Category: meta

Because Blogger is discontinuing the service I use to publish my posts, I’m moving the underlying publishing tool to WordPress, which will give me the same level of control that Blogger is eliminating.

At any rate, the deadline is approaching: May 1st is when I expect to start. I’d love to make the change completely transparent to you, my handful of readers, but you may notice a change in how the site looks at the minimum. I’m taking the opportunity to update the look a bit, although it should still retain whatever tiny bit of branding I’ve established over the years: two column layout, black background with white text, Futura logo, and the Moon somewhere on the page.

There are some features I want to add, too, and hopefully there are WordPress plugins that will enable those features.

At any rate, this is a warning that for the next week or so, I will probably not be posting much, if anything; the more posts I put into Blogger, the more I have to move over and import into WordPress. I’m reducing my workload; need to focus on the back-end stuff.

Feel free to read my Twitter feed if you need your daily (hourly, minute-ly) fix of Brian.

So, the publishing function I use in Blogger is going away. I could continue to use Blogger, I suppose, after the deadline of 1 May 2010, but I’m not happy with a blogging solution that doesn’t let me publish on my own server and have access to the file system. Call me a grognard but that’s what I want, even if I’m not as technical and can’t make use of all of the cool stuff that having this level of access entails.

I’ve been meaning to switch my blogging software to WordPress for a while now; it’s open source and therefore allows me all the more chances to fuck up my blog in ways many and varied. I could customize to my heart’s content, tweaking each little individual feature for hours and hours. Do I want to customize the URLs for my posts? Sure! Do I want to tweak the “theme” and layout? OK! Do I want to add features based on my tags (called “categories” in WordPress)? Fine! And plug-ins galore.

The Blogger deadline, therefore, became my impetus to finally start figuring out WordPress and how to get my blog moved over. Ideally, I’d be able to export all my old posts and comments, and import them into the WordPress software, then republish using WordPress, using my style sheets and layouts and whatnot. Of course, there’s a little bit more to it than that, and in the meantime I’ve had the idea to redesign my blog and make it more standards-compliant, and and and… Of course, what could be a simple task is turning into a giant project with lots of individual pieces, all of which need to be done by me and only me.

And I have a month to do it. Nice.

I barely have the energy to write posts on a regular basis and now I expect myself to step up to all this? Who do I think I am?

I’m an unpublished writer. I’m a happy guy, lately. I’m the guy who loves learning new stuff, that’s who. And I’m the chief content provider, technical support, editor, publisher, research staff, and marketer for this here blog.

Yesterday, I began the process by installing a test version of WordPress on my main machine, the New Sexy Thing that’s no longer new but still sexy (to me), my trusty MacBook Pro. Which entailed installing MySQL and mucking about on the command line, too. And then tried using the “Import” feature of WordPress to simply move my posts over. It seemed too easy to be true, and sure enough, it was. I was using an “old” version of Blogger, one that WordPress didn’t support. I had to export my posts and then import them into a “new” Blogger blog, then import them. Figuring that out took several hours and lots of Google searches and several tries where some, but not all, of the posts would import and then freeze up. Ugh.

Eventually I got all my posts into WordPress. But not the comments. I have no idea how to import only my comments. Even though the help files say that any duplicate posts and comments are ignored if you keep trying, that only seems true for posts, and not comments. I can get about 50 of my comments imported (there are ~1200 total over the 6 years I’ve been blogging), and each subsequent attempt just duplicates those 50. Argh.

It makes me sad to contemplate losing the comments. I still have time. If anyone can help with sorting out the comments from an XML file and figuring out a way to attach them to the correct posts in WordPress, I would be much obliged.

Next steps are to find a theme or customize a theme that looks like Lunar Obverse. That shouldn’t be too hard. Then go through and make sure all the links in the old posts work, add titles to the posts that have no titles, and finally move all this over to my actual, internet-facing web server. No problem, right?

I’d like to find a way to consolidate some of my various social media outlets into one page, like a stream that shows all my Tweets, Flickr pictures, blog posts, Tumblr posts, things like my Runnkeeper updates, etc. That’s down the road, though.

You, the reader, won’t see any changes while I muck around, and I’ll give you a warning before I make the move, but let’s set a soft deadline of 1 May 2010 for all this to happen, OK?

And maybe once the mental pressure to switch is off me, I’ll start blogging again more frequently.

Yesterday was Friday, and Fridays on Twitter are for Follow Friday. And I got a shout out from t.a. barnhart, that also mentioned film critic Roger Ebert. I’m sure t.a. only did that to save space and wasn’t comparing me to Mr. Ebert, but secretly I’m going to pretend that’s exactly why he did that. Well, secretly, and here on my blog.

