Written by Mike Young on September 13, 2007 at 6:28 am
If you happen to have me subscribed via Bloglines, you’re going to need to unsubscribe me and then subscribe again, using this URL instead, http://wildernessvoice.com/?feed=rss2. The old URL seems to be broken and will not update properly in your RSS feed tool of choice. I’m hoping this will fix things, though my last post still isn’t listed.
If you continue to have problems, please fire off an email.
Category: Techy Stuff
Written by Mike Young on September 7, 2007 at 7:20 am
Well, this has been an interesting week for me. Several little things happening as a result of moving various sites from Hurricane Electric to Go Daddy.
Wordpress
I’m really not liking Wordpress right now. I have migrated all sorts of sites to Wordpress over the past year without a hiccup. But they really insist on using their funky Wordpress Extended RSS (WXR) format for migrating from Wordpress to Wordpress. Bear in mind that they do provide a hosted Wordpress for free, as well as the host it yourself stuff, which is what I tend to use.
Anyway, never ran into the situation where the MySQL database actually exceeded 2MB, before. And to my surprise, one of the sites I have to move is actually hovering at around 7MB. Shouldn’t be a problem if I could just use any old migration tool. But nope, I have to work with the tools provided, which are all PHP based. And as a result, there is a 2MB limit. Nice, huh? You would think the boneheads at Wordpress would provide an export option to split the WXR file into chunks smaller than 2MB. After all, if the maximum file size is 2MB, then what good is a WXR file that is larger than that? This is an example of programmers having their heads in dark, moist places. Seriously, this is the type of stuff I look at when hiring folks. And to ignore a design limitation is a seriously poor oversight. The question for me is whether I really want to fix it or not. Do I have the time?
New Template
So, I’ve switched my look again. I know, I know. But I couldn’t help it. I’ve been working on a different look for a while and just haven’t been very happy with the overall style. This is finally getting towards that look I’ve been driving. Please be gentle with me if you opt to leave feedback. I might be tempted to make more changes 
… and to Truncated Comments
This will be fun, especially as time goes on and my comments get pushed down. But over on the right hand side, I had made a comment that just doesn’t display properly. Under Recent Comments, it reads, “LOL! Should have let me do you”. This is not what I wrote and is perfect example of what happens when you take things out of context. I would never write such a thing on my blog. Seriously. The actual comment was related to my offer to produce a Gravatar for a friend and it reads, “LOL! Should have let me do your gravatar when I offered”.
I hope you can see the difference. Sheesh, the last thing I’m trying to do is to turn this into a porn site.
Anyway, those are some of my rants for now. I’m sure either I’ll come up with a Wordpress fix or find one. If I do, I will certainly post it here.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, PHP
Category: Misc. Rants, Techy Stuff
Written by Mike Young on September 3, 2007 at 7:33 am
So, as I’ve been going down the path of migrating all of my domains from Hurricane Electric to Go Daddy, I’ve encountered a few problems with getting the old Favatars to work properly. The issue, and I’m not sure if it’s the hosting or if it’s the migration to a newer version of the Favatar plugin, but something just doesn’t work right. When I go to create my database of associated favatars, the result is that no favicon is found. Hmm… they used to be there.
Anyway, if you recall when I went down that path, it was to find a way to get the equivalent of an avatar next to the commenters’ names. And Gravatar was going through some major difficulties as their hosting provider didn’t apparently like the demand they were under. So I went with Favatar support.
My choice of using Favatars seemed to be a good one at the time, but it looks like the project is pretty much abandoned. I’ve not seen any changes to the plug-in code and it’s getting to be a pain for me to maintain. As a result, I’ve decided to make the switch to Gravatars.
Please help me out and register your Gravatar so that my site can look right again 
. With that said, here’s what you can do:
- Go to the Gravatar.com home page
- Click on Sign up now
- Enter your email address, you’ll get a confirmation email with a link to activate your new account
- Click on the link emailed to you and enter in your password to your Gravatar account
- You’ll be redirected to a registration page where you can subscribe to their newsletter or skip it (either is fine for this purpose)
- Moving on will take you to a page to add a Gravatar to your account and to link it to your email address
- Click “add a new one“
- Here’s where you can make things interesting by either choosing an image from your own computer or you can select your existing favicon as a gravatar. If you’d like to use your existing one, you can simply use a link to your url/favicon.ico (e.g. http://wildernessvoice.com/favicon.ico). You can cut and paste or just type the address into the URL box then click next.
- The only caveat about using an existing favicon is that typical favicons are 16×16 pixels in size. So they can be quite small. My favatar fix from before allowed for images up to 32×32 pixels. And Gravatar allows for even bigger ones. I still prefer the 32×32 size as any thing larger can be quite overwhelming.
- Click the link “Back to My Gravatars“
- You’ll see your email address along with the gravatar you’ve just uploaded. However, you need to link the two together. You do this by simply clicking on the gravatar and then confirming the selection.
That’s pretty much it. For those on Wordpress who would like help adding the support to your site, just let me know and I can either walk you through it or make the changes for you.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Gravatars, Avatars, Favatars
Category: Techy Stuff
