Ennovy.org

I posted a long post just now and I accidentally closed the browser window, losing everything. Argh!

Here’s basically what I wrote.

It’s been another year. This website won’t go away until I forget to renew the domain name! I’ve got a lifetime account as A Small Orange and so I don’t have to worry about monthly domain fees.

Every month I received a spam comment or two in my image galleries. When I got notice of them, I simply disabled comments for that image and deleted the comment. In November and early December, the spam comments got much more frequent, so I disabled all comments on all images on all of the galleries. Saved me some time in getting rid of those comments, I should’ve done it earlier!

Back in April, when I last posted, I did a fresh install of ExpressionEngine 1 on an unused domain of mine to try and diagnose the htaccess problems. The domain is installed on the same server as this one, so I thought if I could get it working on that domain, I could get it working on this one. All I did to change with that install was change the settings to remove index.php from the URLs. Eventually I did get it figure it out, but I left the ExpressionEngine install alone.

The spammers managed to find this domain and they went crazy with the spam comments. I didn’t notice what has happening until August. I happened to log in to check the stats on my domains and noticed that there was an unusually high amount of bandwidth usage on that domain. Turns out the spammers had made 15,337 comments on one that one default post from June 2nd to August 16th! Here’s what the visitors graph from Awstats looked like:

I still want to upgrade to EE 2. This main blog is inactive but my private journal isn’t. I have a Tumblr account and this year I got to spend some time with WordPress 3 since I was helping a friend design a website. They’re both great but I don’t like them as much as I do EE and I’d much rather stick with EE than use something else. I made a copy of my site offline, and using MAMP, I upgraded to EE 2 and started working away at updating the templates and the broken plugins. I stopped when I couldn’t get the Textile formatting plugin to work. That was several months ago and I haven’t looked at it since. I can’t say when I will start looking at it again.

So that’s all for now. Happy Holidays!

After 5 months, I finally found a partial solution to the htaccess problem. The front site appears to work for the most part. Except now I can’t get into the control panel properly.

If I access the control panel at mysite.org/system, I cannot access the control panel.
If I access the control panel at mysite.org/system/index.php, I get access to the control panel.

It’s not a big deal but I’m lazy and don’t want to type in the extra characters.

My host dropped PHP4 support and switched to PHP5 in October. Somehow, it has messed up my .htaccess file rules. What used to work doesn’t work anymore. As a result you can’t access any of the pages. I’m trying to find out how to fix it, so stay tuned.

Edit: The issue is something to do with the fact that I’m removing index.php from my URL. If you add index.php back to the URL the pages will work fine.

I waited deliberately for a couple of days until December 17th to post this. Anyone reading?

I’m still alive. I’m still updating part of my site, although it’s only my journal and it’s all private. I have left the public part of the site to rot, and I said a year ago I’d try to fix it up, but obviously I still haven’t yet.

ExpressionEngine 2 has been out for two weeks now, and I have yet to try it out. In fact I wasn’t really planning on trying EE 2 this soon if at all. I’m perfectly happy with my existing setup. But, I participated in the EE Heist and won a free upgrade. (I actually won something. It was a rare feeling.) I bought the EE Heist bundle because it had some useful modules/extensions that I could use with EE 1.6.x. Now that I have access to EE 2 though there’s no way I’m not going to use it!!

I haven’t received my upgrade yet (still waiting for reply to email), but once I do I’ll be installing it and hopefully I can convert my LJ crosspost module to be compatible with EE 2. If I can do that, I’ll upgrade this site to EE 2 and maybe I’ll post more!

In the meantime you can find me in public on Twitter if you want to read my meaningless and infrequent tweets.

Wow, I haven’t posted in this blog for a year now!

I would love to rehaul the entire site, get rid of all the broken stuff. But I don’t have the motivation to do it.

