07.13.09
Posted in Blog admin, Crafts at 12:01 am by kyrias
I really hate it when bloggers don’t take the time to clean up their comments section. When I’m willing to take the time to read the comments on your site, it’s a real turn-off when I see spam or random asdfsdlkfjasl;kdfj as comments. I usually end up closing out of the site because it irks me to see that.
For one, it makes you look unprofessional. If you want people to take you and your information seriously, then presentation is a huge thing. I will lose confidence in your abilities and knowledge if you can’t even keep your own house clean. If you’re using Wordpress, then Akismet is amazing. I don’t know if there are similar applications for other platforms, but there should be and if there aren’t similar applications, then that’s just another reason to sign up for Wordpress. I’ve used multiple blog hosting sites, and Wordpress just comes out on top in all the ways that count.
For two, it’s irritating to have to surf through spam in order to read comments, period. If I remember correctly, apparently most people just Google for answers, attempt to find an answer within one minute or less, and then closes the site unless the site seems to be of potential further use or very interesting. I assume this is true, since that seems emblematic of how most people I know use the Internet. This means that if you’re allowing anything to detract from the usefulness of your site, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
For three, similar to the first point about keeping your house clean — if you can’t even be arsed to install a spam catcher, I can’t be arsed to listen to you.
Bloggers, just get rid of them spam!
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06.20.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged Statcounter at 12:01 am by kyrias
I was wondering why no hits were showing up on my two other blogs’ Statcounters.I had installed the code properly, so there was no reason the hits were staying at zero — especially when I knew that Thene had been clicking on one of them.
Then, I realized I couldn’t even see the counter on the bottom of the first page, so I changed the theme to see if that would fix things.
Lo and behold, it did.
So now those two blogs have the default wordpress theme, at least until I find another theme that works and see if changing themes will screw things up again.
Very odd that it failed though.
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06.08.09
Posted in Blog admin at 12:14 am by kyrias
I grew up with the forum X, and it was there that I first realized that I could find people who were like me online, where I first fell in love, and where I first realized that love isn’t always happy.
Fast forward about six or so years, I remember that I had a lot of writing saved on said site. I go back and try to find my work, which includes a novel about my cyber relationship.
To my surprise, sometimes between my infrequent visits back, the entire forum has changed. The old boards aren’t there anymore, much less my threads, even though the thread my novel was posted on was starred way back when.
Amazingly, I can find a review of my work — but I can’t find my work. I can’t help but wonder if some sort of purge happened that I didn’t know of.
I’m feeling rather bruised at the moment. It’s not just about losing the equivalent of a childhood playground or even the pain of losing my art.
I’m feeling let down by myself. I should have taken more care with my work, should have saved it, backed it up obsessively. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time a forum went down and took my unsaved work with it.
I’m also feeling let down by my old forum community. No one bothered to tell me that they would be clearing the old threads, not even when most of the people who I still talk to from that community know that I have work saved on there. Then again, it’s likely that they themselves haven’t visited the forum in a long time, and so they didn’t know either.
Regardless. I’m feeling stupid and I’m feeling pain.
This is why everyone who creates anything, ever, needs a space of their own. A place where you make the rules and where your work is carefully archived and backed up obsessively. Since I work mainly through the medium of the internet, it’s doubly important to me that this space is mine. Not only will my site not be taken down without due notice, I have backups of my blogs so I can reconstruct if necessary.
Gods, I hurt.
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06.06.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged rage against the machine at 12:45 am by kyrias
Yes, this.
I’m trying to install two more blogs onto my site. Despite having installed one other blog by myself and upgraded yet another without any help — I’m running into a lot of problems here.
- Files that I’m trying to delete off the FTP server aren’t cooperating with said deletion.
- Uploading the new version of Wordpress is oddly also not working too well. The FTP clients keep making noises about the maximum number of clients already being connected. Then the files that I upload aren’t showing up on the client either.
- Trying to create a new database for the new blogs isn’t working so well. I’ve done it once before, so I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong this time.
- The current theme of my blog is not compatible with the newest version of Wordpress, but I can’t be arsed to learn how to create themes and there’s none available right now that I like. Yes, all 100 or so of them have been reviewed and discarded. I guess I’ll keep my old version of Wordpress so long as the plugins are still compatible with it. Bah to obsolete themes.
- Oddly enough everything that went swimmingly when I did it last time is refusing to cooperate this time.
- When the blog says it’s been set up — the front page is blank. This is amazingly aggravating.
This. This is why I am not doing this for a living.
As it is, if I had a tech-savvy friend who could do this for me right now, I’d throw it to them in a heartbeat.
For the love of god, why won’t tech work as it’s supposed to on a consistent basis?
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05.31.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged blog-things at 12:21 am by kyrias
First of all, I actually forgot to activate Akismet on my other blog — which is why I had to manually catch and delete spam. That was stupid of me because somehow it’s getting more and more spam regardless of the fact that I haven’t been really updating it and it’s a pain to do it all manually.
Second of all, I do have a second blog and right now it’s going to be mostly fics, memoir bits, and perhaps what I’m thinking when I’m mentally fapping onto a screen. Or perhaps I’ll burden you all here with what goes through my brain when I’m dealing with Estyria. I haven’t decided yet, you can feel free to discuss it in the comments. 
Thirdly, I’m slightly contemplating the possibility of moving back onto a free-hosted website because the amount of traffic I’m getting is incredible. Sadly, about 99% of said traffic is spammers and I’m more than a bit tired of paying for bandwidth for spammers. That said, it’d be a pain to move all my posts back to my wordpress account and I’m not sure that cutting my nose off to spite my face is a good idea. However, once hosting fees get insane, I might change my tune.
