It’s been awhile since I’ve updated, so I figure I may as well give some sort of indication to what’s going on behind the scenes (or not) here.
About two, possibly three weeks ago now I updated to Wordpress 2.5. It was only shortly before that I’d upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and finally ironed out the kinks between Wordpress 2.3 and my theme, k2. Not surprisingly, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, k2 ended up having some issues, the most important of which on my end is seeing the nice message:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /…/dashboard.php on line 31
Every time I log into the site. Now, from the looks of things, this doesn’t really interfere with my ability to post. But it certainly interferes with my desire to actually post anything at all. I mean, here it is weeks later and the only information I have about fixing the issue is from the k2 site promising a Wordpress 2.5 update “soon.” If the k2 guys can’t be bothered to fix it, why should I?
Of course, I did at one point seek out some information on the problem, but the suggested solution didn’t work. So here we are. Hopefully things will settle down and start working soon so I can post without being hassled.
The site layout is still “broken” in that images will expand beyond the main column. I’ve got a post sitting around here with some images that I’m considering posting, but it’ll show up badly due to the way images are currently working. I’ll probably hold off a few days and see if I can fix it, but I’m having a hard time finding the desire to dig into the layout.
I think having a layout that I’ve been reasonably happy with (K2 with default stylings) for so long has ruined my tendency to want to tinker with the blog’s theme. I know at some point I’ll have to go and re-add the AdSense blocks and such, which is fine. But I remember the last time I changed themes I had some pretty elaborate theme ideas, most of which have just fallen off since I’ve had a layout which worked decently and wasn’t overwhelming. Since when did upgrading mean, “Getting everything that was working broken and have to fix it?”
I noticed some clunky behavior of the blog today on the back end here, so I decided to go ahead and upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. In the process this seems to have screwed up my theme, so working on getting everything functional again. For the time being I’m back on the Terracotta theme, although hopefully I’ll get K2 working again soon enough.
Edit: Well, K2 is back, but images are still screwy, and the sidebars are messed up. I’ll get this sorted out eventually.
I noticed a couple of sites recently that were hotlinking images that were hosted on my site, so I disabled all image hotlinking. I felt like this was an unfortunate but necessary step, since obviously some people can’t be bothered to put in even the minimal amount of effort that would have been required to simply rehost images locally.
I can understand hotlinking in some situations: Let’s say someone in a forum linked to a post that I wrote about a game and also wanted to include some of the pictures I usually include with videogame related posts. Although forums tend to be huge wastes of bandwidth, that sort of usage makes some sense and isn’t instantly objectionable. After all, presumably the example here is one that’s discussing what I wrote and with forums you don’t necessarily have an easy at-hand way to deal with images. On the other hand, someone who has gone through all the trouble to make their own website and secure hosting for it doesn’t really have an excuse.
I would prefer if I didn’t have to completely disable hotlinking, so I am thinking about how I can revise my access policies, but for now it’s gone.
I think I’m going to take a little bit of a break from the UT3 weapons now that I’ve finished posting thoughts and information the core weapons set. I’ll get around to the Translocator, Avril, Redeemer, and maybe some of the other miscellaneous items later. The interruption comes out of a couple of different motives:
One, I went out and bought the full game and have started playing it. I’m only on the single player campaign right now, but I think it’s fantastic. Having access to the full range of maps makes the game feel so different than simply playing with the three demo levels. I put in a good number of hours in the game yesterday, and I’m still playing the campaign — It’s actually pretty cool for an Unreal Tournament singleplayer mode, and there’s a bit of humor mixed in with outstanding gameplay. Playing on CTF-Hydro16 or CTF-Coret brought back memories, and both maps feel really good, fast, and action packed. The only complaint I have is pretty common: The bots on my team are incompetent, while the bots on the other team are pretty good.
Two, there are some other things I want to write about, and even though most of my work on the UT3 weapon summaries was done last weekend, I’ve been doing editing and checking of my material over the course of the week, so I’m a bit burnt out on that. Besides, it’s time to mix it up a tad.
