This Is Not News

OK, so here’s another difference between a journal I write by hand and a blog I maintain online.

I don’t have to worry about the paper getting an update that makes me unable to actually edit my text.

There’s something about the latest version of WordPress that is making it impossible for me to format text or add links. I’m sure I can figure it out. I’m just not going to try to do it tonight. We’ll try again tomorrow.

Well, if a global pandemic that shuts down schools and requires me to stay at home as much as possible doesn’t motivate me to start writing more, it’s time to say that my days of writing anything beyond snappy social media posts are over. So we’ll see where this goes.

I’ve had a lot of ideas in my head for things I would write if I had the time and the energy. The energy is the thing, really, even more than the time. That, and the guilty feeling that there was something I needed to be doing more than writing something for a blog I started almost twenty years ago.

I had not done the math on that until I just typed it. Good heavens, I started this website almost half a lifetime ago.

Anyway, while honesty demands that I admit that I am going to play more than a few games of Civilization V during this hiatus, I am also going to try to use this time to reset some of my routines. I’ve talked about doing this before. Let’s see where it goes.

Not News’ hosting provider had to disable the site in order to deal with a problem connected to an old version of the site. There are still some posts in the old bulletin board version of Not News that I need to bring over and reformat into the WordPress version. I lost momentum on that project, and some spambots took advantage of the opportunity and went after the old forum hard. I’ve managed to fix things up so that I still have access to the old forum, but it’s disabled. Hopefully that will motivate me to complete the process of bringing everything over into WordPress. While I need to catch a nap from time to time, spambots never sleep.

So we’re back up and running, I’ll be filling in the missed stuff I would have written this week over the weekend, and we’ll go on from there.

I’m falling asleep at my desk and I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to come up with something to say.

Saw Dark Knight Rises today but I still haven’t unpacked what I think of it, except that I prefer Inception.

I’m thinking about writing some posts this week that will link back and refer to older posts. WordPress automatically puts Trackback comments from the oldr post to the new one. In the past I’ve found these annoying and deleted them. But now I’m thinking it might be wise to keep them. If someone stumbles upon something I wrote in 2004, that person might find it useful to see if I’ve updated or revised my thinking at all.

Summer’s just about over. Time to go get some rest, and then make one last push to clean off this desk. 🙂

Got home from work and grocery shopping, conked out, and before I knew it Tuesday had become Wednesday and my streak of daily posting had ended. Don’t let the date stamp fool you – this is being written on Thursday and retroactively posted through the magic of date stamp editing. Why? So if anyone clicks on the date in the calendar, they’ll learn that September 20 was a date where I didn’t actually say anything and understand the reason why. It also gives me a chance to reflect on the effort to post daily. It has been a challenge since the school year started, but so has just about everything up to and including remembering where my glasses are. The challenges of every day’s classes give me a lot to reflect about in terms of my education practice, but I don’t want those posts to totally overwhelm the blog. Also, it takes a lot of energy to write, and I’m still working on mustering it. But I’m going to try to start a new streak tomorrow. Er, today. You know what I mean.

I am just barely making it to Day 5 of my renewed posting regimen – I have a headache that’s stopping me from putting together the post I had in mind for today, but I think it’s a good occasion to take a look at the site’s current form and see what I think. More importantly, I can beg for feedback or ideas.

• Part of what made it easier for me to post this week is that I finally moved the site’s hosting from Globat to Bluehost. So far I am very happy with this choice. Globat occasionally would have some kind of odd hiccup that would make it hard for me to access the site or make changes. Bluehost’s control panel has been easy to work with and I had little trouble with moving the content. Which reminds me, I need to renew the site’s hosting contract.
• I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, which definitely makes a bunch of functions easier. I noticed it when I was moving content from the old forum – it’s pretty easy to click the right boxes and get the post up. And I found a theme that works with the new version. So far I like it, but I’m not wedded to it.
• I’m still thinking about the sidebar to the right. Is having the Recent Posts and Recent Comments worth it? Does anyone find it useful to be able to click on a particular month’s archives, or does the Calendar serve that purpose well enough? I would like to add an Amazon widget. I don’t know if being an Amazon affiliate is even worth the effort these days, but I feel like I should give it a try. Is there anything else that should be there and isn’t?
• There is now a link to Register at the top of the sidebar, so if you would like to leave a comment here, please feel free to do so. I would love to see if I could make that link more prominent. Maybe I’ll try to create a specific Register widget.
• I really like the way this theme (Techozoic) formats posts. The date and headline look good, and it comes with social media buttons buttons built in so I can finally get on that bandwagon.
• I should probably make the headline/title fonts a little darker, and get a Not News logo up somewhere on the page.
• The blog roll definitely needs an update – I haven’t touched that in years.

So, overall, I’m happy with the way the site is functioning right now, and I hope that keeps me motivated to keep adding content. Thoughts, suggestions and feedback are always welcome, but right now while I have the time to do something about them, they’re particularly useful.

I’ve changed the WordPress theme that Not News uses in order to use a theme that’s compatible with the upgraded version of WordPress. Other than adding the Amazon widget to the sidebar I haven’t tweaked it yet, but I’m going to be tinkering over the next month or so. So please excuse any dust.

UPDATE: Google has finished reviewing the site and has found it to be clean; they’ll be removing the warnings from the site’s search results. The hackers were able to insert new files onto the server and insert malicious code into WordPress that created a number of problems. I’ve deleted all the malicious files, and I also deleted all the WordPress files and replaced them with clean versions I downloaded this morning. So all systems are now go.

ORIGINAL POST: I’ll update this later, but this morning I discovered that the site had been hacked. I believe the problem has been fixed; I apologize for any inconvenience, and urge you to run any spyware/malware/virus scans you may have available to you.

More of an update later today, and hopefully I’ll fix the look of the site as well – getting rid of the hacked code also took out some of my customizations.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate seven years of Not News than waking up to find that Network Solutions has temporarily suspended the domain registration. And on a day when some pretty important e-mails were expected to come down the pike, no less. I’ll take the blame on this one – I must have split the domain registration off from the hosting service at some point, and then forgotten that the hosting service wouldn’t automatically renew. Whoops. If anyone tried and failed to get to the site, my apologies.

My Year Eight resolution is to finish importing everything into the blog database, and from there maybe I can start writing some reviews again. In the meantime, I’m gonna hunt down some cake.

I think it’s time to recharge the ol’ batteries, so I’m gonna spend a week or so ruminatin’ on various topics before I return to the blog here. Have fun and keep cool.