I used to get a lot of comment spam on this weblog. 99.9% of them were caught and so they never showed up in the comments, but I still had to delete the comments in the control panel. In the last couple of months the comment spam has died down to nothing. I was congratulating myself for solving this comment spam problem (although it’s really EE’s security features and Loweblog’s Akismet module that should get all the credit) when I realized that in the last couple of months I had turned on the option to close comments after 30 days. So obviously I wouldn’t get any comment spam if no one can post comments! And I rarely make public posts these days.

A few weeks ago, I switched to the beta version of the new My Yahoo, a personalized portal page. They’ve added a couple of new features, including more customization options and more content. I’m using it as my home page, same as I’ve done for years now, but there are a couple of things that bug me.

In the old version, there was something called the “Message Center”, which I had on the top left corner of the page. It told me whether I had any new mail in my Yahoo account, and it was really quite handy. If I did have mail, then I could sign into the Yahoo mail.

In the new version, it’s been replaced with something called the “Personal Assistant”. Except it’s not a replacement. This new Personal Assistant tells me if I have new mail only if I’m logged in. If I’m not, then it tells me to sign in. Which makes it useless!

Then there’s the fact that this Personal Assistant seems to be stuck on the right side of the page. I can’t move it around like I can with all of the other items on the page.

Lastly it sticks an advertisement into the middle of my links:

Note: I wrote this post because I wanted to test out the screen-capture abilities of Skitch. And I felt like whining.

I’ve updated the CSS for the control panel themes to match with EE 1.6.0. There have been no changes to the images, just to the css file. If you notice anything off, let me know!

I haven’t actually upgrade this site to EE 1.6 yet. I installed a fresh version of EE 1.6 on my computer to play around first. Before I update this site, I still need to make sure all of my extensions/plugins don’t break. Then I need to reconcile some hacks I made to the default plugins. Then I have to update my Control panel theme because it looks like the style sheet in the new version got some new updates. I’m planning on starting on all of that this weekend!

My worries about running out of bandwidth last month came true – I ran out of bandwidth on February 26, and my site was down for 3 days.

Here’s a graph:

This first few days of March have been quite cold. There was a snow storm on Thursday, with freezing rain in the evening. We ended up getting the afternoon off at work to avoid the bad weather/traffic. On Friday, there were quite a few areas without power, but luckily my house and my workplace had power. Friday afternoon, it snowed heavily much like the previous day, and we got the afternoon off again. Except the snow stopped in about half an hour, so there wasn’t really any need to leave early. I’m really looking forward to spring/summer!

It’s not even the middle of February yet, and I’m at 79% of my bandwidth limit. This is a first.

I’ve closed off comments on older entries, and trackbacks too, hopefully that will slow down all of the spam attempts. I’ll also edit my robots.txt file and stop bots from crawling my site.

If I go over my bandwidth limit, it costs $0.50 US per gigabyte to keep the site up, and even though that’s not bad, I don’t want to have to pay that. So if my site looks like it’s being suspended later this month, you’ll know what happened.

Bandwidth in November/Dec 06

( More Screenshots )

Since I made a post about decorating my desktop, I thought I’d make another one for decorating a website.

If you want to spruce up your site for the holidays, here are some links:

• Seasonal Elf and Santa Smilies from Connie at Schildieproductions. Also, check out the Santa smilies and the Winter and Christmas Smilies.
• Christmas Holiday Icons from N. Design Studio.
• Falling Snow effect using javascript from Dynamic Drive.
• Create some Christmas graphics by following the Christmas Photoshop Tutorials.
• Add a realistic-looking Santa hat to your photos.

Research :: Documents
Chuck :: dooce’s dog
Insert :: Delete
Bang :: Big
Lousy :: Lame
Rehearsal :: Dress
Critics :: Bash
Memory :: RAM
Squid :: Ink
Remove :: Junk

:unconsciousmutterings:

After reading this post which explains how to get the TextMate blogging bundle to work with ExpressionEngine, I decided to try it out for myself. I’ve been able to retrieve previous posts from my blog already, let’s hope that I can post this entry to my blog!

Edit: Yay! It worked! Except that my mood custom field is messed up.

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