Archive for ‘Computer And Stuff (Probably Be Damned)’
36 items.
Site Back Up, Still Fiddling with CSS
December 23rd, 2009 |Posted In: Computer And Stuff (Probably Be Damned)
We had a blog disaster. After much ado, the blog is back, and I think most of it is intact, excepting images that were tucked away in the wp-content folder that I overlooked. And some old photo galleries from the first couple of years. I need to get those back up in some form and also check links here and there on posts to make sure they’re reading correctly.
Hacked! Yes, hacked. The blog was hacked, likely a while back, but I was stupid and didn’t realize that the drop to zero of search engine referrals signaled the hack. Discovery of it came about only because I paid attention to a peculiar search item that brought someone here, followed that, for some reason looked at the cached page of the search, and was surprised to see hundreds of obnoxious links sitting above my blog post, links that were never observed on the blog itself. That rude bit of information led to ditching of databases and assorted other maneuvers and many things acting weirdly and freaking me out.
Finally, the blog was back up, but there followed the discovery that my exported xml file of the text content was too large to import. Wpsplitter salvaged what remained of my sanity, enabling me to split the XML file into multiple files. An absolutely painless process and I’m fortunate that I found it.
Along the way I lost my blogroll. Kaput. I don’t know where it went but the links are no longer there.
I’m tired. I have spent nearly a week laboring at this and am not done yet. Issues are still being worked out, and I have some fiddling yet to do with the CSS. I switched over to the newest Comic Press theme and don’t care for the menu bar or the fonts. Have to get that worked out. And I’m being indecisive now about whether to do the big picture format at the top which I was using or make it smaller, which is the option I’m using at the moment. I’ll probably revert back to the big picture option as soon as I’m posting this.
”Comment
The Apple store says their “geniuses” are very busy with repairing computers so it’s several more days before they can look at my monitor.
I already know my monitor is going to cost probably (at least) $500 to repair. After 16 months in my possession, the Apple power box apparently freaked out and went bad and when it freaked out it seems to have blown a backlight in my monitor. I’m four months out of warranty and the snotty attitude and the fact that the Apple “geniuses” are backed up for days with computer repairs just makes me want to spell out I R O N Y for them real loud, with flags, while making cross-eyed faces.
I’ve been feeing tech challenged and helpless all afternoon, trying to get my monitor to work. Marty dropped by for a bit and tried and still no go. I would have preferred to be tech-challenged and have it fire right up. Weird. One cord came unplugged and I plugged it back in and it’s acting like there’s no signal.
I like transcripts but podcasts might be nice
July 30th, 2008 |Posted In: Computer And Stuff (Probably Be Damned), General
Was wondering what people think of the “Have you ever seen a UFO?” series…not whether you think it’s a good idea or not, but if a podcast might be preferred? Or not?
Am also testing blogging from my iPhone though my computer is right in front of my face.
“Not a toy!” I tell H.o.p. when he asks to play a game on my iPhone. “Not a toy!”
He knows better.
P.S. Marty thinks it ought to always be transcripts, and I tend to agree with him. That probably takes care of that.
So I sat down at the computer this morning and automatically put my hand on the monitor and tried to move one of the icons.
Oh, yeah.
Not an iphone.
A couple have questioned, aware I was hit hard with some evil cold-flu combo, if this is why the blog has been silent. And this is partly the case, it’s partly due to that Big Ol’ Walrus of Reckoning that thwacked me hard and nailed me to the bed.
My blog also went down this week for some reason. I contacted my webhost and they revived it but when they did so it revived with some problems and I was in bed and unaware that all the plug-ins had been automatically switched off which meant a flood of evil spam coming in. I was able to see to it eventually (there are other problems to address as well) but I accidentally ended up deleting some comments made by friends as spam as well as loads of evil spam.
Big Ol’ Walrus of Reckoning.
Anyway, I haven’t, for now, any fresh or worn insights to post.
I’ve no updates on fiction.
I’ve got no updates on art.
That’s all.
I’m being distracted right now by Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd”. Staggering film. Had never seen it before this week.
I started to write a post and was several paragraphs in when WordPress suddenly freaked out and ate it, which I take as meaning that I’m not to post tonight.
P.S. Which is all right. Really. The world can live without knowing how I feel about being in 4th grade again.
My brain screamed "NOO, I'M MUSH, DON'T DO THIS TO ME!" all the while
February 6th, 2008 |Posted In: Computer And Stuff (Probably Be Damned), General
Waited all day yesterday for a UPS shipment for Marty but then he realized it was coming in today instead so here I wait for UPS to knock at the window.
I started using the Flash Media Player via Dreamhost for displaying QT to FLV video on the blogs because Youtube can be pretty funky, videos not playing very smoothly, indeed so roughly that they have the appearance of dropping stretches of frames. (I already related the other night how Dreamhost’s conversion utility was behaving very badly so I’m doing the QT to FLV myself in QT).
BUT! Yes, but. There was no way to do a preview image in the Flash player and that was giving the blogs (H.o.p.’s and mine) the appearance of having big black gateways to nothingness instead of RICH MEDIA CONTENT!
So, yesterday I began my journey to previews via this nifty plug-in.
Well, well, I labored quite a while and couldn’t get previews to work, despite the fact my code was fine.