I figure I may as well mention, for anyone who may not have already noticed, that I’ve went ahead and added AdSense to the site. I haven’t had much time at all to dedicate to tweaking things to work with my current Wordpress theme (K2), which means what you’re seeing now is liable to change at some undisclosed point in the future. K2 seems particularly persnickety when it comes to adding in AdSense, as the nature of the thing is to have a completely modular sidebar without needing to fiddle around in Wordpress’ code (ie, “The Loop). AdSense, on the other hand, pretty much instructs you to copy and paste the code into the desired spot in Wordpress’ “Loop” where you want the ad-block to appear. That the two agendas are in contradiction means I’ll have to sit down one of these days and really figure out what K2 is doing and how I can incorporate AdSense into that in the way that I want.
As for reasoning: Well, not that I expect to make any money off the ads in the first place, but I figure I may as well try to recoup some of my hosting costs for this site. They’re not substantial, and I’m not in any real danger of needing to update to a more expensive or robust hosting plan, but what the heck? I don’t really plan on being a Steve Pavlina, or any of those other AdSense/SEO /Self-Help hucksters out there, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever decide to do anything more with AdSense than have them sit unobtrusively in the bottom of my sidebar.
Well, the first year of this blog being up and active has gone by. This is day one of a new year.
In retrospect, this blog has kind of gone in a different direction than I expected. Slightly more emphasis on the whole gaming and geekery aspect than I originally intended. That’s not really a bad thing, just not exactly what I was anticipating — I suppose realistically that comes from general time constraints. When I write here it’s in the time I would normally spend on other hobbies, and so there’s a lot of overlap. Writing about D&D or videogames or (more recently) tabletop wargames is just another way to sit down and ponder the intricacies of their respective systems without necessarily playing them or spending wasting time reading forums.
Seeing as how a year has passed, I’m pondering whether I should do something with the theme, or perhaps “re-branding” (so-to-speak) the site with a more game-centric title and tagline and all that? If I didn’t know that I’m already too busy to be doing that sort of thing I’d consider it…
So, following Shamus’ lead, I went ahead and installed Peter’s Anti-Spam Captcha, and disabled some other anti-spam measures. Lets see how this works out over the next couple of days.
For the time being the security word is set to be “human,” and I went ahead and edited the text to indicate this as well (in case the image bit stops working or you’re blind, etc.). I’m betting that even the most basic reading comprehension is a far harder task for spambots than read-and-regurgitate OCR, so I doubt this will impact the security of my captcha. If you’re a non-spamming, non-human visitor to the site — Welcome! And, I suppose, sorry for automatically assuming that my website would only be interesting to humans.
Update: So far things have been going well. The Captcha has dramatically reduced my amount of spam. Unfortunately it hasn’t cut it down to nothing. I’m getting probably 1/10th of the amount of spam as I was before, though. One good thing is that most of the spam that is getting through seems to be from the same spammer (at least from the format and what it’s promoting). The most annoying spam, the hundreds-of-lines-long messages with hundreds of links contained within them are being blocked — When I see those in my Akismet queue I usually just delete the whole queue without bothering to check the others. The ones that’ve been getting through right now are one-line spams that I can skim for legitimate comments and delete without any anxiety.
As some of you may have noticed, posting has dropped off a bit here recently. I suppose I should offer a bit of an explanation for anyone out there reading who I don’t know personally.
In January I went to the doctor’s office for a routine check up. It’s been a few years since my last one, so I figured I may as well go. Pretty standard stuff, except the doctor did notice I seemed to be picking up a little bit of weight around the waist, so he ordered an additional test for me — A pregnancy test. It came back positive.
In the infamous words of Internets: O.M.G.
You might expect that this news would come as a shock. Let me tell you, it did. When my doctor suggested a pregnancy test I told him it was impossible as I had my period only a few days earlier. But apparently it’s possible to have a partial period immediately following conception… that is what I seem to have had.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your hyperventilating.
As this has been a completely unexpected turn of events, I’ve had to do some long and hard thinking about my life and everything … And, honestly, as much as I enjoy my own little soapbox on this corner of the world wide web, I can’t see myself dedicating much time here anymore. Currently I haven’t even decided if I am going to continue my job full-time, so a little thing like a blog … It’s funny how a little crisis like this kind of clarifies what’s really important to you.
I’m hoping that this isn’t goodbye forever, but I don’t expect to be here much for the next six or so months … And after that, who knows?