Looks like yesterday’s post titled links for 2009-11-05 posted and reposted itself a dozen times overnight, eventually turning into links for 2009-11-06. I use the Blog Autoposting Tool (Beta) on del.icio.us which “creates a daily post of your latest bookmarks to your blog.” I wonder whether it went nuts or my WordPress install is on the fritz.
So, I’ve killed the blog posting job and the offending post itself, and will post links manually from now on. If this post does not regurgitate and spew like the last one did, it’s a del.icio.us thing. Otherwise, it’s a WordPress fail. The last thing I need right now is pushing around WordPress innards.
Are you sure you want to learn how to blog? This s*** be overrated, y’all.
UPDATE: It was totally del.icio.us’s fault. That’s what you get for relying on Beta.
VatulBlog’s latest incarnation is brought to you by Ocular Professor, “a photoblogging theme that features large images, gallery support, and threaded comments for WordPress 2.7 [and up].” Hope this is a better way to link the photographs at my Flickr gallery to this blog, make the blog more visually appealing and, given all the travel I’ve been doing, tell the tales with their pictures. Here are some images from my new life in the country.
If you’re a WordPress 2.8.x user, please upgrade to 2.8.4 ASAP. You can download the latest version from here or, if you’re (lazy and) adventurous like me, do this from inside your dashboard. WordPress 2.8.3 exploits admin password reset.
Upgraded VatulBlog to WordPress 2.7. The new dashboard is a lot like Flickr’s slick new Home page – all management utilities are available via drop-down menus on one page as opposed to tabs. QuickPress is sweet, but hotlinks have to be created manually and categories can only be added during an edit. Must be why they call it QuickPress.
Things have been rather hectic here at VatulBlog HQ lately. So busy that I have neither the time nor the inclination to blog. I’ve seen more of the insides of airports and geophysical data than any human should and the best part is that it isn’t over. More travel and data schlepping ahead.
This past weekend, I flew up to Ohio to spend some time with my parents and grandmother, the latter of whom I haven’t seen since my wedding around sixteen months ago. This is Patti’s (Tamil for grandmother) second battle with that awful beast known as cancer and she has just come out of another demeaning round of chemotherapy and radiation. Yet, she got out of bed and walked into the living room to spend time with one of her favorite grandchildren and, through coughs and sniffles, lovingly related to me all the things I used to do as a precocious young kid visiting my grandfather and her in India. I want to take this opportunity to say the following to my grandmother: Should this fate befall me, Goddess help me be half as strong as you are and look half as beautiful as you do after swallowing harsh, cancer-killing chemicals and being zapped by gamma rays, neutrons and protons that make you sicker than your illness provides. You, my dear lady, kick ass. I love you. (I also admire the hell out of you for tuning out the inevitable, heated discussion on American politics that went on among your children and grandchildren.)
Should this fate befall me. Let’s see – paternal great-grandmother and maternal aunt dead of breast cancer, paternal uncle dead of lung cancer, grandmother fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I live on Cancer Alley. Nice. When I mentioned this to him, Herr Doktor Brother assured me that nanotechnology will cure all within the span of a decade and that I’ve got to have faith in the coming and unstoppable advancements in medical science. I’m similarly optimistic about the oil industry and alternative sources of energy, but, like any passive consumer of products I don’t know much about, I’ll believe the cure for cancer when I see it.
Speaking of frustrating illnesses, Dangerblond‘s blog is on the fritz. More specifically, we are battling File ‘./blog/wp_comments.MYD’ not found (Errcode: 13), which probably means a corrupt Comments file/table which in turn means a WordPress upgrade. I may not be able to fix cancer, but I will make her blog cry Uncle, by gum. Tonight, I go in with a Ka-Bar between my teeth. Wish me luck.
VatulBlog now comes to you via WordPress 2.5.
Thus far, I am underwhelmed by the new dashboard because it is powered by widgets. So what if I can customize some aspects of the WordPress interface to my feng-shui liking if something as simple as the Insert/Edit Link window doesn’t work? (Update: The form works in Mozilla Firefox, but populates with absolutely nothing in IE6.) Incidentally, during the upgrade, it took three FTP uploads of the edit-form-advanced.php file before extended post options would show up on the Write Post form.
A few nice additions: Full-screen WYSIWYG editing is cool; it allows you to concentrate on writing. Posting also allows the creation of a post which contains a thumbnail gallery. Clicking on each thumbnail takes you to a sub-post.
Some more tinkering is in order. If I am not used to this “wordy” interface in a week’s time, I’m going back to 2.3.3. Thank goodness there are no security patches associated with 2.5.
