Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Site”
Wordpress to Hugo Migration Process
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
Update Your Rss Feeds
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
A Little More on the Hugo Transition
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
Moving to Hugo
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
Federation Test
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!
It's Book Review Time
I’ll be getting caught up on book reviews, so through the end of the year you’ll see at least one book review per day. I’ll still be occasionally writing my usual blog posts, but the most consistent content will be book reviews.
This Blog is Now On Mastodon/Fediverse
You can now follow the blog on Mastodon by searching for:
Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)
Spent a bunch of today trying to get SSL working correctly
And failed and left my site offline most of the day. So I’ll have to try some stuff on the side and give it another shot.
A little dust for the next few days (or weeks)
I just moved this blog to slightly different hosting infrastructure. Because of that I had some funky issues with character encoding yesterday. I believe that’s fixed now, but there may be other things that take me time to notice and fix up. Also, I still have a couple other things to set up so that I can FINALLY have https working for this blog. As part of this infrastructure change, I discovered and fixed at least one long-running issue that was causing problems with that. So if things are offline for a bit over the next few days or weeks - that’s why.
Trying out the Code Syntax Block Plugin
I’m not a huge fan of plugins for key parts of the site. There are some blog posts that no longer make sense because they used, for example, the iframe plugin to embed Google Maps. That said, my previous solution for displaying code on the site - special CSS is also brittle because I lose it whenever I change themes. I think at some point I also lost it when I upgraded a theme. So, since Wordpress is all about blocks now, thanks to Gutenberg, I’ve decided to try out this Code Syntax plugin I heard about on Wordpress Tavern.
Changed hosts
I haven’t completely changed hosting for all my domains, but I have changed it for this one. So it’s possible things may be broken for a bit while I root out all the errors. Or maybe I got lucky and everything will be perfect after the DNS is done propagating.
Rolling Your Own
Another event has once again cemented my thoughts that the informed technical person needs to run their own services rather than depend upon the benevolence of companies. It started with Google closing Google Reader. Then Facebook and Twitter got extra censorious. During all that, people started abusing DMCA requests on Youtube. Recently Google decided to close Google code. Now there the Ars Technica story that SourceForge is installing malware on software that is considered abandoned on their site.
First Nine Days in Extra Life
I’ve been hearing about the members of the Giant Bombcast talk about participating in the Extra Life video game marathon for a few years now. For some reason, when the 2014 event happened, I decided to look into it to see if I could participate this year. When I started looking into it around a month ago, I realized I wouldn’t be able to participate in the big 24 hour day because that’s when someone’s getting married. But, then I found out that the organizers are OK with creativity in the marathon was run. There are others, like me, who raise money and play games throughout the year.
It's a Binary World 2.0 is ten years old!
I can’t believe I’ve been blogging on here for TEN YEARS! Here’s a link to my first post. Time has really flown by! Ten years ago I didn’t even think blogging would still be a thing in ten years time. So far I’m still on Wordpress, although I finally moved away from the server. prefix in the domain name. I still enjoy expressing myself and I still love when I get engagement from my readers.
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A story about the IRS targeting Conservatives. (Which later turned out to be a somewhat manufactured crisis, since the IRS was also targeting Liberals)
Five Years Ago Today: A photo essay about moving into my first house.
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A photojojo pos t - which is getting almost recursive, since that contains photos from the year before.
Five Years Ago Today: No post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: I score a great interview with I Fight Dragons about their Kickstarter.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A strange typo in an email from Amazon.
Five Years Ago Today: A tutorial for Geo-Tagging your photos that still holds. (Although if you use Digikam you can do it a lot more seamlessly)
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A look back at the past ten years since Wordpress turns 10. Also, a super cute photo of Scarlett.
Five Years Ago Today: A review of Dan’s Blog. I know Dan’s been really busy. But Dan needs to get back to blogging. I love Dan’s blog posts. Dan! BLOG!
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: No Posts
Five Years Ago Today: A review of Jeffery Friedl’s blog. Man, I used to read that all the time. Haven’t read it in years!