For some measure of what I’m talking about, here’s a screencap of my Akismet stats:
So. 680 bits of spam in May. 107 bits of ham.
Urgh.
That said, considering that I’m not getting as many visitors on my blog stats page as I’m getting spam perhaps I’m not paying for it?
Is very confused. Tech-savvy people, please explain if you please.
The thing is though, my hosting fees have gone up drastically, which is rather worrisome.
Lastly: Wordpress is very much more win than any other platform I’ve used. It boggles my brain that there is no quick-link to post images to wordpress from photobucket when Xanga is an option. Or perhaps that’s just my bias because I don’t know or read any blogs hosted off of Xanga.
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04.15.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged spam at 9:47 am by kyrias
Yes, that “teh” is deliberate.
The title needed that to emphasize the spam. 262 spammy bits in 8 days.
Ye gods. I almost think that blogging about the spam was as if I dribbled blood into shark-infested waters.
Thene, I fished your legitimate Sybilla-wank comment out of 15 pages of comments. 
You’re right. It’s full of fail. But then, anything that has to do with Twilight is usually fail.
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04.07.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged spam at 12:17 am by kyrias
I really dislike blog spam, but I seem to be getting so much of it lately.
I really hate wading through all the spam. Even though I have Akismet installed, which pretty much catches almost everything, I still have to skim through the spam to see if some legitimate comments have inadvertently triggered it.
It’s a waste of my time, but I can’t just bulk delete without looking, because I would really hate for someone to take the time to write a comment and then just delete it. It seems like one of the most love-killing things a blog owner could do, asides from not responding to comments or having tasteless blog spam in their comments.
I’ll admit, I’m a judgmental bitch, but it just lowers my estimation of a blogger when they don’t keep their comments section clean. I know they probably have a good reason for it, such as actually having a life, or having a blog that draws a lot of comments so it’s harder to moderate. But it still smacks of sloppiness, which I don’t like. Mostly, because it pulls me out of the “zone” I usually go in when I’m speed reading my way through long comment thread to see “omg, VIAGRA, now!” ads or those gibberish link spam posts. Although, I’ve thought at times that an excerpt of those gibberish posts would make an amazing short-fic prompt.
What would make me really happy is if I could figure out how I suddenly went from almost no spam to suddenly having a decent amount of it. It’d be nice if it correlated with having more traffic but it doesn’t seem to.
Anyone out there know?
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03.29.09
Posted in Blog admin at 12:18 am by kyrias
Then you probably have.
I’m currently in the process of moving some of my posts over from my old blog. Specifically those which are more fit for public consumption.
Then I might or might not continue using the old blog as just a personal venting place.
I also might or might not go back and read through all of my own posts here and re-tag them, perhaps even try harder at categorizing them. Sometimes I’m not quite sure what I’ve posted before, and I think the tags will make it easier to figure out what’s already been flogged to death already.
Not that I really have many readers who’ve read back through the archives, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter. 
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01.16.09
Posted in Blog admin tagged blog at 11:45 pm by kyrias
Is when I get linked to a blog that is mentioned glowingly only to find that the domain has been taken over by a squatter who currently has Google ads plastered all over it.
This is perhaps a reflection on my self-designated status as a blogger. I’m almost certain that other people would not agree that it is sad, if even close to being the saddest thing.
Why do bloggers blog, if not to make their voice heard, and in some way leave behind something tangible and real? I’ve seen blogs maintained by the spouse after the blogger has died, both because the spouse could not find it in himself to destroy something so lovingly maintained and because the blogging community begged for it to stay up. Perhaps for the edification of others, perhaps almost as a shrine to the deceased, maybe even simply because it hurts to think of so much gone to waste so easily.
Unlike a physical journal, it doesn’t even require an action to get rid of years of work. For those hosted on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com perhaps their blog will be deleted after significant time left fallow, for a blogger who had their own domain — if it’s not renewed, it’s gone.
At times, it makes me wonder about blogs and the world’s impermanence reflected within their pages.
Is it worth it.
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01.15.09
Posted in Blog admin, Money tagged blog upgrading, tax, techie stuff at 5:19 pm by kyrias
I upgraded my wordpress version yesterday, giving me a shinier toy to play with.
I also went through themes like crazy, both downloading more and testing them out. It would have been funny to have had a slide show of all the different looks my blog went through before I finally stopped for the night. I managed to weed through the 100 or so Wordpress themes that I had uploaded in bundle form when I first started my blog. I’m going to go through the rest of the 50 pages of free themes and then call it done.
Oddly enough, I can’t get widgets to work properly. If I try to add a text widget so I can display my Technorati button, then it kills my meta, my calendar, my archives, and my pages for one tiny button. I’m not quite sure why it’s doing this, if anyone knows, that would be great. I don’t think it’s because my current theme isn’t properly widget-enabled because I DLed a theme that was and the same thing happened.
I just might have to learn how to make WP themes. Which involves php and some other terrifying stuff. I might not have a choice if I want my blog to look exactly the way I want it though. Any coders who actually like this sort of thing around?
Speaking of which, I finally claimed my blog on Technorati yesterday night.
Tax season is coming up, and I realized that I claimed too many exemptions. I thought that I got one for being single, head of the household, and one for myself. Unfortunately, I had misunderstood the form: I didn’t realize that I had to have a dependant. I somehow managed to come away from that form thinking that I was the head of the household so long as Iwas paying more than 50% of the costs of keeping my household.
Which means that I might owe the IRS money.
Oh well, that might be better than them owing me money. We’ll see.
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