On every front except work, 2016 was a bad year for me.
Not in big ways; I didn’t have any major setbacks, bad injuries, or dramatic blowups. It just sucked in a low-key but consistent way.
It was bad in terms of the goals I set myself at the start of the year, too.
[more...]
I’ve been blogging regularly since 01 August 2006: every day for that first year, five times per week for four years after that, and at least once per week since 01 August 2011. Now it’s time for a break.
[more...]
I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with WordPress, despite the fact that it’s served me fairly faithfully for over seven years. The main reason is performance—this blog is now just too slow to load. There are definitely things I could do to tackle that, but having to do so is a sign that it’s not the right platform. The other reason is philosophical—I no longer think that a web application backed by a database is the best approach for a blog.
I’ve been thinking about writing my own—of course[1]. So first I should establish the requirements.
[more...]
For whatever reason, I’m struggling with my writing schedule at the moment, and changes I’m trying to make haven’t worked so far. Thus, this week all I have is another video:
Either I’ll figure it out and proper articles will start appearing regularly again, or I’ll have to reconsider the schedule entirely.
I’ve noticed over the last few months that I’ve had more and more difficulty writing about political subjects for my blog. This ranges from commentary on overly political matters such as legislative and judicial decisions to socio-political topics such as various forms of discrimination.
[more...]
Spam comments to my site have reached ridiculous levels over the last few weeks; in the last two weeks there were over 35,000 messages awaiting moderation and another 10,000 or so marked as spam.
I don’t have the ability to moderate that kind of volume, so I’ve taken a couple of steps to deal with it.
[more...]
Since my primary server died in February this year, I’ve been running tadhg.com on a cheap virtual machine. That’s worked fine, but the original server came back to life quite some time ago, and today I finally completed the process of moving tadhg.com back to it. The move is now complete, and hopefully you’re not seeing anything unexpected[1]. This post is about what’s involved in that move and what I’ve tried to improve along the way.
[more...]
I just haven’t been able to put together a blog post today. It hasn’t been the usual lack of ideas for topics, but rather that no topic will come together, somehow. So I’m calling it a night; between this and the laptop issues from two weeks ago, I’m two posts behind for the year…
Yes, really: this week’s post is on the French Open, and rain delayed the men’s final between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. The post will show up after the tournament is actually over.
A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
[more...]
Last week I went through a data loss scenario similar to last year’s, but with a less happy outcome—no miraculous recovery of the data this time. I screwed up some things in my backup infrastructure, so I did lose some data—and this should serve as a warning to you all. Backup your stuff, do it well, do it often, and don’t leave any holes.
[more...]
Stylistic choices I’ve made for my writing.
[more...]
I feel as if I did worse than usual on my goals for 2011, but that could be due to getting a bunch of them done early, with not many coming in the second half of the year.
[more...]
Today marks five years of posting to this blog at least five days per week (it was every day for the first year). Well over a thousand posts, on an eclectic variety of topics. When I started, in August 2006, my intent was to blog every day for a month. I did that, then kept on going, but after a year recognized that I needed some breaks in a week.
I’m quite proud of having posted that regularly for so long. That being said, it’s time for a change. The new schedule is a minimum of one post per week, posted Sundays (or earlier, but that effectively means Sundays).
[more...]
Observant readers may have noticed that tadhg.com was unavailable for much of last week, from Sunday 17 July to yesterday, 23 July. This affected my email as well as my blog, so if you sent me email in that period, it’s entirely possible that I didn’t get it (and, therefore, you should send it to me again if you haven’t heard from me).
[more...]
At time of writing, the server hosting my blog and email is down, and the possibility data recovery is uncertain. This makes me feel a little dumb, as I don’t have everything backed up. Not good, especially since I’m highly aware of the need for backups. But this server is where I generally back things up to, and having backups of it is something I was once better at but have lost the habit of. So if the data isn’t recoverable, I’m missing quite a lot, and it would be, at the least, a significant headache to get it back.
[more...]
As I write this, tadhg.com is down, and there’s no chance of it coming back before tomorrow. So I have a post to write, but in the knowledge that once I write it, I can’t put it on my blog for at least a day.
That makes writing it feel quite different, and makes explicit the extent to which I regard my posts specifically as blog posts. That might seem obvious, but there’s no real reason why my posts couldn’t be considered pieces of text that merely end up on a blog, pieces that could be reposted or repurposed elsewhere, rather than being categorized so strictly.
In writing this one, however, I feel acutely the sense of a lack of an audience; this is despite the fact that I know it’ll be read once the site is up and running again. If I regarded it more as an essay or story, that wouldn’t be the case, but intrinsically it is its own form, a blog post, and in this instance would make little sense as anything else.
Hopefully its phantom half-life will be brief.
Those of you who visit this site (as opposed to reading it via various proxies like Google Reader) will have noticed that the image in the site header changes. I’ve set it up to randomly select from several images, and this post contains brief commentary about those images.
[more...]
Since adding reCAPTCHA to my comment forms, the amount of spam comments I’m getting has dropped. Initially it dropped to almost nothing, but now it’s back up to several a day, which is annoying but not unmanageable. Still too high, and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t have email on my phone.
Before the current point of manageable spam was reached, however, I had accumulated 15,000 pending comments for my blog.
[more...]
I upgraded this blog today, the first time I’ve done that in over a year. Everything looks okay.
I’ve become slightly less paranoid about it; I still back everything up first, but I no longer preview the upgrade in my development environment, instead being prepared to restore from backups if something goes wrong. This might not be wise, but I’ve been lulled by the smooth upgrades the past few times.
I received a kind of monetization offer for this blog today, one that I hadn’t encountered before: a service that would pay me to put up articles that they would provide. The kicker would be the links at the bottom of these articles (no porn or gambling, they assured).
[more...]
Long-time readers of this blog will know that happiness is a recurring concern of my posts. Recently, I seem to have made some kind of significant step, or crossed some important line, towards happiness.
[more...]