meta – Among Mad People

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Anna Schwind — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:49:15 +0000

So I’ve had plenty of things going on, but I’ve not blogged much.Â In fact, since this blog is in a new location, none of you can see it yet.Â For a while, Facebook filled the need I had to send occasional messages out into the world, and after that, it seemed I’d left the old site derelict for so long that there was no point writing there anymore. I also spent two months this summer essentially without internet access, as well as frighteningly busy (more on that in another post), so blogging fell off the things to do list. Thinking about all the things I’d left pending, and how ugly the site was just made me ignore it.

But here I am, with a great new re-design and motivation to post again. Thanks to Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios for helping with the migration of the site, and for making it look so good.Â As any righteous book acknowledgment would tell you: where it looks good it’s to his credit, where it looks bad, the fault lies with me.

So welcome to my introductory (re-introductory?) post to let you know a little of the boring meta stuff.Â With any luck, this will be three posts down by the time the site goes live, thus recording the changes for posterity but without requiring anyone to read through them.

Things that are different:

I broke down and got the annaschwind.com domain name.Â That’s an acknowledgement that I’ve not buried the hatchet so far as writing is concerned and am engaged in brand building and marketing. Or something.
I switched from Nucleus to WordPress.Â I liked Nucleus fine, mind you, it just had the ability for (and sometimes required) way more customization than I was ready to put into it.Â So far the switch is a little bit like moving from PC to Mac land.Â Stuff just works, without wrangling and curses.Â Also, it’s aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Yeah. That’s a lot like moving from PC to Mac. Part of the ease with which the move happened was the assistance I had in migration (which was a headache I knew I had coming, and part of what made the old site languish) so I’m just talking about using one versus using the other here, not about transitioning.
I can now tag stuff! As if categories weren’t enough. Ha!
I’m no longer posting as Anarkey. I am not disavowing my online persona (you can still find me under that name in many a corner of the internet), I’m just linking it to my real life name now, because obscurity and anonymity are my enemies.

Things that are the same:

It’s still me writing, with all the notorious irregularity that implies. I’m not going to make any vows to post frequently, but neither will I vanish for six months at a go.
I still want to hear from you. Comment away.
We’re still playing the lyrics game! I’ll tote up the totals and see if I can’t place them in the sidebar.
I also owe some folks some crafty stuff from my crafty meme, which was one of the last things I posted. I am definitely not promising it by year’s end, but I’m promising I haven’t forgotten.

It’s good to be back. Enjoy the site!

We have always been at war with spam

Anna Schwind — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:38:25 +0000

I believe I may have outsmarted the spammers. For the moment. By installing one of those word recognition typing thingies. Sorry for the inconvenience to the living humans who comment.

This time when I say hello world maybe the world will say hello back.

Anna Schwind — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:33:19 +0000

Apparently comments have been broken since sometime in June. June 2007! Why didn’t anyone tell me! Well, I believe they are fixed now, retroactively, all the way back to October. Ecto was the culprit, starting when I upgraded it and installed it on my new laptop (Sinclair!) back in June. At any rate, comments should be fixed for future posts. I figure no one wants to comment on anything older than October so I’ll leave those older entries broken. Apologies to all my readers. Here I thought I was being too boring and sporadic for you. I kept asking questions no one answered, and I love comments, and I didn’t know you couldn’t answer. Please say something! Anything! It’s like an echo chamber in here without you.

So if you wanted to tell me the results of your political compass test, say, you could now do so on the entry where I asked about it. Or on this one. Or anywhere really!

Now to go to bed. My hand hurts. Tomorrow I vote in Missouri’s open primaries. Yay open primaries. If you are in the U.S. and a citizen, don’t forget to vote!

Huh.

Anna Schwind — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:16:04 +0000

Why didn’t anyone TELL me comments were broken? Geez! I thought you guys just didn’t love me anymore.

I’ll fix when I can, not right this minute, unfortunately.

Clarification plus all over the mapness

Anna Schwind — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:31:52 +0000

Quick business note, here. Last weekend I happened to notice that a legitimate comment got swallowed by Kurt’s Mighty Mighty Spam Filter. I usually wouldn’t even know this, but the system emailed it to me instead of just dumping it on the floor (though it did not post said comment, so the filtering part was in order). Why it sometimes emails me and sometimes doesn’t is a mystery I have not yet solved. At any rate, after fooling around with the blocker and such, I realized that anything in a comment marked http:// will be marked up by the commenting software prior to posting, and that the spam blocker reads that as two URLs. So, remember when I said limit your URLs to four? Your new limit is one. Feel free to post as many comments as you need to in order to pass along the URLs you’re dying to give me. Thanks.

Alright, admit it, you didn’t think I could do a whole week of posting daily. We’ll see if I can make it two.

So, the snow didn’t come last week, and we are actually supposed to hit mid-sixties this week. Thus the thing that had become a trend to me, snow before Thanksgiving two years in a row, seems to have ended. However, there was frost everywhere this morning, sub 30 degree temps, and the windshield had to be scraped.

