Category: iohelix

So I’ve decided that I want to keep my personal site and my professional site more separate, as well as give everyone in the family a matching email address and allow for growth within the family website, so I’ve created welkerfam.net.

Anything that is of a personal nature will be found over there, and all of my more professional/programming things will remain here at the iohelix.

Feel free to head on over and check it out. It’s pretty fresh, and I’m still getting things moved over properly, so I’ll keep a copy here as well for about a month or so until everything has been ported over properly, but it’s up and running.

Since my wife and I started using a blog again, I was thinking it would be cool to go back in my archives and grab the old posts I had on here years ago, and try to find a way to import them back into the blog.

So I started looking in my backups folder for a database dump that would have the blog posts in it, and I searched and searched, but could not find the most recent version of it.  I have a coupe older ones, and some really old ones, but not any that were from right before I deleted the blogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a backup of them, or if I did, I don’t know why I didn’t keep it in a safe place, but I didn’t.

So I jumped on the wayback machine, and found one more post that I didn’t have in my backup.  I imported the backup into my database at home, installed the version of WordPress I had when the posts were made (also via the wayback machine), and posted that last one that was missing.  Then I installed the latest version of WordPress, made an export file, and imported them into this incarnation.

So now I have posts that go back about 5 years (albeit very sporadically), with the possibility of a few missing that are probably gone for good, unless I happen to find an old dump somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I doubt it…   oh well.

I’m off to make a backup of my site right now, and I’ll label it ‘Keep’, because obviously, the method I have now doesn’t work.

Maybe I should start putting my site backups in Subversion…

Anywho… enjoy the old posts.

so my webhosting company was recently bought out and decided in all thier wisdom to follow the old adage of “if it’s not broke, break it, then don’t fix it”.  ok, maybe it’s not an old adage, but it sure does fit the situation.

the new company decided to move all the websites to new servers and in the process broke just about every one of the thousands of sites hosted on those servers, mine included.  and it doesn’t stop there.  in the past couple of weeks, my site has been off and on more than a newbie dj mixing with cassette tapes.

it seems like every couple of hours the site goes down, only to be back up again (but with limited functionality) the next time i see it.  it’s getting really annoying.  and the support people are not really helping, but it’s not entirely thier fault, because it seems that the errors are not happening everywhere in the country.
anywho…  the whole point of the post is to let everybody know why the site has been being stupid lately.

…and don’t host your site with WebHostPlus.

since writing ‘rss feeds in your inbox‘, the post letting people know how to get my blog in their inbox, i have upgraded the blogging software.
this has changed the rss feed url.  the new rss feed url is:

http://www.iohelix.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2
http:/iohelix.net/blog/feed

so there ya go, all fixed.

i stated in a post back when i switched over to this blogging software that one of the best things about it was that it automagically blocks all incoming spam.

well…  it’s still doing it and rocking it like nobody’s buisiness. last night i got about 15 emails letting me know there were comments waiting to be approved and not a single one of them was legitimate.

if i hadn’t switched to wordpress, i would have been sifting through my blog searching for all of the comment spam right now.

now all we need is a way to really piss them off when they try to spam us. by maybe freezing thier comp for a while everytime they try to send spam, so that if they hit the wrong place thier comp freezes for the rest of the day…  yeah, that would be cool.

stupid spammers. it’s not even like they’re trying to get you to buy something cool either. i mean, really, who gets a spam and think, “ya know, i’ve been meaning to have my penis enlarged, i should give these people in that third-world country a call, i bet they could do it really well.”

nope, doesn’t happen.

well… wordpress 1.5 came out not too long ago, and i’ve upgraded the blog software as you may be noticing right now. the only thing that sucks is they changed the whole skinning process and started to use themes. i’m sure it’s a step in a positive direction, but now i’ve got to figure out how to skin the darn thing and get my old skin back (which was based on Human Condition by Ian Main)
so i’ll probably be working on that soon, and i hope that this new version is everything they say it is…

but it should be, the people over at wordpress are super cool and probably the best developers anywhere… keepin it real, just like it should be.

*UPDATE*:
as you can see, the theme is coming along nicely, i’m learning some cool things about wordpress and have implemented a few upgrades and plugins to make the iohelix blog experience even better.

i just discovered that, when using a compatible mail client (such as mozilla thunderbird), you can have my blog entries sent right to your inbox without having to check the site every day.

this is also true of any RSS feed.

so, what are you waiting for?  get the latest version of thunderbird and check it out !

there is also, as of the time of this writing, a Release Candidate for the 1.0 version of thunderbird.

you may want to check that out as it has many bug fixes and newer features.

now for the instructions:

to set up thunderbird to read the rss feed, click on Tools -> Account Settings…
then select ‘News & Blogs’ from the menu on the left. this will allow you to click the button labeled ‘Manage Subscriptions…’

click the button labeled ‘Add’, and in the Feed URL: box enter http://www.iohelix.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2http://www.iohelix.net/blog/feed
(this address can also be found on the main page of the blog in the box labeled “META” on the menu side of the page, as well as some other feeds, like the comments)

click ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ again, and ‘OK’ one more time.

after you have returned to the main thunderbird screen, click on ‘Get Mail’ in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and watch in wonderment as the blog posts appear automagically in your inbox.

anytime i make a new post, it will appear there all bolded and highlighted and ready for your reading pleasure.

if you wish to comment on one of my posts, just click on the link provided in the header info of the post and it will sweep you off to internet land where you can view the post on my site and add comments however you see fit.

amazing, isn’t it?

that is all…   for now…

this new blog software has got to be the best thing ever.

it looks pretty cool, the back end is awesome and the best thing is…  automatic comment moderation.
which means, i don’t have to sift through all of the comments any more and search for comment spam. before a comment hits the screen, it’s sent to a queue where it sits waiting for me to delete it before ever appearing on the blog.

nice.

except that i didn’t have any comment spam until i added the link to the old location of the blog…

maybe thats my fault, maybe it was inevitable, either way, i still don’t have to sift through them.

yay  =)

i got done putting the finishing touches on my new and improved website layout last night, made a few new pics for the walls section, and uploaded them today. take a look around at the new site and enjoy!

i really like the cleanliness of the whole layout, its very easy on the eyes, no part is too contrasted, and they all blend very smoothly. if you’re using mozilla or firefox as your browser, you also get an added bonus, if you’ll look in the blog (which you are right now), you’ll notice that as you move the screen up and down, the background doesn’t move, not even inside the light parts. makes for a really interesting effect. i kinda like it. oh well, enough about me, lets talk about you.

leave comments if you wish, or sign the guestbook and let me know what you think.

plur, lahter.