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A quick note about images on the blog
Five Years Ago Today: No Posts
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A fun photo of Tony
Five Years Ago Today: No Posts
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A book review!
Five Years Ago Today: No Posts
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A few Bitcoin stories
Five Years Ago Today: No Posts
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: How Merida was changed from the movie to the toy
Five Years Ago Today: No Posts
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago: A change in this blog’s comment policy
Five Years Ago: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: More on the 3D printed guns
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: Some tips for a 365 Project
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: The interesting ways that Restaurants deal with no-shows.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: 3D Printed Guns become much more of a reality
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: Scarlett begins displaying empathy
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: The end of too big to fail?
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A photojojo post.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It’s A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: A post about game designers who put out broken versions of their games to nab those who didn’t pay.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Today in It's A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: Firefox, Google Glass, and Wordpress Themes in the Technology Roundup
Five Years Ago Today: I promise more Linux reviews I also ruminate on the melancholy of living far from family.
Today in It's A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: I discuss Disney Princess culture in anticipation of what will happen with Scarlett.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post
Blog's at the New URL - Update your Bookmarks!
Finally did the move, I’m at www.ericsbinaryworld.com instead of server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog ! Whoo! No more annoying URL! There may be a few funky things here and there until everything’s ironed out, but for the most part it seems to be working just fine.
Today in It's A Binary World Blogging History
One Year Ago Today: 5 Tips for Taking Photos of Toddlers.
Five Years Ago Today: No Post.
Today in It's A Binary World Blogging History
Every day Boing-Boing posts a blog post from a year ago, five years ago, and ten years ago. I think it is pretty revealing and I want to do it too since I’ve almost been blogging for 10 years now. We’ll see how long I can keep it going.
One Year Ago: I reviewed Fall Out Boy’s Save Rock and Roll.
Five Years Ago: I did not post on 1 May, five years ago.
Upcoming Changes
That this blog is at the strange URL of server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog is the product of the circumstances at the time that I got my first ever URL - www.ericsbinaryworld.com. That URL went to my tripod site, the only way I knew how to do hosting at the time. In 2003 I wanted to play with using Linux to host my own server, hence the server.ericsbinaryworld.com. And I wanted to do other things than just blog, hence the blog being in a subdirectory. Time has passed and Wordpress has grown to be a full CMS. I’ve gotten more sophisticated when it comes to the Internet and understanding how things work and should be structured. I’m not 100% sure right now, but I’m leaning towards moving the blog in Mid-April to www.ericsbinaryworld.com for simplicity and elegance’s sake. I’m not 100% sure because I’ve been at this URL FOREVER. At the same time, the Internet has wonderful things like redirects and since pretty much every domain registrar provides subdomains for free, I’ll be able to handle people coming to the old URL seamlessly. I might also condense a few of my other URLs to reduce the amount of money I’m paying each year to register my domains - especially since most of them are not getting enough traffic that it would matter if I gave them up. Unlike Jeff and some of the other Giant Bomb guys, I don’t have enough money to throw away on URLs just for fun. When the time comes and it’s certain, I’ll make another post so you can update your links, bookmarks, and RSS feeds.
Holy MOLY 9 YEARS!
[caption id=“attachment_6755” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] This blog was on the server on the right, the left is a server for Phi Sigma Pi[/caption]
Nine years ago today I started blogging using Wordpress. I’d been blogging for a little bit before that on Tripod (and I’ve been copying those posts over to this blog, so that post might not appear to be the first one. Those are the posts that start with [1.0]) , but this was when I took blogging into my own hands. I just can’t believe it’s been that long - it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been blogging for that long. The blog has moved from a server running Fedora Core 1 in my apartment in college to a server running BSD in my first apartment after marriage to being hosted on ServInt.
Fixed Headers and Comment Policy
Cleaned up the header menus (it was really bugging me that the second row only had one entry on most desktop computers) and added a Comment Policy page.
Header 1.0
My stats say there have already been 43 visits today, so some of you may have seen the header while in its state of flux. After talking it over with the wife (who also thinks the new theme looks more pro! yay!) and sleeping on it, I got the header to about 1.0 stage. I have a couple ideas on how I want to punch it up a bit more, but I want to give myself some time to mull it over.
