This Is Not News

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.

• Dave Thomer posted on August 5, 2011
  Thanks for the User tip. I did a first purge, I'll do a more detailed check to see if there's ...
• Earl Green posted on August 5, 2011
  I'll spare everyone the details of my own experiences with Globat, but getting off of that hosting service is as ...

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.

Special Order Speeches essays from prior incarnations of Not News are now available from the SOS link on the sidebar. This category includes essays that were written for the Humor section of the site when that was its own entity. Transferring them into blog posts reminded me that I enjoy that kind of long-form not-quite-serious writing. I oughta do more of it, although now I probably will have to label those entries so that they don’t get taken too seriously.

(Oh, for what it’s worth, I did notice that one entry got reposted twice. I’ll fix that soon while I’m transferring the Culture & Media section.)

I’m thinking of reposting some discussion threads as blog posts, and leaning toward doing them as single posts with a sequence of block quotes. Probably not the most aesthetically pleasing option, but not every old poster is set up as a commenter here and I’d like to keep ghost accounts to a minimum.

I’ve finally resumed the process of putting old articles from the site’s prior format into the blog database. Tonight, Life in Practice essays from 2000-2004 can now be found from that helpful link in the sidebar.

My to do list says I’m supposed to tackle the Special Order Speeches section tomorrow, but that’s seeming ambitious.

I don’t know how much longer the old phpBB forum will be around on the site. I’m going to pull all old essays and reviews into WordPress, if my fingers don’t fall off. If anyone has a particular discussion thread and/or response they want to preserve, let me know and I’ll find a way to wrangle ‘em.

The site performance must be back closer to normal. The spam comments have resumed. Ah well, at least I can access the controls to kill them.

Thanks for your patience, everyone. I’m still considering other options for the future, but for now it’s good to have things up an running.

And remember that Crowded House song I was talking about before? The video is available online thanks to an Australian newspaper.

• Dave Thomer posted on June 19, 2007
  At least you got it to load, which is more than I was able to do some days! Yeah, things ...
• Robn posted on June 18, 2007
  I've been lax on the commenting because, yeah, it's been sorta slow here! There have been days when I've ...

I’ve been having more trouble than I’d like accessing the site for the last week or two – any attempts to access the database-driven parts of the site (the current blog structure, the old forum) are just grinding on without much luck. If updates get spotty, this might be why. If anyone else is seeing this, let me know. It may be time to start thinking of moving to a new host, as little as I look forward to such a project.

If nothing else, this is motivation to get the older content moved over into one database sooner rather than later. Always good to have motivation, I suppose.