And then @sjkpdx re-tweeted t.a.’s post, doubling my pride.

Finally, I woke up this morning to find that Athena, of The Bliss Quest, a writer whose posts about herself and her goals and dreams are an inspiration I use in living my life transparently and honestly (and guest-blogger here), tweeted something to me that made me feel very good:

@lunarobverse I’m goin’ running shoe shopping tomorrow!Your Shamrock run and posts have got me inspired!

It was a very good day for me. I’m happy to be a small part of the community online, and am humbled by the people I interact with. I just never know when something I write will reach someone unexpected. I honestly just write for myself, about the things I like and care about and do; I’ve said that I don’t care if millions read what I say, and I am sincere. It’s nice, though, to learn from time to time that others do, in fact, read what I put up here.

Thanks to everyone and anyone who reads this.

Also? Yesterday was the third anniversary of my joining Twitter. What a great present on my Twitterversary!

Summer. It turns me upside down.

Summer, summer, summer – it’s like a merry-go-round.

(Ha! See what I did there?)

So… how’ve you been doing? Good, good. Me? I’ve been doin’ stuff.

It’s kind of sad when a blog turns to infrequent, “sorry I haven’t been posting” posts, isn’t it? Perhaps I’ve temporarily lost my muse. Perhaps I need to work harder on cultivating my creative force. Perhaps the stuff that’s been happening to me isn’t suitable for public consumption, involves people with far greater need for privacy than myself and so requires greater discretion, or perhaps I’ve simply neglected to notice the funny, happy, strange goings-on around me enough to write about them.

Or some, all, or none of those.

Be that as it may, I have not forgotten my blog, and I vow to post again with regularity at some point in the future. These days, most of my need for attention is being taken out on my (as of right now) 295 Twitter followers in 140-or-less character bursts.

I’m going through every last post on my site, from the oldest to the newest, and adding a title to each one to bring it up to the current standard.

I’m also checking and updating every link, and in some cases adding obvious links to my past posts or external sites.

If there are any pictures in the post, I am moving the pictures from my old gallery to my Flickr photostream. If you happen to be following my Flickr page, and you see old pictures show up there, that’s a result of me adding them.

When I’m done updating, I’m going to be creating a new archive page; one that will include links by month and year, links to the tags I use, and a handy search function. In other words, an archive that will be more useful than the difficult-to-read drop-down menu that I currently have over there on the left.

I also plan on creating a more informative “about me” page, with links to some of my best or most important posts, and links to the various other places on the internet I use, like the above Flickr account, or Twitter page, my Last.fm page, and others.

Then I want to add some small things like navigation links for the archive pages and tweak the CSS and page layout a bit.

In other words, just some background tinkering to make it all work a bit better. Y’all probably don’t care but if so, hope you don’t mind.

If you notice something broken, missing, or just strange, let me know.

As a way of getting more conversation going here, I’ve been thinking about a new comment policy. Here are my thoughts:

• As before, I reserve the right to delete or mock any anonymous comments. An anonymous comment is one that doesn’t have a profile associated with it, whether that’s a pseudonym or actual real-world identity. Note that a pseudonym is not the same as an anonymous comment – I’m known on the internet as Lunar Obverse, and have been for a long time, and tracing that pseudonym back to my real-world identity is fairly easy, so it’s as good as my real name.
• Likewise, if the comment appears to me to be spam (selling something, or just linking to a site that is not connected to the post or my blog at all), I will delete it. I reserve the right to mock it, but I’m more likely to just make it gone.
• I will make every effort to respond to any non-anonymous comment left on my blog. Every single one. I’ll try to reply within 24 hours.
• I’ll use this post to mention that you can track the conversation here: you can get an RSS feed of the all the comments posted here by opening the “All Comments” feed in your RSS reader thingamajig.
• If you have a Google account and use it to identify yourself when you comment, you get an option to have follow-up comments on a specific post you’ve commented on emailed to you.
• When I figure out what tag I need to add to my template that enables it, you’ll have the ability to follow comments on a specific post via RSS feeder without having to comment. But of course I encourage you to comment, anyway. ‘Cause I want more discussion ’round here.
• Feel free to use my contact form to email me about stuff you don’t want posted publicly, but again, posting a comment that everyone can see can help inform many more people. Just sayin’. And I reserve the right to post any email I get from that form if I think it will be entertaining, informative, or it would give me a warm glow of satisfaction.

Finally, let me throw this open to my readers. If you’ve never commented before, introduce yourself and give me some feedback. What do you like? What don’t you like? What would you want to see more of? Less of? How did you find this blog? Do you have a blog of your own – feel free to pimp it out in this thread!

