Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Happy birthday, blog: 10 years

 Posted by (Visited 12008 times)  Misc, Open thread
Aug 292008
 

The banner today

The first posts on the ancestor of this site went up ten years ago today. The site was dark blue. It used this newfangled HTML tag called frames, and I added each post by handcoding the HTML and uploading the file to the server.

I feel old. 🙂

Some of the oldest things on this site date back before the site itself, to when I was a young punk designer of 25 or 26, cocky and arrogantly sure I knew everything. I turn 37 in a week. I like to think I’m still a young turk tilting at the windmills.

Ten years ago, I started the site to archive some of the things I was telling the UO community and the LegendMUD community, things about the ways in which online communities can self-determine, things about how virtual worlds can serve as bridges, as ways to connect. To talk about how something people see as “mere games” can mean much more. I eagerly read everything I could by people like Randy Farmer & Chip Morningstar, Richard Bartle, and other pioneers. I collected aphorisms from mailing lists and gathered them into a reference source. I tried to share it back, to do my learning in public.

The previous banner, aka "the pixelly look"

In some ways, the site has become a book — most literally, in the way that A Theory of Fun was born from blog posts and snippets from MUD-Dev, but also in the over half a million words I have written here.

"Wood site #2" -- there was a wood site #1 before that one. This is where the knotwork thing came from.

I thought a good way to celebrate might be to turn things around on you. I am pretty sure that there are plenty of folks who haven’t been here that long — given that the site has gained several thousand daily readers in just the last year. So I thought I would ask some questions and use the anniversary as a chance to point people to some of the older material they might not have read.

So I want to turn it around on you! I have questions for you!

I don't seem to have that old art anymore... and there was one design older than ths, all dark blue.

I don't seem to have the old art for wood site #1anymore... and there was one design older than this, all dark blue.

I have my favorites and am thinking of showcasing some of them over the next week, but I am curious, because I suspect that to some degree I am better known to many of you for what I have said than what I have done. So many of the things I have done aren’t really there to see anymore, but the things I have written and said are still here, for better or worse. 🙂

So thanks for coming  on the journey! Here’s to another ten years, another half a million words, and more learning in public.

WordPress 2.6 upgrade

 Posted by (Visited 13745 times)  Misc, Open thread  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jul 152008
 

I am doing an upgrade to WordPress 2.6, don’t be surprised to see the blog broken for a bit.

Later:

OK, I think it’s done, and there seem to be no adverse effects. During the few minutes that it was defenseless, 7 spams came in. 🙂

And my Visual Editor conked out beforehand — the dreaded “visual editor just doesn’t work” bug that apparently plagues many. Sigh. Here’s what fixed it:

  • The upgrade, at least on my machine, put everything up with the wrong permissions. I set the wp_includes folder and all files under to 755.
  • I also deleted the contents of wp-content/uploads/js_cache

Apparently there are several things that cause this. So here’s some useful threads.

Oh, and you need to add captions to your existing theme if you want them styled right on the images. I found this, though I then started tweaking it. (See below).

Even later:

All my accented characters were broken, and it’s because the wp-config-sample.php file has utf8 for the DB_CHARSET, but my blog is old enough that all its tables were creates many versions ago when the default was latin1_ci_swedish. There’s no easy way to change the DB, so I fixed it by changing the DB_CHARSET in wp-config to just ”.

OK, now that caption stuff:

Continue reading »

WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin

 Posted by (Visited 10517 times)  Misc  Tagged with: ,
Jun 292008
 

For those who recall the whole “blog gets hacked” odyssey, and my subsequent request for a plugin that would do security scans, check this out:

WordPress Exploit Scanner 0.1

This WordPress plugin searches the files on your site for a few known strings sometimes used by hackers, and lists them with code fragments taken from the files. It also makes a few checks of the database, looking at the active_plugins blog option, the comments table, and the posts table.

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