Hi there! This site is the content that I used to have at momathome.com for reference.
For many, many years that site was self-hosted, but recently it fell victim to some hacking spammer and I decided to shut it off and start fresh.
Feel free to search around, but note that some entries have funky formatting due to missing text plug-ins, and some images are missing on older posts. But all 1,915 posts are here.
I am now posting fresh content at JudiSohn.com and I urge you to visit me there.
Not a fun Friday.
At some point yesterday morning, my WordPress database disappeared and was replaced with a default WordPress install.
It looked like this in Safari:
That tiny print is the copy that’s on a default WordPress installation, but with the Thesis theme I use applied to it…kind of. I couldn’t log in to wp-admin.
More troubling, the title of the blog was changed to a funky spam link.
I am a pretty good problem solver…when it’s someone else’s problem. When it’s my problem, I tend to be like a scene from Airplane. All panic and I can’t think logically.
Luckily, Erik was the one who brought the problem to my attention, and he stuck with me until the site was restored. Also working in my favor was the WordPress Database Backup plugin that I’ve had installed for years. It emails me a backup of my database every night. We used iChat for screen sharing, which worked really well. When we looked in phpMyAdmin, 6 years of blog content was gone.
Erik restored my database to the most recent backup I had been emailed. After the content was restored, I had to reset my .htaccess file and some Thesis settings. And it appears some posts have formatting issues now they didn’t before. But all-in-all the site seems no worse for wear.
To be safe, I changed all my passwords. Was I hacked? Database corruption? Security hole on the theme or plugin?
Nope.
Turns out, it was something that went wrong at MediaTemple (my host). I opened a support ticket after the site was restored, and a few hours later got this response:
I consulted with our admin staff about this issue. The reason for why your database data was missing was due to an issue on our end that we are aware of. I sincerely apologize for this happening to you. I have credited your account for the trouble.
Yikes! They credited me $20, and assured me that what happened wouldn’t happen again.
This was caused by a temporary problem on our end. Unfortunately, this was a matter of bad timing. I understand that you’re concerned that it would happen again, but without going into detail on what the issue on our end was I assure you it’s being taken care of and was not a normal circumstance.
We figure the spam title was because the default WordPress install that replaced my database was an older version which immediately fell victim to known security exploits.
Moral of the story:
MAKE SURE YOUR DATABASE IS BACKED UP.
I can’t imagine what I’d be going through right now if I didn’t have that backup file at the ready. The plugin I use is easy. There are other ways to do it. The geeks are rolling their eyes at the obvious advice, but the average, every day blogger with a self-hosted install doesn’t think of these things. We should.
Just do it. Backup. Now.
A lot of folks don’t realize that WordPress has the ability to save posts as “Pending Review.” This doesn’t mean much on a single-author personal blog, but it’s really handy on a group blog like WebWorkerDaily (VIP hosted at WordPress.com). When a writer saves a post with the “Pending Review” status, that tells me that they’re done with it and I can see at a glance the queue of posts that I have to work with.
Unfortunately, that’s all it does. I’m ready for the Automattic folks to take the next step. How about letting the editor or writer leave a comment in the post editing window? Right now, I have to go back to email to ask a writer a question or explain why a post isn’t being published. How about an option to notify the writer via email when their post has been scheduled or posted? An option to notify the editor that a post is in Pending Review?
If anything, WordPress 2.7 has taken a step back for multi-author blogs. In previous versions, the dashboard showed Administrators how many posts were pending review with a handy link right to those posts. Now, that information is buried on the Edit page requiring an extra click.
Once again, I waited a while before leaping into the upgrade. This was the day for it. I upgraded C3′s site to WordPress 2.7 this morning. The C3 upgrade didn’t quite go as smoothly as hoped. Turns out that there was something in one of the files in our custom theme that the upgrade didn’t like. Erik and I eventually got the kinks out.
Thankfully, upgrading this site went smoothly and was done in under 5 minutes. I was waiting to be sure my theme was compatible, which it now is.
Truth be told, I was dragging my heels on upgrading based on my experience with WebWorkerDaily which runs on WordPress.com and has been on 2.7 for a while now. As a blogger, there’s a lot to like about 2.7. As an editor, not so much. For starters, the “at a glance” view in WordPress 2.6.x used to tell me how many posts I had pending my review. WordPress 2.7′s dashboard no longer shows that info, so I have extra clicks to see if there are posts I need to read/schedule.
I’d also like to find a plug-in or Greasemonkey script which makes the font in the WYSIWYG editing window a little larger. On a large monitor, this window gets wide and very difficult to read with the smaller type size.
My 2009 resolution: get my blogging voice back.
I haven’t really gone anywhere. My attention has been divided between Twitter, Facebook and now my latest addiction, Ravelry. As such, my blog has been neglected. I’ve “written” hundreds of posts in my head…I just can’t seem to get them in to the editor with any regularity.
I’m not that sorry to say goodbye to 2008. 2009 represents a fresh start.
I wish everyone a healthy and happy new year.
No, this has nothing to do with the Presidential election.
A while back I played with Disqus, a hosted blog comment management system. I like the idea of threaded comments and easier comment management/layout tools. In practice, I found Disqus to be a little klunky and so I removed it.
Then Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Disqus’ biggest competitor: Intense Debate. They locked the software down to new sign-ups while they tweaked the code. I applied for a beta invite which just came through this morning. I may be imagining it, but there’s a certain extra level of trust now that it’s an Automattic product. It also now uses Akismet for spam filtering and it supports Gravatar images.
Intense Debate, like Disqus, allows you to import/export/sync your comments between their hosted system and your blog’s own server. So you can switch back and forth and not worry about losing anything already in your database (which you backup nightly anyway, right?) or on Intense Debate should you decide to switch back later.