Today I went into a (small, very organized) used book shop I’d never been in before and found Elizabeth Bear’s new book Blood and Iron. I snapped it up with great eagerness, unable to believe my luck. In the last two months I’ve almost bought it like four different times, but the price tag is just a little too steep for me. To be fair, I did buy the whole Jenny series out and out, so I’m not totally stealing food out of the author’s mouth. I also referred to my experience of salivating over Blood and Iron as “almost buying it at the unused books store” which my husband thought hilarious. I’m not sure why. I checked for Dhalgren and Little, Big while I was there, but no dice.

So even with my reading holiday coming up (I mentally think of my visits to my in-laws’ gorgeous lakeside home as reading holidays. They don’t care at all if I just hole up and read all day, only communicating at meal times. Their house is a reader’s heaven of comfy chairs and huge windows with tons of natural light.), I think I may have more books that I want to read next! now! today! than I can realistically take care of over this anticipated vacation. So, I’m thinking about posting a list of a dozen and picking the top five recommended ones to bring with me. Stay tuned. There’s always at least one book foisted onto me while I’m there (last year it was The Kite-Runner. Visit before that it was The Da Vinci Code) so I have to leave some space for that.

I keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the world’s fisheries. I’m starting to feel guilty about eating sushi.

I need to buy seville oranges, but all the local grocery stores only seem to carry navel. Ideas?

P.S. Deirdra I fixed your comment by dropping one of the URL’s and reposting it. Thanks, that studio is just down the street and I’m going to check it out as soon as I can and maybe take a class or two with different folks to see if any suits me.

My apologies.

Anna Schwind — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 14:42:34 +0000

I sometimes get overzealous with the banning of spam comments. I accidentally banned all comments ever yesterday, when I was really trying to ban matches on a certain url, and I can tell from the log that at least some of you have tried post a comment. Sorry! It’s fixed now. I love comments. Especially if they’re not from spammers. Feel free to comment away.

iTunes says I was listening to Sleeping in the Flowers from the album John Henry by They Might Be Giants when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

Minor Ch-ch-ch-changes

Anna Schwind — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 12:46:45 +0000

If you read this site through an RSS aggregator, most of this post does not apply to you.

It bugs me right now that geourl is down, so I can’t tell it I don’t live in Jackson anymore. It bugs me because I want to see who has blogs geographically close to mine, and geourl is the best way I know of to do that, and because I want to be accurate as to my physical location.

I’ve added Creative Commons licensing information, which I should have done ages ago. And I changed the NucleusCMS, Valid CSS and HTML4.01 validation buttons to be smaller and more pleasing to my eyes. I also added a button pimping Firefox because I think everyone should give it a try. You may be hesitant, but I thought I’d never stop using Galeon either and now I couldn’t be happier with Firefox. I also cleaned up a number of the RSS feed options. They’re still there and your aggregator should be able to find them but I took away the links because there was just too much clutter in the Navigation menu.

I’m thinking about the fact that I seem to be composing longer entries, but ecto doesn’t let me post anything into the extended entry field. Anything over 1500 words is probably too much on the front page, without a cut. I’m not sure what to do about that, except resolve to make shorter entries. Again. One of ecto’s good points is the ease with which I can link to things. You’ve probably noticed how much more I’m linking to these days.

I added some blogosphere stuff, like Technorati and TTLB ecosystem links. Talk about gaining perspective on the size and readership of one’s blog.

I added Orcinus to the list of blogs I read regularly.

My allconsuming.net project seems to be proceeding well, you can see the books I’ve mentioned lately here.

I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the number of spam comments the Pivot BlackList has caught. I went in to look at the plugin settings and realized that it had silently blocked hundreds of comment spam attempts since I installed it. What a wonderful thing! So wonderful, in fact, that I added a button pimping it to my left column.

I futzed around with the CSS, and I have no way of testing it on IE for windows. I’ve always wanted to float the right column instead of positioning it absolutely, and it’s now like that. I’m not sure I’m happy with the results. More futzing may ensue at some later time.

iTunes says I was listening to Slow Like Honey from the album “Tidal” by Fiona Apple when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

We could be sleeping in the flowers

Anna Schwind — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 20:23:56 +0000

So it looks like I finally have the AudioScrobbler plugin that I referred to in this post working, and you can also see, in the last two posts (which happen to be almost a week apart) the results of the CurrentMedia plugin. I like both at the moment, and think they will be a much easier way of telling you what I’m reading and listening to. I’m hoping having the little book icons there will motivate me to do more reviews as well. I have plenty to say about Persepolis when I get a chance. Perhaps tomorrow.

Plug it in, plug it in.