New Header Image
Just got the new header image up. At least the first draft of it. I’m CLOSE to where I want to be with the header, but it’s going to take some thinking about it to see exactly what I want to change. Slowly, but surely, the website is moving towards what I want it to look like.
Moved Things Around
I’m not somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done with fixing the site to align with my new theme. I moved all but the ads to the footer. (No one’s going to pay to not be seen) I actually like the new design philosophy. Why constantly distract the viewer’s eye form your content with links to other posts or other sites. That can be saved for the end. I’m done with this post - now what? Well, what about these links here at the bottom. I might still need to move some of those around.
Finally Got Caught Up
I mentioned about two weeks ago that my scheduling for the site might temporarily fall apart. I finally got caught up so now I should be able to focus on meeting my weekly schedule. I’m going to try not to let things get that far behind again because I had to discard about a dozen blog post ideas because, while I saved the URL, I didn’t really feel the passion to write about that topic anymore. In some cases I couldn’t remember exactly what point I wanted to make. In other cases, I just couldn’t muster the same feelings for the topic so I just dropped it. I hope you do enjoy what I’ve written and queued up. I know I’m enjoying the comments of my regular readers.
Scheduling
When I decided I was going to blog 5 days a week, I picked five categories I wanted to blog about: Fatherhood/Family, Technology, Culture, Photography, and Politics. And because I only have a certain amount of time to write throughout my day - usually during my lunch break at work with a little bit at home - I started keeping a list of topics I wanted to talk about. The list has grown unwieldly and it’s getting to where I can’t remember the point I wanted to make on some of those posts. Sure, some of that is fixed by better note-taking, but a lot of it is that the way I like to write involves being in the moment. When it’s a month (or more) later, I might not really be in the same headspace to talk about that topic. So I’m going to work on paring back the list. I’m going to keep the same days for each topic so that there might start to be a few gaps in the schedule, but it should roughly even out.
Images
You may have noticed the images overlapping with the right-sidebar. That’s because I tend to write my posts ahead of time and I was expecting to have Wordpress 3.6 and the new, wider theme by now. But I’ll keep going things this way because while it might be a bit uglier now, it’ll look nicer in a few weeks when the new theme is finally out.
Additionally, I’m making some changes in my screenshots page to make use of galleries. Hope you find the new method a bit more organized-looking.
Change to Comments
In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling Wordpress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.
Tagline change
I’ve had the same tagline for a long time, but it hasn’t always been the same. In 2007 I had a focus on computer animation where I now focus on photography. I’ve been watching a lot of presentations from Wordcamp 2013 and one of them inspired me to focus on trying to blog every day (just as how I did photography every day for a year to practice photography and get better) and to focus on a certain topic per day.
Wordpress Upgrade
Know that there are a lot of errors on upgrading. Some files are not updating correctly via SVN. I had to do a fresh install and copy in my config/plugin/theme files. Annoying, but it’s done. I probably won’t be upgrading my other WP sites for a while.
Wordpress 3.0 is out!
Looks pretty awesome. I’m about to switch over. Hopefully nothing breaks.
A Word About Our Sponsors
Unlike some other web admins, I respect your ability to choose to have ads blocked. The ad providers brought them upon themselves by making ads really freakin’ annoying into the mid-2000s. I just want to say that I don’t run any of those kinds of ads on this site. I have an ad for Servint, the company where I have my site hosted. By clicking on that ad or the link for Servint in this post, you can help me recoup some hosting costs. If you sign up via that link, I will receive some amount of time (depending on the package you choose for hosting) of free hosting. I also have an affiliate program with B&H Photo and Video. I chose to have an affiliate program with them because I buy all of my camera equipment from B&H. Ever since I went to their store in NYC, I was very impressed with their customer service. Anything you buy from B&H from that link in this post or the ad on this page will net me some percentage of the cost which I will use to offset hosting this site. I also have some Google ads, but it’s against the terms of service to tell you to click on them. Instead I’ll tell you that you probably shouldn’t block Google ads in your adblock program because they are very unobtrusive and usually are only text so they won’t sap your bandwidth. Also, they are usually very relevant to the post or my site in general.
