Today was "update stuff that hasn't been updated for years" day. It started out well enough, I updated the installation of eFiction on Hafoc's website and things went swimmingly. There's a  major update on that forthcoming, slowly, and I'm sure all the problems I didn't have today will show up then.

Then I went to work on Omnifariously Knotty and pretty much crashed and burned.

My problem there is that I dearly love the layout theme, but it's not been updated in over two and a half years. I've used some tweaks that other people have created, or tried to. One works (the date tabs include year for posts over a year old), but the one I worked on again today worked only partially. It was supposed to wrap the main content under the second column to use some of the wasted space as you scroll down. Well it worked great on the "home" page but when I when I checked it on the Categories page and the About page... nope. The content ran under the second column. No matter how often I look at the assorted template files I can't see why it works on home.php and not on categories.php or any of the other files that I tweaked. It's one line added to them, not exactly a lot of room in that for errors.

There is also a much more annoying problem with that layout. I've installed the OpenID plugin on my instance of WordPress but the layout doesn't display the option to use it. I poked and fiddled with the comments.php file today to try to get that fixed. That also didn't go well. I need to learn how to use php with forms (or at all really) and figure out how to construct the if/else loop in there to drop through the options of having a login account (which no one has other than me), supplying an email address, or using OpenID. Sure, as the site stands now people can use a name and email to comment, but I'd really, really like to have OpenID as an option.

Maybe I should just go looking for a different layout theme. *sigh*

I'm contemplating setting up a blog in my domain for a craft blog. It would have postings about patterns I'll be putting up for sale (and I'll probably have a few free ones) and assorted technique and springboard ideas. Since I'm into more than one craft (even if it looks like all knitting all the time these days) I need a non-craft specific name for the blog. The blog name will end up being used as my Ravelry store name as well so it shouldn't be too cutesy or generic.

The sorts of things that are likely to turn up on the craft blog:
knitting patterns
"choose your own" knitting pattern (AKA, fill in your own gauge and measurement guides)
knitting technique tutorials
how to make knitting charts with a decent paint program (PSP for me but it plan to generalize)
crochet patterns
sewing patterns
how to draft sewing patterns (specific patterns that I don't feel like grading and working up PDFs for)
beading projects
wire projects
heck, maybe some soap recipes
tatting patterns, if I ever do more than dabble with it
ditto with sprang

You get the general idea. :)

I was thinking "Making Stuph" but that is very generic, even with the verging on cutesy Stuph spelling. "Teph Makes Stuph" is today's thought. Whatever I come up with will have a subdomain on tephras.com so whatever.tephras.com should also be a memorable URL easily associated with the site name.

I'm sort of tempted to swipe the name of my dead crafting comm on LJ, Internet Refrigerator, iFridge.tephras.com? :D Yes, I could do the technique posts to internet_fridge, and I may do that, but it wouldn't be kosher to take that comm for the pattern selling part of the plan.

Some one toss me some ideas? Random thoughts?

Crafty Pantry just popped into my head. I need to kill it with fire.

So I've been working on a mock up of hafoc's site on my domain, and I have the story archive and site news part of it going all awesome with a lightly modified version of eFiction. I even have a few skins all modded up and ready for use. I thought I was just at the point of skinning out the forums to match and that it would be all downhill from here.

Then I tried installing the software on his domain.

Let me point out, we have the same hosting service and hosting package level.

The software that installed so nice on my domain? Will not install on his. I've created and destroyed four SQL databases today trying to get eFiction installed on his domain and keep getting the same SQL error. Now either they've updated the SQL version in the last week (which they haven't, according to their FAQ and everything I can find on their site about the versions of MySQL and PHP on the site) or something is different about the eFiction installer.

You see, on my domain I installed 3.0 and then discovered right afterward that 3.2 was out so I upgraded. On Hafoc's domain I am trying to install 3.2 directly.

Wouldn't you know that I can't find a copy of the 3.0 zip anywhere? I know it had a security hole but normally you can find an old copy of a program somewhere online.

But then this is eFiction, the one piece of software you can search for with google and get three pages of results of sites using the software without actually finding the homepage and download site for it.

My head hurts.

Update: A very kind soul over in the eFiction support forums sent me the zip for version 3.0 which installed just fine and was upgraded to 3.2 immediately. So that part of Hafoc's site just needs content and a few tweaks (like the text of the Creative Commons license he's using).

Next up is yet another stab at forums now that Hafoc has revised, again, what he wants out of them. I'll have to do some skinning work to make the look and feel from the story archive carry over and I'm not looking forward to that. Skinning eFiction is relatively easy but phpBB is a bit more complex. At least I don't have to bridge the databases.

I was telling hafoc I had the spammer issues on the forums pretty well taken care of... and not half an hour later I went to poke around at it more and found that a spammer had managed to register, even with visual code verification and requiring an activation through email.

