david ascher

Due in part to my initial waffling about domain names (and subsequent struggles with Apache and WordPress configuration), bloglines now has multiple different URLs which map to the same actual feed (david.ascher.ca, www.ascher.ca/blog, ascher.ca/blog, ascher.ca/wordpress, etc.). This isn’t a problem (I hope) for readers, because of DNS redirects, and Apache rewrite rules. However, it’s a [...]

Note to self: figure out why inbound trackbacks don’t seem to work. My first guess is that it’s the Apache URL rewriting. Note to the world: trackbacks, pingbacks etc. are still way too obtuse.

Note to self: figure out why inbound trackbacks don’t seem to work. My first guess is that it’s the Apache URL rewriting. Note to the world: trackbacks, pingbacks etc. are still way too obtuse.

I just figured out one reason why my old blog was slow — I was including the HTML snippet from technorati which pulls the JS code from their servers — it caused serious delays on page rendering. Out with that, and in with the simper version.

In switching to the new blogging software, I have broken the URLs for the old RSS feeds. If anyone has feedback on how I can use Apache .htaccess and the like to redirect a URL that goes through a file that doesn’t exist (…/index.cgi/index.rss) over to another URL (…/blog/wp-rss2.php), please let me know. To those [...]

I was getting lousy performance out of pyblosxom, for reasons that I’m sure have nothing to do with pyblosxom, but with my abuse of it, and my lack of a deep enough understanding of how pingbacks, trackbacks, etc. worked. Also, I didn’t really have the energy to build my own comment-spam filter. Finally, it had served its purpose — it gave me a good feel for what blogging software does. Now I was happy to move on to something with more “GOOBE” (Good Out Of Box Experience), polish, templates, features, etc. I tried blogger again, found it too slow tonight. Looked at Drupal, but its generality scared me. Settled back on WordPress, which I’d played with before and had impressed me. It has an excellent user interface, trivial installation, and seems to have a strong “aftermarket” of plugins and themes. I’m using the Kubrick theme, tweaked with minor CSS changes and a picture that my brother Ivan took on his trip through eastern Europe a few years ago.

So, Will & friends, don’t take it badly — I was a happy customer and then my needs as a customer changed. Thanks for pyblosxom, and keep on trucking.

New features for all you readers: comments are back, the RSS feeds are nicer (e.g. they have dates, which the old one didn’t, which is why all of the old posts that were imported neatly don’t have any history of when they were posted — oh well). I’m sure there’ll be more as I figure this tool out.

I got hit by comment spam (I guess that makes this a real blog, sigh), and don’t have the time to implement a countermeasure (or the inclination, really), so I’m taking comments off for now. Email me (firstname.lastname@gmail.com) if you want to contribute—it’s not like I was getting a lot of non-spam comments anyway.