Temporary Offline Time Possible
I’m going to be moving my domain over to a new registrar in the next day or so (edit 14 Dec - I got extremely busy this weekend, so expect the possible change next weekend. At least this way there’s more warning time) and this site and other sites on this server may go offline temporarily while everything is sorted out.
Recent Search Terms
Looking over my search statistics I saw the searches that had recently led to my blog. Here are the most recent ones with comments on the strange ones:
mythtv totem makehuman review mario 64 3D model - I don’t think I’ve even mentioned this before. I’ve written about Mario and 3D models, but not 3D models of Mario “Rudy Winston” +Canon - I spoke about Rudy Winston’s talk at B&H. I wonder who’s searching for him and connecting him with Canon. rockbox anime themes - I haven’t really spoken about this hitchhikers guide to the galaxy binary - What would that binary be of? alvarez guedes diary joke gentoo vs opensuse 11.1 - Check out my Gentoo Posts and Opensuse 11.1 posts and compare. Garmin eTrex HCx tutorial bunny binary - binary bunnies? Hmm…. crunchbang rocks - It certainly does! ati fglrx sabayon 4.2 ta spring gentoo binary - Not sure what this means credit crunch bunny animation - what does the credit crunch have to do with a rabbit animation? top ten web of world pictures digital world human world interface opensuse 11.1 review
Another Reason The Web Rocks
A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:
My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!
We're back
Mysql database got corrupted so for a while there, the entire blog was out of operation. Fixed it and we’re back.
Twitter-like Post
A few quickies.
1) I fixed up a bunch of my links. Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website. So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.
- I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken. Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on. I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable. I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future. Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.
Gravatar Support is here
Since Wordpress 2.5 supports Gravatars, I discovered them and have enabled it. Gravatars are images that appear next to your comments next to this blog. To get one, go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and register one with your email address. Then use that email address when you leave comments on my blog. Right now I’m only allowing images rated up to PG, so keep that in mind.
Vietnamese Zodiac
In celebration of the new year, and to solve a problem that I explain on the page, here’s a program to figure out which Zodiac animal corresponds to each year: Vietnamese Zodiac
I’m still working some kinks out such as the fact that unicode is currently not working on my blog so depending on whether I’m testing a new feature there may be some breakage.
"Planned" Eric's Binary World Downtime
The electric company gave us a letter today stating that they’ll be doing some work on the lines and we may/will lose power on 27 or 28 Dec. Because I’m going to be extremely busy with my family at that time, I may not be able to get the server back up until 1 Jan 2008.
Sorry if that keeps you from enjoying my blog or Andrew’s blog or drop the bomb productions. I’ll get it back up as soon as I can.
Why do people come here?
I looked at the top 60 of 365 search strings people type into search engines when they come to my site. These represent 34.14% of the search terms people type to get here.
It seems that most people come here looking for:
- Relient K ( 7.4%)
- Gnewsense ( 5.2%)
- Fedora 8 ( 4.71%)
The best thing is that ever since I switched from blog posts with URLs that look like http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/p?923 to http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/year/month/day/posttitle/ the search engines have been bringing more and more relevant searches over to my server. Before they were way off topic due to the fact that the search engines were not picking up on my topics efficiently enough. As you know, I love having more people come because it means more readers and I don’t feel like I’m typing for no reason. Also, especially when it comes to Linux issues, I’d like to think that my posts can help others who are going through the same situations. When it comes to the specific search terms that people are coming over for when it comes to Fedora 8, it’s obvious they are coming with questions I provide the answers to. Here are some examples:
Flock Blogging now works for me!
Many many thanks to Flock engineers Erwan Loisant, Mike Dosik, and Patricia Bacon. They took time with me over the past few days to get my problem debugged and now categories worked. Here are the details in case you find yourself in my situation.
First of all, once they told me that it worked on Wordpress blogs in general, I was starting to think that it might be a problem on my end. It turns out that it was a problem on my end! After some debugging, Erwan found out that Flock was getting back the message that the pulling of the categories was requiring more than the alloted 8 MB for PHP memory. So I went in and increased that and now it works!