<insert truly vile language here>

So I find myself trying to decide while modifications to the forum code are more likely to work to prevent this sort of thing since apparently just needing people to read a code out of an image and type it in AND click a link in an activation email isn't enough. The "best" choices (meaning the ones that have more "yay it works!" comments than "I can't get this to install" comments) are to do a different visual confirmation system (requiring a person to indicate if the supplied image is an animal or not and allowing me to supply my own images) and/or to add a bright red message telling people to leave the profile section of the registration empty and then reject any application that has anything in that section.

The former would undoubtedly look better but may conflict with the visual confirmation of the first post modification I've already done.

The latter is unlikely to conflict with anything but is a bit obnoxious. There is a variant that just hides the profile section of the registration form, which is visually more elegant, but apparently bots are "smart" enough to check if a field is hidden and then simply not fill it in.

Fucking spammers.

And several points about the basic forum code make me wonder if they even thought about security, it seems if you want to prevent harvesting of your member's email addresses you have to either trust they will tick the "hide address" box of install a MOD. Version 3 might solve some of my issues but it's still in beta (though it seems to be close to release.) Of course there will likely be a lag between the release of 3 and the release of compliant MODs.

Well, enough for tonight, sleep time. *Zzzzzz*

God Checker

I decided to check out the Japanese section and the intro has me snickering:

"The Japanese have 800 myriads of Gods which must cause a few congestion problems on their islands.

"They appear to have a tendency to worship anything if it stays still long enough and looks interesting enough. Photography has replaced Iconography and pilgrims can often be seen in London recording taxis and streetlamps for possible deification."

By this logic, I am a god in Japan.

There were a ton of tourists taking my picture when I was mapping in the Grand Canyon as a grad student. I'm not sure what was so photogenic about a fat American girl in combat boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt. Maybe it was the fact I was sitting astride the stone wall at the very edge of the canyon with a map board and pencil while squirrels used my leg as a highway in and out of the canyon. Or the fact that the squirrels were stealing my grapes while I worked.

One of them probably has a photo of me taking a photo of a squirrel as the squirrel tried to steal my camera.

As if I needed another hassle....

I just found out that my domain host will cease all services October 1st. This means I will have no host for tephras.com, no mail, no website.

I'm not in a good position to look for a hosting service, let alone afford one, so this was just the sort of news I did not need to get while sitting 1000 miles from home waiting for mom to have a cancerous mass removed from her breast.

So far I have had 1and1 recommended by my erstwhile host. I'm admittedly spoiled by him, I was free to install what I liked and was given a lot of permissions on his server, so the hosting services are all both foreign in design and rather restrictive in practice.

I most likely will not be maintaining my PSP related site, the bandwidth and storage is too great. I don't want to lose my domain since I'd like to avoid having to change email addresses (the very thought of hunting down every site and person to update that is shudder inducing) and it's paid until next July.

This is pretty much the last straw for today. I'm going off to have a cry, if I can do that without someone demanding my time and attention yet again.

So the server is back up, yay!

Of course I changed my email with LJ during the outage so I could keep track of things, therefore the first order of business was to change it back to my normal email address.

I'm not getting email from LJ.

So I go and force LJ to send another validation email. I do that about half a dozen times. No validation emails arrive.

I go log into my server (yay for shell accounts and SSH!) and go through my procmail filters. Nothing to mark LJ mail as spam in there but I whitelist LJ anyway.

Try having LJ mail me a validation a few more times.

Log back into my server and check my mail logs, nothing from LJ, not even something getting caught in the assorted server side spam filtering I have going.

Change my email with LJ back to my meowmail count and get a validation immediately.

It's not LJ.

It's not my filters or ISP.

Email the admin of my server. Discover that I need to have Thunderbird purge the old site certificates so I can actually send email. Poke around and find where it stores them and delete the old certs, accept the new ones, then send the email.

We're hoping it's just some lingering DNS cache issues and not the DSL provider.

So I find myself hoping I'll get eight or ten invalid validation emails in the next day or so.

*head!desk*

Well I've finally made it through all my posts and tagged them. I'll probably refine the tags a bit (some ramble posts will be changed to tidbit, and tidbit might become life, or life might branch out from tidbit and ramble...) but for now it's done.

I should perhaps also go through and put subjects on everything.... "No subject" is unhelpful when searching for something.

My server is still down and I'm getting a bit irritated. I've changed my LJ mail address to my backup meowmail address so I can keep track of people replying to things here. Perhaps it's time to see if hafoc can set up another mailbox with Charter (from what I've seen on their site there should be slots for nine more boxes).

...

This song would make an interesting AMV...

Just a note to say that I finally got around to updating my website. If you read this journal you've seen everything that's new to the site already.

And while I was doing that I found a nearly finished piece of art that got set aside for some reason. I think I'll work on that next.

It seems I own a domain that I have no recollection of buying. I went to renew tephras.com and found that I own tephras.info, and have since the beginning of the year.

I'm very, very puzzled.

And that segues pretty well into my latest irritation. People finding stuff on my site and then grabbing domains for them and emailing me asking for more information and demanding to know my interest in the term.

The world should live in fear of my ever gaining godlike powers.