Somehow, Blogger broke RSS feeds on Friday or late Thursday. I don’t know what happened on their end, but the XML files that get pushed out to Blogger users’ sites that rely on FTP/SFTP publishing are zero-byte (or empty) files.

And that’s not right. Not at all.

If you search the “Something is Broken” group for Blogger help for the terms “RSS” or “feed” you get lots and lots of separate threads, and all the users reporting basically the same thing I summarized above. I settled on updating this thread with my own specific information, and watched it all day yesterday for some kind of official Blogger response. None came.

However, the user “nitecruzer”, a.k.a. Chuck, proposed a workaround. He found out a different address for the RSS feeds for a Blogger-published site and, armed with the internal blog ID # for my blog, I was able to access the RSS feed for my site and redirect it to/through Feedburner.

Long story short: my RSS feed has changed. I don’t really know how to let people who read my site via the old feed know this, however. But if you wander over here because you haven’t seen me update in a while, please take a moment to update your feed reader by using the following link:

Main site feed for Lunar Obverse

You can also use the link in the right-hand sidebar, labeled “Subscribe”. If, however, you see “Feeds”, then frakkin’ Blogger hasn’t updated my site template yet. I made the change an hour ago, and republished my site, but it still hasn’t shown up for me. I have no idea why. If you see “Feeds” over there, could you let me know?

And now, a little bit of meta, behind-the-scenes tech talk.

A week and a half ago my site had a little downtime. The cause was a result of the dynamic IP address that was assigned to Eggers¹, my web server, was a little too dynamic: it changed, without warning, putting my site on a little cul-de-sac on the internet.

I was able to move my content over to another server I had, on a slower connection, temporarily. And since then, I’ve moved everything back to Eggers, but I’ve left my site content on my secondary server, Lethem², as a backup.

I’ve been slowly working on the backend stuff necessary to have my backup server automatically mirror the main one, and to act in the future as a failover in case something goes wrong again in the future. And, knowing technology, something will fail in the future.

Not all of it is in place yet, but I’m kind of proud of the fact that I know have sub-domains to my main address on the internet. eggers.bamoon.com points to my main server, and lethem.bamoon.com points to my secondary. I’ve got each server emailing me their current IP address at 1 AM in the morning, every morning, and it checks against the previous day’s address and sends a separate alert if it changes.

Next step is to implement a script, using Mac OS X’s launchd(8) to copy the primary over to the secondary if the primary has updated. In order to make that work best, I need to upgrade both servers to Mac OS X 10.5 – they’ve been running 10.4.11 since their inception.

I would not call myself a Unix or command-line guru or wizard – at best, I’m a padawan, still learning and not yet a master. But I’ve been learning all sorts of new stuff:

• I’ve learned a lot about using crontab(1) to run scripts on a regular basis. Unfortunately, crontab(1) is deprecated on Mac OS X – the functions of it are in Apple’s replacement, the previously-mentioned launchd(8), and launchd(8) adds more, to boot.
• Because the default editor for crontab(1) is the viciously-user-unfriendly text editor vi(1), ugh, I’ve been learning how to do basic editing in that.
• In the process of setting up my sub-domains, and having my main domain point to two different IP addresses and two different servers, I’ve learned a lot more about how DNS, the internet’s address book system, works; like how I can have multiple A records in a single DNS entry, to utilize DNS’s ability to load-balance traffic.
• And, of course, I’ve learned more about how to write shell scripts, since those are what do all the heavy lifting of mirroring each server, checking IP addresses and notifying me about any changes.
• This may seem like a simple thing, but since Unix-y (and Mac OS X is Unix-y – well, technically, BSD-y – at its core) operating systems are configured by simple text files, being able to manipulate and make changes to lots of different text files quickly and efficiently is a key skill. To that end, rather than wrestle with vi(1) all the time (or, more correctly, in addition to wrestling with vi(1)), I’ve learned how to use the command-line tool sed(1) to do fast search-and-replace on multiple text files with one fell swoop.

…and in these hard economic times, learning new skills is always a good thing. Anyone need any web server work done? Anyone? I work cheap while I’m still learning…

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¹ Everyone has a naming convention for their hardware. Mine is to name my computers and computing devices after favorite authors; in this case, my main web server is named after Dave Eggers, author of “A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius” and others.
² This server is named after Jonathan Lethem, an incredibly dark and brilliant author.

My apologies for the downtime on this site this morning. Not sure what happened, but for now I’ve got things temporarily working on another, slower, server.

Things may be broken – links, pictures, and whatnot and suchlike. Feel free to let me know or you can just wait and I’ll get everything working at full capacity (such as it was) eventually.

I tend to forget how much has to be changed/updated to move even a simple blog like this from one place to another.

This is probably a reminder for me to back things up more often, too.