27 posts tagged “blogging”
It’s nearly eight months since I started the Cars’ group here on Vox. We are now seven members shy of 100, the group is vibrant and spam-free, and I want to thank all members for making it a great place to be.
We have had spammers come in, but I have been quite active in deleting the obvious ones before they caused any trouble. One or two have got through, and were deleted after they sneaked in one spam post.
To see how badly things could have got, I visited the old Cars Rock! group today. It still looks like no one is managing it, despite my suggesting to the group creators that I would be happy to help. There are a few legit posts there, but since mid-2009, spammers pretty much control the place, right down to multiple Russian porn posts.
No problems with that here. We have great posts from all over the world—Japan, the US, Australia and New Zealand most often—and it’s exactly what I hoped the group would become. Thank you.
Vox was dead again for the last couple of days. Daisy has been very good and has replied to my messages, though it’s a bit annoying that no one else at Six Apart has. It still seems this problem is unique to me, but it can’t be if I can’t compose messages on Vox on any one of three different computers. (I’ll be trying from another office shortly, too, and we are both on the same ISP.)
Complaining about Vox interrupts the flow of these posts a bit, especially when I just wanted to share these Wellington images with you. Christchurch seemed to have better weather when I visited.
I wonder if Vox is fixing its problems. I have been trying all morning to get the compose screen up, and here it is, after a couple of hours (as opposed to days). The only problem is, two hours on, the inspiration for writing the post has kind of left.
Let’s see what I’ve put up lately that I had an intention to mention: how about this guy in a Chevy Camaro Transformer costume? Watch on: there’s a bit of a surprise. (Thanks to Tanya for this one.)
Meanwhile, this was an oddity from a few days back. I would have loved to have commented on this site, but putting an ad (it’s the scenic view) in front of the comment box (which did not disappear even after you clicked on it) is not smart:
Any bets I can still compose on Vox later today?
How odd, the compose screen comes up twice over a short period, despite being out of action for two solid days. Even before those two days, it was only working intermittently (but I could deal with clicking refresh for a few hours—a few days gets boring).
Before the service goes away again, here are some shots I wanted to share with you of Christchurch from my last visit. These were shot from my suite at the Hotel Grand Chancellor.
Finally. The compose screen has taken two days of refreshes to load.
So if any of you are wondering why I haven’t blogged, that’s why. I can’t. And waiting two days for the screen to appear is a little longer than the two seconds that it should take.
After I click ‘Compose’, Vox just loads a blank screen. On viewing the source, there’s nothing there. Yet the browser reports ‘Done’.
I filed a complaint with Vox today so hopefully they can fix it. However, so far I notice I am alone with this glitch as many of you are able to compose normally.
Last time this happened, other antipodeans were affected as well, but I see Snowy, Ninja and Robin have been able to post to their Vox blogs lately.
I think it could be my ISP, but yesterday and today I tried proxy servers and the compose screen still failed to come up. I’ve also tried Firefox and IE8, and Windows XP and Vista, all to no avail. I’ve also cleared the cookies.
Until then, I am blogging a little at jackyan.com/blog and, for my mayoral campaign, at yourwellington.org.
Now that an ex-girlfriend’s name has disappeared from the tags, I can paste these without censoring: my tag words for Vox.
I find this quite fascinating. I must have posted a lot about the US remake of Life on Mars, because actor Jason O’Mara still figures in this, even though I stopped blogging about that show around the time of its cancellation. Obviously, Lucire, Wellington and New Zealand figure in a big way, including the Māori names for the city and country. Computer bugs and errors have dominated my blogging, enough for those topics to make it in to the keywords this time around. No surprise about cars and fashion being regular blogging topics.
One fascinating thing is the appearance of Deutschland, so Germany must have been a regular enough subject. Mercedes-Benz is the most tagged car brand, but that’s more to do with its sponsorship of New York Fashion Week; however, I was interested to see that BMW is present and Audi not, which gives you an idea of who has been loaning Lucire more vehicles this year.
Facebook beats Twitter, even if most of the posts were of me bitching about Facebook being buggy; Philip Glenister beats Jason O’Mara and Barack Obama; and the 1970s beat the 1980s.
If other Vox friends want to paste theirs, I’d be interested to have a gander!
Apart from the Amazon importing, have others found that Vox is back to normal in terms of speed? I seem to find that composing and adding images is nearly back to where they were, say, a month ago, even though I miss having the site previews.
I have to give props to the developers of the Mimbo skin for Wordpress—it’s a very good one that takes into account the needs of bloggers. Below is one of the sites we’ve been building—it’s not ready for prime-time yet, as it doesn’t have enough entries or contributors at this point. Mimbo needed little customization and we were able to make it look more distinctive than the out-of-the-box version.
Prior to that, we were trying a German skin called Overstand, which was quite good in appearance, but not as easy to use. That might have been down to the language barrier. Mimbo seems to use the Wordpress features better and from what I could tell of the coding, is more logically structured.
You’d think that I learned my lesson the first time I tried to upgrade Wordpress using its innocent little button that read, ‘Upgrade to 2.8.1’. But, I figured, what if I messed up, and the program was OK? I’d feel bad about rubbishing the software, right?
So tonight I pressed the button again on another blog we are working on.
I am doing nothing wrong. The program is stuffed. This is all that happens:
If you see the update button on Wordpress: do not press it! Save yourself some heartache and do it the long way.
This blog isn’t even customized much, and it still doesn’t work.
PS.: Last time, I let Wordpress run for about 15 minutes before giving up, and this stuffed everything up. This time, I estimate I let Wordpress stay on the blank screen above for around 35 minutes. I then clicked the ‘Dashboard’ button and Wordpress claimed that it had performed the upgrade, and I needed to click one more button to upgrade the database. Surprisingly, that has worked.
So: this does not take a few minutes as some users claim, and there is certainly no progress bar. The entire process takes over half an hour, during which time one should not touch that particular tab on one’s browser. After that is done (you won’t know when: you’ll have to guess, but that is better than reading erroneous instructions), click ‘Dashboard’.
For those who are having issues, please give the above a try. However, I can’t believe one has to rely on guesswork and I still reckon Wordpress should have tested its update program a lot more.
Some more oddities I have found on the web today, both relating to Google.
Ever hear of people wanting you to give 110 per cent? Google’s Blogger service sure tries hard:
Here’s one from just a few moments ago. Selling Cialis? Google News now picks that up:
And remember the PHP error I noted at the end of June? It turns out I am not alone with Firefox refusing to open a page and prompting me to save it instead, as I finally found this complaint today. However, unlike the complainant I was unable to solve it and the error is not on the servers I visited. As he was using Ubuntu, and I am using Windows, we can probably conclude that the error is Firefox’s alone, and sporadic as well.
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