Saturday, August 15, 2009
If you’ve been visiting the ol’ haikufactory lately, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of “500 Internal Server Error” messages popping up. This is being caused by PHP processes hanging. I’ve had no luck at all tracing the problem, but my suspicion is that a WordPress plugin is the cause, so I’ve turned them all off. If the error keep happening, then that wasn’t the problem. If that stops it, I’ll start reactivating things. In the meantime, my movie review archive is unavailable, and if you write a comment and don’t see it immediately, email me and I’ll make sure it gets posted.
Between you, me and the sidebar, though, I think this is just my blogging software acting out due to the fact that Facebook and Twitter have pretty much killed personal blogging. But can I write 500 word articles about mediocre movies to an audience of about five on Facebook and Twitter? No, I cannot. I’ve checked.
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The look the site has been sporting the past few weeks was never intended to be permanent, so I figured I’d best be demonstrating that fact by shaking things up. So I’m in the process of looking for a theme that I like, that works with the various site elements (like the movie reviews side bar), and that I can tweak to make my own reasonably easy. Until that’s all figured out, you can probably expect some broken-ness to various degrees around the ol’ haiku factory, and for that (and only that) I do apologize.
Currently up: Elegant Grunge, with a brand-new phones-in-Bangkok banner made out of my old phones-in-Bangkok banner. God bless whoever invented transparency and drop shadows. Where would hack designer wannabes like yours truly be without them?
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If you’ve been visiting the site in the past few weeks, you may have noticed it’s not been working so well. You might even be getting weird, not-at-all-helpful server errors.
According to Dreamhost, my site has been spawning too many processes for the server to handle. I haven’t changed any of the code, and my traffic hasn’t increased, so I’m not sure why this problem suddenly appeared. I’ve removed the sidebar widgets (where the most potentially-dodgy code lives) until I’m able to figure it out or until I just switch hosting companies.
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Monday, September 1, 2008
I don’t think I’m a particularly hard worker (note to future employers: just kidding! hahahaha!), but I have been working pretty hard at my current job for almost a year now. One of the consequences of that is that when I do have a day off and really, nothing at all to da — like, say, today — I tend to get a little bit bored and antsy. And so, after cleaning the bathroom, hanging up new box shelves, looking at sofas, going for a run, and reading my Nixon book, I decided it was time to do some fixing up of the old blog.
However, the changes I made were subtle. So subtle, I’m probably going to have to draw your attention to them.
I updated my curriculum vitae and publication pages, which were a year out of date. I upgraded the version of WordPress I’m running. I added several new sidebar items. I also decided to change the way I do my movie reviews. For a long time, I was posting them in the sidebar. Lately, I’ve been posting them on the main blog, mixed in with other random details, and only posting the star ratings in the sidebar. I still kind of like the idea, but I’m finding it hard sometimes to find anything interesting to say, or the time to write something longish for every movie. Plus, I actually kind of enjoy writing very concise reviews. So I think I’ll be going back to the sidebar for my short reviews, and posting the occasional long review as a blog article.
This is probably also a good time to remind anyone who cares that you can see reviews of every movie I’ve seen for the past 2 years plus, organized by date, title or rating, right here.
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Not only is it rude (I don’t pay much for my hosting, but I do have to pay), but if the target site belongs to some kind of computer-oriented smartass, they might do something like this.
before
after
Yes, yes, I know: she probably doesn’t know any better and I’m a terrible, terrible person. But before you judge me too harshly, just consider the images I could have planted. Plus, while I love Buffalo ’66 dearly, wouldn’t it have been just the tiniest little bit better with a sarcastic, cat-eating Melmacian in the mix?