Sorry for the Outage
We keep losing power around here. I’m not sure who’s to blame. This time even the server lost power. That means that the power outage lasted longer than the UPS could handle. That’s quite a few minutes, so it wasn’t just a blip in the electricity.
Sorry if the outage kept you from getting somewhere on the server you needed to get to.
Andrew's upgrade went smoother
I just upgraded Andrew’s blog and his went much, much smoother than mine! That’s a good thing because I had left him behind in WP 1.5 because I was scared of messing up his blog. Now he’s caught up with WP 2.3.
Upgraded to Wordpress 2.3
Broke categories….now all of my posts are uncategorized….
everything else appears to be working well….
now to fix the categories again….
Permalinks
Finally went through what I needed to do to get the permalinks working on my blog! Now you can have nice URLs for my post which are easier to remember than before.
They’ve gone from: /?p=950
To: /2007/08/29/giving-nick-some-backbone/
to give an example from my last post.
News is supposed to be NEW
The reason behind the lack of my news or politics-related material recently is due to a very simple fact - the world has become boring. I haven’t seen anything new happening in months. The war in Iraq continues, stagnating at the pace of a glacier. Has anything new happened there? No. US soldiers continue to die every day. Sunni and Shi’a continue their slaughter. Iraqi politicians resign and rejoin, but no legislation of any consequence is passed.
Directions for the Train
Live near a big city with mass transit? Need to know how to get somewhere? Then use the RandMcNally of trains, HopStop.com. Also available on my blogroll, under the links category.
A Quick Reminder
Don’t forget to be careful of what you write in your blogs, myspaces, etc Express your opinion and interests, but be careful not to give away enough information that criminals can use it against you. Don’t talk about vacations ahead of time or what time you get off work normally and other such things. It’s hard and I’m sure I’ve made a mistake or two, but keep it in the back of your mind and the your time on the Internet will be much more pleasant.
Remodeled Homepage
After months of neglect, I’ve completely redone my homepage. Check it out at http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com
Bizzarre Stats
I don’t know wtf is going on with Google, but according to my web stats, 66 of you came here looking for info on anime conventions (this month alone). I’ve never talked much about them except to put up a picture of someone from an anime convention. It was this one or two:
Apparently there aren’t too many other blogs/sites out there talking about it or I wouldn’t get so many people coming here looking for it. The above pictures are probably responsible for the 32 people coming here looking for cosplay. (The second top search term) Another one that brought about 20 people here is the Order of the Engineer, which I blogged about the day I got it. Since then I haven’t mentioned it until today.
Looking back....wow.....
Today I was looking back through my original blog, It’s A Binary World (now 1.0), and it was interesting to see what I was writing about. I found some really fun posts. Here are links to the posts and some highlights.
When I started up this server and blog(of course it was on an old Fedora Core 1 machine back then):
Why does technology excite me so? I think because my knowledge of technology frees me from the slavery of others. I can run my own server with as much space as I want on it. I can post any content I want (as long as the goverment doesn’t shut me down q;o) and I can be free of paying for software that doesn’t work right out of the box -> by switching to Open Source alternative. Also…I’m a bit of a geek. q;o)
Downtime
Sorry about yesterday. Apparently my dynamic DNS hostname decided not to be dynamic. So, after about 30-40 minutes of checking and rebooting my machine (which had 65 days of uptime! - I think a power outage occurred two weeks ago), I realized the problem. If you can read this, it has propagated to your DNS server.
A few changes
If you click on any of the blog posts you will see two new things - related posts and links to tag my blog in digg, redit, etc.
I will be working on getting it showing on the main page too, but it’s not a big priority for me right now.
We're Back!
So lycos died today and they provide the name servers for my blog. So my server, all tripod, and all angelfire pages were inaccessible today. Didn’t see anything about it off their home page, but the roughly 6 hour outage was annoying as heck!