The best part about systems like Intense Debate is that it links conversations together across the blogosphere. You can log into a single interface to follow/track your comments and the comments of others across multiple Intense Debate-enabled blogs. This is where I think Intense Debate will have the most value. As an Automattic product, I think it will eventually have better adoption than Disqus. The more blogs using Intense Debate, the better it will be in the long run.
It has some little bells and whistles, like a widget for displaying recent comments in a sidebar (you can see it already in mine) and a Feed Flare for adding comment counts to FeedBurner RSS feeds.
What I’m not seeing yet is a way of author highlighting my comments here.
So far, I think I like Intense Debate. It was even easier to install/configure than Disqus was, and the layout is less fussy. It took about an hour for my blog’s 3000+ comments to be imported. I’m not disappointed with the way the comments look and behave, and I haven’t had to touch a line of CSS yet. We’ll see how it goes as I leave it here for a while. Please let me know if it really sucks, okay? I have it set to just filter spam but not require any other moderation at the moment. I was approving all legitimate comments anyway.
I’ll be using this post to test, so if the comments seem a little funky here, that’s why.
So much has changed in my life over the past few weeks. As typically happens when I go through a big upheaval in my life, my blog’s theme no longer feels like “me.” The current previous theme served me well when I had to make a quick, solid break from the old layout. Now it’s time for something new.
After spending a few days looking at more free and premium WordPress theme sites than I can count, I kept coming back to Thesis. It’s one of the most expensive themes that I looked at. But for $87 it’s beautiful, clean & simple, customizable and well-supported. So here goes nothing. I’m going to activate it and see how it goes.
So if you’re reading this post live on the site this weekend, who knows what you’re going to see. I’m hoping that it won’t take long to get the theme customized to my liking.
Update: It’s coming along nicely. I’m still going to tweak a bit here and there, but it’s heading in the right direction. The ease in which one can update a site with a whole new look and feel is what I love about WordPress (I’m sure this is easy in MovableType now too, it was’t when I switched to WordPress nearly 2 years ago).
The WordPress app for the iPhone is finally out. I’m using it for this post.
Like the Salesforce app it’s a decent first effort but lacking key features. I would have liked to see some basic comment moderation. It’s fine for quick posts which is what I guess it was designed for.
I’ve been reading all the noise about Google Friend Connect and Facebook from an amused distance.
Google Friend Connect is very similar to something like Yahoo’s MyBlogLog where website publishers (someone like me) can build an instant community around their blog, right on their blog. Widgetized social networks, if you will.
I get that Google isn’t actually retaining any Facebook data so that whole thing around Facebook blocking access is kind of silly. Let’s say that “Jill’s Curly Hair Blog” has Friend Connect on it, and my Facebook friend Mary joins that network. It will only impact me as Mary’s friend if I join the site too. Then I’ll be able to say, “Oh! Hey, my friend Mary is here.” Otherwise, the fact that Mary and I are Facebook friends remains between Mary and me. If my Facebook friend Pete joins “Bob’s Muscle Cars Rule” blog, my life (and my data) won’t change, other than my seeing that fact in a news stream on Facebook or on Pete’s profile.
I never joined MyBlogLog because I can’t see the practical utility of it. Either for my site or as a participant on someone else’s. If there is a thread that interests me and I want to be a part of that conversation, I do so by either leaving a comment or blogging about it knowing that the pingback will leave a trail. But ongoing “membership” on someone’s personal blog? Not so much. Especially if it depends on the sites/communities I care about also belonging to MyBlogLog or Friend Connect.
That’s why I like FriendFeed, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader shared feeds, etc. If someone likes what I have to say, they’ll build community around it by sharing it to places that people go to see what people they care about are sharing. They don’t necessarily need to make a commitment to my site and turn over their avatar to appear in a little window for my site to be part of the global conversation.
Sure, the larger more well-known sites have hundreds of members, but when I click around MyBlogLog it doesn’t take long to see that the vast majority of sites have so few members it looks a little pitiful.
I would much rather see the ability to search Facebook friends to see common friends on Twitter or FriendFeed, than to see on a blog I’m visiting which of my friends also reads the same blog. The web is fractured enough. We need more aggregation and filtering, and less mini communities that will only make the small blog publisher feel more out of the loop when their numbers don’t stack up.
I guess I’m just waiting for all this to solve a unique problem, rather than just exist to compete for attention within the tech blogging echo chamber. I want to see Google pay more attention to making their own Gmail contact data more usable for their users than worrying about connecting users to Facebook data.
I’m also hoping that video comments on blogs die a quick and painful death.
I love well-produced online video as much as anyone else. The best talking head videos are that way because people work hard to make sure the sound and lighting are good, and they know what they’re going to say before they open their mouths.
When I’m scanning a comment thread, I have absolutely no desire to see what someone has to say on the subject sitting there in their pajamas, mumbling into their webcam in a dimly lit room with some sort of strange feedback buzz over it all. I don’t need to hear them fumble for words…um, I think…you know…um, like…
If I’m reading a blog and my family is nearby, I’m not going to click on a video comment that may or may not have language on it that I don’t want my children to hear. I may be in a public place. I may already have headphones on because I’m listening to something else and I’m not going to stop iTunes just to hang on their every word waiting for them to say something profound. Sorry.
Considering that I’ve been waiting over a year to be able to post that headline, you think I wouldn’t have waited nearly a week to write this blog.
A bit of an improvement over the old one:
The new site was well over a year in the making. Not because it’s all that complex, but it’s been difficult to focus a very small organization on all the moving parts that had to go into a ground-up rethinking of a website on a small budget.
Some details…
