain what drives me to share my weird thoughts on the internet.
(more…)
I upgraded this site from PHPNuke to WordPress in 2005. The cut over was rather abrupt and poorly thought out by yours truly. At the time, I believed I had successfully migrated all of my old content to the new environment. But several years later (!!), I realized the migration had left any article from my old site with a ‘read more’ tag without more to read in my WordPress configuration. This bothered me, and today I decided to see what I could do to ‘fix’ it.
My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time. The most common is the seemingly random appearance of  characters in the midst of some of my posts.
I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch. I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted. Until today… I hope
You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
