this woman’s work

Maybe I’m lucky enough to get to show you first because it’s been making the rounds! (Brett smirked, especially because I showed it to him and then headed down to the basement to growl at the computer screen.)

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

You must get this extension: Better GReader :: Firefox Add-ons

It lets you click within your google reader to open a person’s page, which means no more clicking through the reader and opening a new tab or page so you can comment or read past the short excerpts. That way when you’re done reading (and commenting) you just keep scrolling through your reads. Yes, my friends, you never need to leave your feedreader to read your blog friends!

Excerpts of feeds? DRIVE ME CRAZY. I know some of you are all about the stats (and may I mention that if you have wordpress and are hosting you can use the feedburner plugin to see how many people subscribe to your feed regardless of where they’re reading — no it doesn’t help your ad stats but it’s good for the ego).

It’s rare that I click through to read a whole entry because I’m subscribed to (I just checked) 269 blogs so yes, generally I scan (a bunch of those are work-ish related and a handful of total timesuck mp3 blogs but that’s also not counting my livejournal friends list). But now my feedreading life is easier!

Please join me in the goodness that is  Better GReader.

(I assume, of course, that you’re already a Firefox person and not using that bane of the web designer’s existence, Internet Explorer. And if you’re not, join the beauty that is the opensource platform!)

I think I need to start taking down some archives. My site is just too big, my database is just too complicated. I think that what I’d like to do is whittle things down and streamline it. The reason NOT to do it just yet is that the ridiculous size of my archives gives me great search engine juice and frankly, I need my hits to stay up while I work on selling my book.

So that’s another reason I hope to sell my book. Fame, fortune and a smaller blog. (Truthfully I do not expect fame or fortune — just more opportunity. But a smaller blog, now that’s a realistic goal!)

I’ve got a bunch of work to do but want to write an Actual Blog Entry today if I clear my desk soon enough. Here’s hoping!!

I upgraded wordpress from 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 because there are security holes in 2.3.2 and also because wordpress reminds you to upgrade and I got sick of looking at the upgrade reminder. And somehow this upgrade, which changed out three or four tiny files, wiped out my database. So I lost most of January and what I had of February so far.

Ok, so I have a backup of my database and I went to restore it but for some reason it wouldn’t take. (That’s why my theme looks funky and my sidebars are empty.) I have no idea why and the wordpress geeks have no idea why. These are the kinds of things that shouldn’t happen. Because I have about 50 megs of entries on here it took a long, long time to strip the exported file down to something manageable to import. (About two hours to be exact. And this was after I did some handy-dandy footwork to get the content, which would take too long to explain but of which I am very proud because I had to get quite creative to figure out a work-around.) Then because I hadn’t backed up since 1/7, I had to go and swipe my other content from livejournal even though there was at least a week the crossposter wouldn’t work that I’m missing and I was too tired to strip out the “this post originally appeared on” header. I also lost all of your lovely comments.

But at least most of it is here.

And now I’ll back my database up once a month. (Wordpress has a plugin to do this but my site is so big that it sometimes times out. I messed with a setting and hopefully it’ll work now.)

I swear — I’m having the worst blog luck so far this year. I think my horoscope said something about that…

I’m pointing my nameservers back to my old site. For the non-techie among you basically my domain name (thiswomanswork.com) will now take you to my old host instead of to my new host, or will at least when the internets catches up to the change. I don’t want to keep blogging here because I am going to move, darnit, if I CAN move and while I’m in progress it’s a nuisance to blog here, re-export my database, etc.

(Note: Most people can export their blogs, no problem. My blog for reasons I cannot fathom is missing it’s export link so I can’t export it thus the giant database move. And that may be it — my blog may be too big. I can’t find an answer on the forums.)

Please don’t let this scare you from wordpress or web sites and all that. If you don’t mess with your site much you’re unlikely to have such juice, complicated problems. Me, I mess with my sites. I know, I know. You’d think I’d learn my lesson, right? Well, you’d think wrong because I never learn my lessons. At least not about messing with my blog. But this does convince me not to mess with my work sites too much. See, I learn a little bit. You can say that for me, at least.

Damn, I’m discouraged.