Tastes Like Chicken

Technologically speaking, it has been a very crappy last 24 hours for me.

Last night, I changed my password on my Winblows box at home, and then I promptly forgot it. Of course, I tried every variation of what I thought my password was, but after an hour, had to give up and reset it via the administrator account. And because I have most of the stuff on our home workstation encrypted by EFS, I was in trouble.

Luckily I had made offline backups of my EFS certificates, and after managing to find the CD, I reimported them, and unencrypted all my data. I reset my password again, and am still in the process of re-encrypting everything.

Then this morning, for some unknown reason, my wordpress blog (the one you are currently reading) was corrupted. I got the dreaded "your Wordpress table is marked as crashed and should be repaired." I tried repairing the database tables using phpMyAdmin, but all that did was restore the blog to working order with a couple hundred default blog entries.

Again – my backups saved the day. I had backed up a few weeks ago and kept the database backups offline. Unfortunately, the backup that I ran three days ago was corrupt (coincidence?) and so I lost my last post. But Google cache helped out there and I only had to manually enter in one entry.

So for all you keeping score – do what I did. Saved me from really losing my mind.

Tip One – backup up your certificates to offline storage.
Tip Two – backup your databases to offline storage.

I am pleased to announce yet another waste of bandwidth. Midwood.tv was just launched, and if you happen to be online when I have the webcam turned on you can keep track of me. You can get there from the Midwood.Net home page, or by going directly to Midwood.tv. I'm not yet sure what else I'm going to do with the domain. Maybe a place to put all of those fun iMovies. If you have any suggestions (other than telling me to f-off) let me know. And if you want to tell me to f-off, do that too.

Thanks to Christian Spanring who posted some PHP code to fix the issue I was having with GeoPress and WordPress. The problem was that when a post was tagged with a location, and then subsequently someone commented on the post, the location tag disappeared. The following PHP code can be added to geopress.php to fix the problem. The code should be added as the first three lines of the update_post function.

if (!is_admin()) return $id;
if (!isset($_POST['addr'])) return $id;
if (!isset($_POST['locname'])) return $id;

Thanks to the guys in these two threads for providing random advice to some other guy that I used to fix up my blog. Education by crowdsourcing!

How I fixed up my Flickr Wordpress plugin so that it works correctly in IE (crappy browser) as well as Firefox and Safari (good browsers).
clear:right not working in Internet Explorer 6

How I fixed up my Twitter badge so my page could still be valid XHTML.
Twitter Flash Badge: How to validate the code as XHTML

Thanks!

But you knew that already…

I finally figured out why my blog has been so slow to render since switching to the new hosting provider. I neglected to switch my database connection string for my Flickr cache that shows the thumbnails of my pictures on this blog. So every time the page rendered it ran out to the Flickr servers to get every single thumbnail. Very slow, very bad.

So I put in my new credentials to my new mySQL database, and now things seem to be running very smoothly again.

I've made a couple improvements to the site in the last few days.

I finally got our Australia site up. Go to the homepage and click on the Southern Cross in the sky, or go direct to the site here. You'll need a username and password to get in – if you don't already have the username/password for the site, let me know and (assuming I know who the hell you are) I'll send you the info. For those of you that have gotten in to other sections of the site – it's the same creds.

And I at least got the front page of the site to render correctly in Safari. I reworked the imagemap with a different CSS technique, and on the advice of some folks, put a sitemap out there for people that have CSS enabled, but images disabled.

I also read an article regarding CSS efficiency and tried to slim things down a little. And finally, I put in a lot of work to make the new pages WC3 XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. None of the rest of the pages are, but I'll get to them over time.

Happy Presidents' Day. And congratulations to Salary.com for going public last week.

I've been struggling for a while with trying to get the main page for Midwood.Net to show up the right way using Safari. It seems to work fine in IE and Firefox. It's an image map using CSS, and I'm sure there are some bugs somewhere in the positioning code, but I'm not sure what else to try.

Here's the link to the homepage.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this up to work in Safari would be appreciated. Leave a comment. Thanks.

Well I'm a little confused. I haven't been able to figure out if Technorati will take a "label" from the new Blogger.com editor and use it like a "tag." So I'm going to experiment and just label this post, but not put a tag in it, and see if Technorati picks it up.

I'm curious, only because on one of my previous posts, I forgot to put a tag in there, but Technorati seemed to catch something that was a "label" only.

Hmm. That certainly would make things a little cleaner for me.

Things in the ATOM feed for my blog got all screwed up with my last post. Evidently Blogger sometimes converts ampersands to the html character code for an ampersand and sometimes not.

And depending on whether or not you hit the "Edit Html" tab or "Compose" tabs, the formatting can go back and forth and get all screwed up.

In fact, I can't even fully describe the problem here since it is even screwing up text I try to put between "pre" tags.

That blows. Especially since I want to blog about William "&" Mary a lot…

Come on Google. Fix this. Aren't you bastards supposed to be smart? Isn't that why it's so hard to get a job there? Or are you lazy hippy California overrated too-full-of-yourself jerkoffs? My guess is the latter.

A Consuming Experience: Technorati tags: an introduction

Thanks to this guy who explained all sorts of Technorati tag stuff here for me.