Category: Ramblings

Cleaning Up the Archives

There are some schools of thought that one should never (or almost never) delete old blog posts, or even create substantial revisions without providing notice of the change (and access to the original text.) I do not really feel that way. One of the things that can make publishing on the web (a blog, a video, a plain old web site) is the fact that it is a living thing. It’s easy to make changes and improvements.

Of course it’s not as easy to hide those changes as one might think. This is also a good thing. It helps keep people accountable.

Ease of updating is one of the most powerful things about the web.
That power should not be wielded indiscriminatly.
If nothing else one should be accountable to oneself.

I’m going through the archives and cleaning things up. Fixing spelling errors, adding titles to entries, (There are over 100 that just have a time-stamp as the title. An artifact of the port from g-blog to WordPress. I had a bad habit of not entering a title when posting.) fixing broken links, and removing some of the useless cruft.

For example: there are entries that are marked private that are never going to see the light of day. Nothing bad, but I had another habit of leaving notes for myself in the blog (One example was birthday gift ideas for my step-father) that the rest of the users (or the general public) didn’t need to see. I don’t need them anymore, so out they go.

I’m tired. I’m up too late to be writing about this coherently. I suppose I could save this as a draft and come back to it later, but whats the fun in that?

State of Flux

I’m toying with the idea of moving this blog to a new home. Namely http://hooloovoo.net (instead of using the blog.hooloovoo.net sub-domain.) Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that I have no interest in updating (or even maintaining) the design/content of my old site.

The only substantial change I’ve made recently was adding a rule to my .htaccess file to redirect http://hooloovoo.net/blog to this site. Prior to that, I updated the homepage (and did a design refresh) in 2002, added the blog page (syndicating g-blog.net) in 2003. I also added an eBay directory last year for self-hosting auction images. (But I never linked that to the rest of the site.)

My old website has languished for 4 or 5 years. It’s time that changed. There’s nothing on the site content-wise that I can’t easily port into WP as a Page. So I think that is what I’m eventually going to do. For now, I’ve added a couple more rules to my .htaccess file, which is most likely how you got here if you just tried to visit http://hooloovoo.net.

(Tangent – I should clean up my category list now that I have control over it. Do I really need a “Testing GLUE” category now that this site is no longer on GLUE?)

Recreating childhood flavors in strange ways

Okay, I’ll admit it: When I was a kid I would occasionally try a sip of my dad’s beer. (Usually, it was Budweiser) I didn’t like the way it tasted then, and I don’t like the way it tastes now.

Just a few minutes ago, I took a sip of a Monster Energy Drink while sucking on a Wintermynt Blast breath mint.

Those two items together sent a taste-sense memory rushing through my brain: I was 12, and was making a disgusted face after just having tasted my dad’s beer.

blech – I won’t be doing that again.

I’m sure everyone posts something like this at some point…

Akismet seems to be working very well for me, only 3 4 spam comments have gotten past it since I migrated to WP (in mid January,) all of which ended up in my moderation queue – so they never made it to the blog. The two most recent were this morning.

I’m not sure why they came through tho, since the only appearant difference between them and a bunch of the recent messages Akismet caught is the link they were trying to promote. All the others were porn-related – these was about jeeps. (I think… I didn’t actually click the links to find out.)

I don’t get that much traffic, but these stats are still interesting to me:

Caught Spam

Akismet has caught 1,917 spam for you since you first installed it.

You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. 🙂

Either that, or I just deleted everything Akismet has identified as spam.

The blahs

I have nothing to say right now. At least nothing I feel is worth blogging about. I’m not even sure anyone is reading this besides me, and that is really ok. At least I still have my archive available. I should go now.

New York, New York

I’m traveling to the East Coast again for business the week after next. Maybe this time I’ll actually have a chance to make it into NYC and catch Avenue Q

The last time I was out there was for 3 days just before Thanksgiving. (I actually ended up flying back Thanksgiving day, thank you United for the missed connection in Denver.) This time I’ll be out there for the whole week.

What’s going on here?

This site is a temporary blog. My old blog site is shutting down at the end of the month. The admin kindly wrote an RSS exporter, as well as a WP importer that moves not only the posts and categories, but also the comments. I just finished importing 500+ entries with their associated categories and comments.

I think I want to eventually move as much of this content as possible over to my Vox blog. Their importer doesn’t seem to want to move that much content right now, but I’ve sent them a message and I’m hoping they’ll be able to help me out.

In the mean time, I’ll probably be posting in both places as I figure out what I want to do permanently.

(Carlo, if you’re reading this, thanks again for 5 years of g-blog.)