Glad to be back!
www.dropthebombproductions.com gets another overhaul
Well, after fixing it up the first time to deal with the fact that I had uploaded my videos to Vimeo, I found that the site looked a bit clunky. So I revamped the opening page and fixed up some of the organization of the content pages as well. In some cases I deleted references to obsolete things (such as 56k modem download times) and in others I added information about the Creative Commons. I also added a “legal” page where I discuss the Creative Commons and some of the legal implications of remixing my clips.
drop the bomb productions site revamped
Now that I have begun uploading my videos to Vimeo (and intend to digitize my portfolio) I have revamped my video production site to be much better organized. I will be adding new content in the next few months. A lot of it will be in my “Early Work” category as I upload videos I created during my High School years. If you haven’t seen any of my work, give it a shot. There’s stuff in every category from silly to serious!
A few fixes to the site
I realized the Monty Hall PHP program I had written didn’t really have any kind of description of what you should do on the page. So I went back through my blog and found the description and fixed that sucker up. So if you went there in the past and didn’t get what you were supposed to do, go ahead and give it another shot.
I also fixed my blogroll because a bug from Mauricio’s blog had been causing it to choke. That is now fixed as well and you can go ahead and check that page again.
Google Ads....
You may have noticed a new addition to the top of my page. I’ve decided to add in some Google ads to my page. Nothing else will change, I’m just trying to help earn a little extra cash. I’m new to the AdSense program, so be patient with me if things look weird or ugly until I get the hang of it. For now, it looks like they are showing PSAs, which they show if there aren’t any ads to serve up. Thanks guys.
September - best month yet!
In Sept I had 12,106 visitors to my server! That’s the highest yet!
rendering problems
there are some rendering problems with my blog right now and it is putting the sidebar - usually on the right side here, all the way at the bottom - very annoying. Just wanted to let you know where it is.
The new server is up!
This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is a right of passage all free and open source hackers go through on their way to fully grokking the OS. It always sounded a bit scary and risky to me - recompiling the one program that determines how EVERYTHING on your computer talks to the hardware. But I did it after just two tries! This whole experience has been a lot of fun and now we FINALLY have enough space on the server to allow the members to post all they need to and I can post more screenshots, pictures, and civ4 save files!
Setting up the FreeBSD server
Well, I’ll tell you one thing - FreeBSD does NOT hold your hand like Linux does. This has had both frustrating and enlightening effects. On the one hand, it’s been very annoying to have to deal with all manner of config files I never had to deal with before. Apache and MySQL didn’t just work as soon as I compiled them. Apache needed me to change the server’s name to an name actually resolvable and MySQL needed me to chown the directory it had installed to. Webalizer wasn’t automatically installed and I had to manually configure it.
FreeBSD is here!
I now have a FreeBSD 6.1 computer which will eventually take over the job of the server. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get everything set up correctly, but I’ll be sure to make a post when it’s ready.
Upgrade?
Danielle’s job is getting rid of some old computers - all of which are way, way better than my current server. My current server is a P II 333 Hz computer!!! And it only has a 4 GB hard drive, most of which is full! By contrast, the cheapest computer they’re selling at Danielle’s work is an 800 Mhz machine and we’re trying for a 1 Ghz machine! The hard drives on all the computers were 20 GB. Given its track record, I will be switching over from a Fedora Core 1 server to a FreeBSD 6.0-series server. I’ve been itchin’ to do this ever since I first read about the BSDs and their legendary status in the server world. Also, I’ll be able to implement a nice clean server as this server was originally a desktop install subsequently made into a server. Thus it’s cluttered with a bunch of useless stuff. I’ll also be able to implement file quotas from the beginning for those whose sites I am hosting here. It’ll be a fun little adventure for me, and a chance to start with the right intentions. Here’s hoping everyone didn’t already bid out the computers!
Overhaul
As part of my tasks today, I decided to clean up my home pages and eliminate a lot of the crud and invalid links. I just wanted to make it a bit more pleasing upon the eyes of my visitors. I still have some work to do at http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com, but I think that I like how http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/ looks now.
Happy Groundhog's Day
Happy Groundhog’s Day!
I’ll be taking the server down this weekend for some upgrades. See you on the other side.