Turns out that you can use an absolute url for the movies (I have them located outside the blog folders since the movies are serving multiple blogs) but you must have a relative url for the previews, it seems. So, success, finally got that figured out. Moved the preview images inside the WordPress folders and am doing relatives urls as the base url is automatically appended to preview images in this plug-in.
But wait! I discovered that on the category and archive pages and in searches the flash videos were appearing as code. So, I looked through the mac-dev.net forum and fortunately this issue had been covered. I found the couple of files in each theme in which the word “excerpt” needed to be replaced with “post” and did that and got both blogs looking right again.
No, wait! Other things were going on in the meanwhile where I had to update WordPress to its most recent release, which meant also working on H.o.p.’s category template as it hasn’t liked the most recent WordPress updates, but I had a fix for it and uploaded that.
But wait! I realized posts were now disappearing in H.o.p.’s blog. They couldn’t be reached via categories or archives or searches. They were THERE but were simply gone. Panic time! I backtracked in my browser and did a duplicate post of one I’d just made which was one of the posts that had disappeared. Now TWO posts were appearing, both the original and the duplicate. So I removed one of them. And both disappeared. I did this several times over. The theme we were using on H.o.p.’s blog hadn’t appreciated, apparently, my changing “excerpt” to “post” because this issue involved archives, searches and categories.
Forget it. H.o.p. loved that theme (Mistylook, the appearance of which we’d modified according to his exact specifications) but it was time to change.
I spent hours last night trying out themes. Seeking them out. Downloading. Unzipping. Loading them up. Almost all of them had the same issues with the plug-in where you would need to change “excerpt” to “post” but I didn’t see any posts being dropped at least. They were all present. Or so it seemed.
We also didn’t like the themes, not even after my changing the appearance of them. None of them were working for us. They were ugly and I didn’t feel like doing hours and hours of work modifying css to create a whole new theme essentially. I just wanted to do simple mods like changing colors and images. I didn’t want to have to redo type and spatial orientations.
Finally tried the Artsemerging theme and WONDERFUL it worked straight out of the box with the plug-in. I modified the appearance (images and just a little CSS) and H.o.p.’s blog is back in order.
P.S. DAMN IT! I WAS WRONG. I’m now losing posts in my blog, having changed “excerpt” to “post”. Damn, damn, damn, damn! I didn’t notice it last night.
I’m not working on that today. Will face that tomorrow.
P.P.S. My brain decided it had to face the problem. And VOILA a light clicked. I changed my archives and search php files back to what they originally were, restoring “excerpt” where I’d replaced with “post” (which was the fix supplied in the forum but wasn’t working well for Veryplaintext or Mistylook themes, which weren’t displaying the full post with the change and were dropping posts) and when I have Flash videos to display I will write an OPTIONAL EXCERPT (a summary), thus bypassing the problem. You see, excerpts strip away all coding, which was why it was showing the coding for the flash player. But changing from excerpt to post in the archives and search php files resulted in posts being dropped rather than full posts being displayed in Veryplaintest and Mistylook.
We like H.o.p.’s new theme so will leave that as it is. It’s already configured to display full posts rather than excerpts, and though excerpts are nice, well, it’s not so bad to have H.o.p.’s blog displaying full posts in categories, archives etc.
Told you my brain is mush. I should have thought of this last night.
When whichever fan it was that’s been sounding like a dizzily sick Disney World tea cup ride started whining this morning, it was time to pull off the side of the computer and try to locate the source. My brother was wondering if it was the chipset fan. Instead it SEEMS to be the fan on my Radeon X800GT videocard (driver version 8.201.0.0).
There it goes again. Whine, whine, whine, whine. Nerve wracking.
I read on a forum someone talking about taking apart the fan and oiling it and how it would work good as new. If it was making grating, crackling sounds.
Someone else on the forum said this was not a good idea.
I can see me taking apart my X800GT fan.
Not.
So, maybe this is what I need instead of buying a new videocard?
This month my Wacom mouse scroller started slipping so badly I can get nowhere with it. I found a web page that described how you could take apart your Wacom mouse and get it working right again. So I pulled the felt off the back of it and there were no screws on this Wacom mouse. Forget that. I don’t use the mouse at all in Photoshop so won’t bother me any there but I do use it for all other computer work and was heavily reliant on the scroller. Since the scroller’s stopped working, I’ve gotten kind of used to not using it but I’d still like to fix it somehow. HOW? How do you get inside a Wacom mouse with no screws without employing a hammer?
And the fan goes whine, whine, whine, whine, whine.
A little earlier I was reading Touching the River which is all about electrified art. H.o.p. was drawing elsewhere. Then I was done and reading something else and H.o.p. gets up from the table and starts dancing around telling me about a new character he’s just come up with.
THE ELECTRIC KNIGHT!
He’s all electric. Even his sword is electric.
His opponent?
THE DARK SIDE OF ELECTRICITY.
Yes, that’s the opponent’s name. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but there you go.
* * * * * * *
Have been having hours long conversations with my brother on what to do about my piecemeal computer, which needs more memory and has one of its fans going. I’m hoping to make this one last a little longer. Trying to figure out how we can upgrade it just enough to do its job without getting too pricey, and then if it is still not up to speed I’ll have to bite the bullet and get a new one but I can pass this one along to H.o.p. in decent working order.
My brother referred to my computer as “a special case”.
I said I knew what that meant.
He said he was trying to be polite.
