Site Administration

10 Years

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Ten years ago I wrote the first post on this blog. 3:43 AM. I’m a late night kinda guy, I guess. Actually, I probably came home from a bar, installed WordPress 1.5.1, and started writing. Ten years seems like an awfully long time ago. So much has changed in my life. I like my job, most days. That wasn’t true back then. That’s part of why this started, as a way to vent. I have a wife and a kid now… almost two kids, just a couple days more until it is man-to-man coverage around Chez Plankers. I’ve been a little burnt out lately, with work and kids and life, and slacked off on writing in almost every way. As …

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A New Hope^H^H^H^HLook

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Once in a while you’ve got to pull the trigger and actually ship some code. It’s been seven years (!!!!) since I did anything serious with the way this blog looked and worked. There were plugins that weren’t supported anymore. The old theme had been so extensively customized by me that it wasn’t upgradable, and didn’t really work well with new functionality or WordPress releases. A lot of the new functionality duplicated what I’d hacked into the theme, too. Stuff like Google +1, sharing, etc. Plus I wanted SSL (and not just CloudFlare’s poser Google juice SSL crap, I wanted the security). I started redoing the site six months ago, where “redoing” meant the cloud-esque “completely starting over.” The synchronization of …

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What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead

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So the tech world is freaking out about the announcement that Google Reader will go offline on July 1, 2013. There’s been talk about this for a while now, along with talk that RSS is dead. This feels like the biggest blow to 141+ character social media in history. And why did it happen? I think Dave Winer and Bruce Schneier sum it up: Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.” Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said [at the RSA Conference]. “Its customers are the advertisers.” Google Reader’s biggest problem was its API. A good API leads to a …

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How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Automate

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My wife and I had a daughter, almost two months ago now. Going into it, I completely underestimated how single-tasking kids are. My grand plans of blogging (at all) and writing and doing all sorts of big cool things while I had time off were suborned by a lot of seemingly simple tasks. Feed her. Feed myself. Change her diaper. Rock her. Clean up the house. Try to get some sleep. As a result, the only big thing I’ve been able to do is read a couple of novels, a few pages at a time. Well, that and keep a kid and a wife healthy and relatively happy. I see a lot of parallels between my last two months and …

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Hey! Go Vote For This Blog!

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Hey readers, I’m on the ballot for the top 25 virtualization blogs this year. If you are a virtualization person (and who isn’t these days) would you go to http://vote.vsphere-land.com/ and vote for the blogs you read? It takes about a minute, tops. This blog is “The Lone Sysadmin (Bob Plankers)” in the middle column with all the other “The” blogs, and I’d appreciate you including me in your 10 votes, if you can. I’m an independent blogger, too, but didn’t make the independent list. Independent bloggers are important to the computing community because we aren’t required to have certain opinions by our employers. Regardless, it’s stuff like this that keeps me interested in blogging because it’s a way to …

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The Mechanic's Car

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It’s been almost a month since I’ve been able to post here. I’m hoping it’s like riding a bicycle, and I’ll get the hang of it again. I knew I’d be insanely busy throughout December, so I scheduled a bunch of posts (one a day) to auto-post. I figured I’d have time to tend comments when I had connectivity, but not any time to do any real writing. I’ve been very unhappy with WordPress’ scheduling mechanisms. Perhaps it’s just user error (PEBKAC, even — Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). As a result I decided to delve into the XML-RPC stuff and write my own autoposter script. Something I could schedule in cron, and have it tweet some promotional stuff, …

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Strange Characters in My WordPress Blog

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In late August I moved my blog from a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. With it came an upgrade to MySQL, from 4 to 5. The migration itself seemed pretty painless, as I was able to recompile Apache on the new host and just copy everything over intact. I moved the databases by dumping each one and importing them on the other side. A week ago I was doing some work on the blog and noticed that for every apostrophe there were three other characters now: ’. I use a lot of apostrophes, and it sort of sucks to have every “it’s” become “it’s”. More specifically, it was only …

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2060 Days

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After five years of the same old look around here I decided it was time to refresh things a little bit with a new theme, splurging for the Thesis Theme for WordPress. I’ve adjusted some of the sizing based on what Google Analytics has collected for data, namely that my average visitor has a screen resolution that’s 1280 pixels wide or more. Having to keep graphics to 400 pixels was wearing on me. 42% of my visitors use Firefox, 27% Internet Explorer, 20% Chrome, and 7% Safari. 71% are Windows users, 13% Linux, and 11% Macintosh, which excites me a little bit, but seeing that only 0.45% of my raw hits are via IPv6 depresses me again. Anyhow, thanks for …

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Avoiding Windows Live Writer Temporary Theme Detection Posts

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I’ve started using Microsoft Windows Live Writer 2011 to author my blog posts, and I love it so far. In fact, one of the best features of it is that it’ll automatically detect the blog theme and keep a copy of it stored so you can see what your post looks like. Normally I don’t need to care too much about formatting, but when I’m including a graphic it’s really handy to be able to resize it quickly to the full width of the column. The native image sizing in WordPress is a real crapshoot sometimes. One problem with letting Live Writer detect your theme is that it posts a temporary article, usually with the title of “Temporary Post Used …

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Delicious Going Nuts

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My apologies, the Delicious blog poster seems to be going nuts and posting the same things multiple times. I’ve disabled it for now.

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