Everything Block
I’m feeling really frustrated right now because, for the last week, I have felt that I had a picture idea or blog idea, but when I sit down to write or get my camera in hand, suddenly I can’t think of it. It’s right at the edge of my brain and I wish I could figure out what’s blocking the way or why I can’t just let it flow like usual. It’s especially unnerving when I read other blogs and see their thoughts flowing freely - easily translated from the firing of synapses to bits on a server somewhere.
Technorati Annoyances
Technorati.corn is a blog search engine. (They also search flickr images, but that’s a minor part of their operations) They are considered to be so important that, on more than one occassion, I have seen CNN’s Internet reporters referring to technorati’s top search items as expressive of what Americans (and others) are interested in. The top search items, appearing under the search bar in the home page, are updated every hour to reflect what most people are searching for. About 1-2 weeks ago, I finally joined technorati. I had always been pinging technorati, but you have to claim your blog for the results to show up publicly - at least that’s what it seemed like in my experience because when I searched for stuff I had blogged about before joining, it was not displayed.
milestone
I am now on post 202! If you combine this with my previous blog Eric’s Binary World 1.0, it comes out to about 900 posts!
We're back....in a hacked up sort of way
You may have noticed some instability in the blog recently. This is due to the fact that the place where my server is held recently switched to an ISP that blocks port 80 due to the Code Red Virus. As I’ll be moving soon, it didn’t make sense to enter into a contract with a business tier ISP for the server, so I had to do a few hacks to get the server running. A few more hacks this morning allowed me to get the blog working, since the blog kept looking for the old URI and I had to do some creative things with the URI in order to keep the same one working for those of you who have linked to the top level of my blog.
The new theme!
I have chosen the ramart theme, developed by the owner of a blog about Weird Al Yankovic. After going over all of the available themes, I chose this one because it best reflects what my blog has evolved into. As a blog mostly about technology news and the GNU/Linux operating system, I feel this theme best conveys my content. However, don’t worry that I won’t be talking about personal things, politics, or religion - it’s just a realization of the main topics of this blog as well as the fact that I ’m a VERY technological person. I mean, how many other people have three computers they use on an everyday basis, including a server. Finally, with the theme I was previously using I didn’t like the font as much - some of the letters ran together such as a c and an l - looking like a d.
Ch-ch-cha-anges
I believe that websites, magazines, blogs, and other media that people become accustomed to should always look the same. Afterall, that’s what people become comfortable with, so why change it up? However, I also realize that these things always change and it’s often for the better. In that vein, I am going to be changing up my blog a little bit. I don’t like that I’m just using one of the default templates for WordPress because what is it that distinguishes my blog from Andrew’s Blog or any of the others using the default template. It may take me a while to customize the template the way I want it, but I don’t want to take the server down again - it’s had enough downtime recently. Therefore, you may notice some changes on your visits until I get everything tweaked the way I want it. Thanks for you patience and see you on the better side of “It’s A Binary World 2.0”.
tumultuous times ahead
As we switch the server over to Fiber Optic lines (providing faster experience for you), you may experience some periods of downtime on the server. I hope to have things resolved by the end of the week.
Tampa and servers
I will be going on my honeymoon pretty soon and so my server will be the last thing on my mind. Besides that, there won’t be any Linux computers easily accessible because I’m not taking my laptop. This is bad news for the server because of the constant thunderstorms in Tampa. For the past two weeks we’ve had thunderstorms every day and we even lost electrical power a few days ago. Since a UPS costs money and I neither have paying advertisers nor paying hostees, if the power goes out, rebooting my server, there won’t be any service until I get back. Of course, this is sad for me too because it means you won’t get to read any of the pre-written posts I wrote, but, in all honesty, that’ll be the last thing on my mind. See ya when I get back!
We're back!!!
We’re back! The server should continue up uninterrupted until I finally move to my permanent home (sometime between Oct and Dec this year)
The end is...today (for now)
It has been a wonderful journey with this server. I have been able to be liberated and have my very own server. I am limited only in the space and hardware constraints of the machine. I can have SQL databases, php, and whatever else I wish to support. I have been able to have my own blog, fully customizable in the way that no other is. I have provided space for my friends; Andrew Laine used it to the fullest. That’s why I’m so sad to have to shut it down. But don’t worry! It’s just temporary! I plan to have it back up as soon as I can when I get back to my parent’s house. Then it will run until I move to my job location. After that it should be running for another long period of time.
official end date
This server will go down this Wednesday. It will be down at least until Tuesday while I move out of my university apartment.
