Real Life – Page 3 – The Kind Healer

Painless, Pt 2

Well, deciding to move the wordpress site back to my web ‘root’ (where it should have been in the first place) has been a bit of a pain after all. Despite making all kinds of redirect setups, MystBlogs does not seem to syndicate the site anymore. And of course I’m finding a lot of external and internal linking that needs correcting (as the fresh import has changed the post URL structure). Not a big deal yet, I’m working through all that.

One nice thing so far is how few plugins I need now, in comparison to what I used to have. This new ‘Jetpack’ thing that WP included in the install has served a number of my needs, though I’ve disabled about half the features anyway. :p Three ‘quickie’ plugins used to modify comment/trackback etc behavior ended up in Core. So at minimum I’ve only needed to add in Bad Behavior so far (Akismet spam protection also came installed).

One new thing I did add is something to manage the Redirect Hell I’m in now. It’s probably going to end up part of my main plugin list, until things cool down in a year or so. I’m hoping Google etc will re-scan the site and re-hash everything in the new format soonish.

–TSK

Well that was painless

Removal/Archive (tarballs) of all non-personal web data – Done.
Export of old site to WXML – Done.
Complete re-install from scratch – Done (including removal of /weblog, with symlink).
Re-import of old post etc data from old site – Done.
Minor copies over – Done.

Still need to get brand new plugins and install them from scratch too. But so far looks good.

Heck of a thing to do, but I honestly cannot trust the old site data after the hack attempt last Dec (that also took out Mysterium at the time).

I still need to sit down and do export/archives of any lingering MySQL databases – there are far too many at this point.

EDIT – Looks like I’ve lost my Links in the import. Not a huge loss, will work on that later.

EDIT #2 – And now a RewriteRule to remove /weblog altogether (so that MystBlogs et al can see me, I think). Mostly there, still need to track down a couple plugins.

–TSK

Hurricane Irene – Landfall

As of about 40 minutes ago (5:30 AM US/EDT), Irene’s ‘eye’ landed in the area. We’ve had serious rain since about 11 PM last night, but compared to other storms this has been just a bunch of rain and wind. Both Gloria and Floyd were severe thunderstorms; we’ve not had that here. Still got power too, which is impressive – seems like this neighborhood will lose power if someone sneezes sometimes (ironic for it being within sight of a major PSE&G power plant).

Hell, just the week before we had some serious thunderstorms, with really impressive lightning. All of it short-duration of course, not this huge thing that’s going to last nearly a day and a half. :P

That’s not to say things are done here; Flash flood warning just popped up, which is normal for the area. Still worried if the car’s been hit by anything (I moved it before things got dark, hopefully that’s helped). And with the storm surge in NYC, I’m also very worried about the storage area I still have in Hoboken (it’s on the 2nd floor of that building).

Also, there’s the fun item about NYC’s mass transit going to be offline until ‘well into monday’ per the Mayor. Going to be interesting for work; Will the NYSE and other markets be open or not?

Still keeping my fingers crossed.

/salute

Hurricane Irene – Approach

[Update 4 PM – just checked that I can access the site with a blackberry app, so if power goes out I can still update. Otherwise no change yet, we’re expecting the real stuff to start around 9 PM and continue until next morning. –TSK]

[1:15 PM] The northern edge of Irene has made it here to Ridgefield. So far its just some sporadic rain, but is expected to be worse of course.

At the moment, we’re expecting it to hit our area early on Sunday. If that’s the case I may still be able to make it in to work on time (and, depending on power issues, will probably be tempting regardless).

I do have some supplies, both normal and ’emergency’ (freeze dried meals). My desk and dresser (both directly under one of the windows) have been cleared off. I had planned to move the computer anyway, so I’ve an excuse to dismantle and move the PC now.

The live announcement by NJ’s governor was shown by Fox just now, and since it sounds like things will pick up soon, I’ll probably go out and get one last eat.

So far, have not seen anything worse than normal from wind or rain perspective here. We’re in good shape still.

/salute
–TSK

Upgrade and Site Collapse

Since its been awhile (and I have tonight off), I decided to upgrade my site to latest WP. Though I eventually got it done, it was a bit rocky on the way there – on par with a previous upgrade failure.

The main source of the problem (so far) appears to be an SEO plugin that I installed a while ago; As I wasn’t really doing anything with it, it got tossed. All the main components (including my two main spam preventors) are still there though, so for now I’m happy.

I can’t thank the SimpleScripts installer enough in making rollbacks easy. Probably would have spent the rest of the night getting to this point. ;)

Oh, in the process I’ve dropped the old (blog.txt) theme. The WordPress folks have a pretty decent ‘starter’ theme now, which loaded faster too.

Now the only outstanding issue is to get ZenPhotoPress back in action [Fixed, but slow]. And maybe get a replacement banner pic for the one this theme includes.

–TSK