Anna Schwind — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:04:38 +0000

So in addition to the upgrade and the comment spam blocks, I’ve also added a couple of other features to the blog. First off, the hit counter is gone. You probably never saw it since it was way down on the left side of the page. I had reason to think (after comparing it to our website stats) that it wasn’t terribly accurate. For the curious, it had recorded about 75,000 hits since March 25, 2003. It’s gone now, both because I didn’t think it was correct and I was tired of it. Now that I have a full text RSS feed, I imagine there’s a number of people who read the site without hitting the site at all, so even an accurate count of hits wouldn’t have told me all that much. I also added a plugin to ping blo.gs as well as weblogs. This should supposedly be redundant, as blo.gs claims to crawl weblogs but weblogs has been intermittent for me, so maybe this will help with my blog visibility. I added a plugin that gives you the handy dandy mail to a friend link (yet another reason that hits don’t equal eyes or reads). I may add a printer friendly link too. Not sure if that would ever be used by anyone and it’s a lot of work (I have to design the printer friendly template for the printer friendly page myself) so I’m not sure I’ll put that into effect, but I’m thinking about it. I’ve also added a couple of plugins that may have far-reaching implications for my “At the moment” column on the right. I have one that will let me tag posts with what I’m listening to/watching/reading (but I haven’t tried it yet, and I may hate it) and also an AudioScrobbler plugin, which will be really super cool if I can get it to work. I fiddled with it to limited success yesterday, but I failed to get it functional. The cool thing about the AudioScrobbler plugin is that it would automagically note what I was listening to when I posted, which means extra information for you with no effort from me. A formula for success if I ever saw one! As for the Current Media plugin (currently reading/watching/listening to), I like being able to note what I’m reading as I post, and hope that if I do that, I might be better about telling you what I’m reading. For example, right now, the “At The Moment” column says I’m reading Dark is Rising aloud, which we finished about two weeks ago (and what an excellent book to be reading around Christmas, let me just say). It also never said I was reading Threshold, which I’ve also finished, and doesn’t now tell you I’m reading the The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 14. It’d also be a snap to pull this plugin into Sophia’s blog, where I could note some of the books she’s enjoying (a current favorite for her is Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business by Esphyr Slobodkina) without working too hard. Changing the file that displays under “At the Moment” isn’t difficult, but I think it’s a better place for some of my less quickly changing hobbies, like computer games and noting what movie I saw last and what books I’ve given up on. I’ll experiment with the new plugin and see if I like it. Comments, opinions and directives about the site are welcome.

Now I’m going to plug several products that I think are just wonderful. First of all, I’ve officially switched to Firefox as my browser and it’s incredible. Secondly, a while back I was listening to Last.fm, a really cool (but not as cool as the defunct Shasradio) online radio station. The folks at Last.fm are the same folks as the ones at AudioScrobbler, which is another nifty cool thing I highly recommend to anyone who has a large and oft-listened to music collection on their computer. Since moving I had been so avidly following my local public radio station – KWMU – (which completely rocks, by the way!) that my music listening habits had fallen by the wayside, but I’m trying to get back into that and you can see what I’ve been listening to lately by visiting Anarkey’s AudioScrobbler page. Hang in there, folks, I’ve just got a couple more things to rave about and then I’ll be done. Earlier, I mentioned RSS feeds and Firefox. If you use Firefox, then you should also be using the Sage extension. It’s an RSS aggregator that works with your browser. It has a clean display, is easy to use, and – best of all – tells you when pages you follow have been updated. This works best for pages that update erratically or infrequently, pages that annoy you to check daily because about 70 % of the time they haven’t changed, allowing you to forget about them until there’s something new there. If you’re like me, you have a number of cool links that are forgotten as soon as you bookmark them. In fact, if you’re like me, you’ve bookmarked a number of different things on about seven browsers on about four different machines and end up rediscovering things all the time, things that you needed but forgot where you had bookmarked and so had to search for again. Enter del.icio.us, a web-based bookmark station. As with all things web, this adds the dimension of community, by telling you what other people have bookmarked the same things you have and allowing you to browse their bookmarks. You can see mine at del.icio.us / Anarkey. Bookmark submission is easily accomplished through a toolbar javascript applet. Easy, convenient, always there. A different sort of bookmarking community can be seen at StumbleUpon which is a way to rate pages and find pages of cool things. It uses a set of interests that you set up when you create an account to decide what pages to show you, and whenever you are browsing and hit something extra cool you can click the thumbs up icon on your toolbar and add it to the pool of things for people to stumble upon.

And that is what I’ve been up to on this here internet lately.

Well that appeared to go smoothly.

Anna Schwind — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 15:19:46 +0000

The upgrade has been completed, and as near as I can tell, nothing’s broken. I added two plugins. One is a Nucleus wrapper for the Pivot-blacklist created by Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. I also added a Comment Control feature that prompts me anytime comments are added to threads that are over 60 days old. These comments aren’t posted, but are placed to a preview section, where I can look them over and approve them. Thus armed, I have re-enabled comments for the time being. We’ll see how effective I am against the spammers. Interestingly enough, I never disallowed comments on Sophia’s site, which suggests that a site must have a minimum amount of traffic before it’s noticed by the bots. It can’t be much, as I have a pretty low traffic blog, but it apparently there is a threshold beneath which they can’t be bothered.