The end is near ... really, this time
While it turns out that the place I’m living at never went with wireless, thus allowing me to keep the server running, I know for sure that we will be shutting down soon. There is always one problem with running your own server at home - when you move there’s no way to keep it on and connected. I’ll be leaving this place in about two weeks. After that I’m not sure how long it will be before the server is operational again. Ideally, it would be the following week. Since I’m also getting married soon, the timeline might be a little different. So if you try to come by two weeks from now and the site isn’t here - don’t worry, it’ll be back really soon.
Welcome a new wordpress blogger on my server as well as fellow Spider-fan
Andrew Laine who you may know from Temporary Insanity, a site hosted on my page, asked me today to hook him up with a blog. I was more than happy to oblige, as I had offered a blog to all those hosted on my site. Within five minutes he was set up and you can now see him at Andrew’s Random Ramblings. Apparently, just like me, he’s a big Spiderman fan. As you will remember, just days ago I wrote about Spidey in a 8 April post about buying the Amazing Spiderman collection on CD-ROM.
Let the flow of encrypted bits henceforth flow!
I have finally uploaded my public encryption key to the main pgp server that is the default on KGPG, the encryption program I use on my Linux computer. I also set up my Thunderbird email program to digitially sign all of the messages I send with my public key so that anyone who gets an email from my Gmail account will now have the assurance that I sent them the email and not someone spoofing me. In fact, if they have the ability to check GPG keys on their computer, they will be able to check the key against the server and make sure that the email has not been changed since I wrote it.
Milestones
I have reached a few server milestones this month. My previous post on this blog was my fiftieth post. Not bad for only two month’s worth of posting. Also, not only did I break 1 thousand visits, I surpassed it, and the month isn’t even over yet. I have come very close in the past few months, but I couldn’t get past the thousand mark.
A couple of things have helped to boost my visits. First of all, this blog is the most accessed page on my server. Out of the visitors to my server 1400 of the pages they visited were this blog! A lot of people have come over from the posts I made to the WordPress website. Many, Many others have come from search engines looking for Numa Numa information. I guess it pays to be talking about popular current events. In fact, about 70% of the visiors who came to my site from a search engine were searching for that phenomenon.
MOody with Music!
Hey, I finally got the MyMooMus plugin for WordPress working after taking a look at the code and clarifying the way to use the tags. I had originally misunderstood the way it worked and was a little frustrated when it appeared not to be working right. You’ll notice on the rest of my posts that I will be having my mood and the song I’m listening to posted. This was the last feature I was missing from my Tripod blog. Now I am 100% fully content with this software.
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What’s RSS? It is a syndication protocal allowing you to get people’s blogs and news websites’ headlines delivered to your email or web browser client so that you don’t need to surf to each and every one of them to read them. You can also save them onto your computer for future reading!
Wow, that sounds great! How do I get It’s A Binary World 2.0 Syndications? It’s very easy, especially if you are using Mozilla’s Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, simply click on “manage subscriptions” under “news and blogs” and then click add. You want to have the url:
reorganizing and Mo Rocca info
I’m not sure how many people have visited this blog site yet or how many are coming here independently through other sites. I know of one person who has confirming coming here and subscriping to the RSS feed. Anyway, you may have noticed I made some cosmetic changes to the site. I’m not 100% sure if it’s going to stay this way. I generally like to leave things the way they are. Since, however, I don’t know how many people are coming here right now and I intend to relaunch the site in a few months anyway, I figure it’s still ok. I put the calender above the links because as the links list grew it would have pushed the calendar way too far down the page. I also moved the categories above the links. I’m not sure if I will emulate the original It’s A Binary World on my tripod page and put the links over on the left side or if I will keep it all as one column here. The center may end up a bit too squished if I go for that, but stay tuned.