Kirb’s Musings

Kirby Witmer’s ponderings, ruminations, and meditations of… anything.

There’s been a number of changes on this blog the last while.

• My blog now resides at blog.kirb.com. I always disliked the fact that my old blog url had a capital letter in it, and when I figured out that it wouldn’t be that hard to move the blog I decided to go with a new sub-domain.
• There is a new theme. For some reason I always get tired of a theme after awhile so I change it.
• I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 RC1. And its just plain awesome. Lots of cool new features, and a whole lot more responsive.
• My photos now reside at photos.kirb.com. Don’t you just love my short domain name?

As I mentioned before, I upgraded my Blog to the latest version of Wordpress, which includes a new feature called tagging*. I also noticed they had a cool utility to convert your categories to tags, which I proceeded to do. Big mistake. Not only did it convert all my categories into tags, it removed the categories, and categorized all my posts with the default category. And I couldn’t find an undo feature anywhere**. Hmm… now what? So what I did for now is added the following lines to my .htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /category/ http://blog.kirb.com [R]

So now what happens is that when someone accesses one of my now non-existant categories it redirects them to the home page instead of giving them a Not Found page. Ideally it should redirect them to the tag instead, but I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. If anyone knows how to do that, let me know.

*Tagging is not a new idea, in fact it has become hugely popular. This is just the first time Wordpress includes it by default.
**You say its called backups? What’s that?

UPDATE: I’m now getting an error “mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached” I’m not sure if its related to this change or not, but I have disabled it in the meantime.

I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3 and upgraded a bunch of plugins. My theme wasn’t compatible with the new version of Wordpress therefore I have a ugly temporary one up until I find one that I like. I know, you are thinking that… “this blog is always under construction, and why doesn’t this idiot just leave good enough alone?” Ummm… you have a point.

I got tired of this blog’s look so I implemented a new theme. I also updated the About page. This theme gives you the nifty ability to select one of three different color choices. I set green to be the default, but you can just click on one of the three different color boxes in the top right to change the color immediately. There is still two problems that I gotta deal with yet.

1. Comments RSS Feeds on individual posts aren’t working properly yet.
2. Footer isn’t formatted properly either. (more on this problem later)

Let me know if you see anything else amiss.

Edited to add: I’m also noticing that this theme throws my blogroll into one category. When I get a chance I’ll have to see if I can change that as well.

Since Spam Karma does such a good job, I’ve decided to reward the few persons who take time out of their busy schedule to post a comment by implementing the DoFollow plugin on this blog. It will disable the automatic rel=”nofollow” attributes added to external links in comments if the comment hasn’t been removed after two days. Besides, the nofollow attribute doesn’t really help anyway.

Due to an exciting event occuring soon, expect sporadic or non-existent posting for at least the next two months. Consider yourself warned.

I realize this is a very small blog, but I thought it would be interesting to post some statistics of this blog.

January 2007 saw 16,623 unique vistors, 23,677 visits, 69,285 pages, 355,241 hits, and 40.97 GB of bandwidth.
February 2007* saw 15,948 unique vistors, 23,054 visits, 66,428 pages, 324,361 hits and 40.54 GB of bandwidth.

For the year so far Microsoft Internet Explorer tops the browser list at 437,202 hits (64.3%), Firefox comes in at a distant second with 185,116 hits (27.2%) , Safari places third with 20,615 hits (3%), and Opera comes in fourth with 14,854 hits (2.1%).

As far as the battle of the Operating Systems, Apple Macs didn’t quite make it to the top spot, however they did come in second. Macintosh brought 30,873 hits or 4.5% and Microsoft Windows managed to place first with 624,440 hits or 91.8%. <gasp> And who said, Microsoft’s share was slipping?

* February isn’t over yet.
** This also includes traffic from kirb.com and the Windows XP boot screen, however they don’t account for much.
*** Yes, mac fans, this is a Pro Microsoft Blog, but awstats made these stats, I didn’t.

I just noticed today that Spam Karma has caught 8000 spams. I’m not sure what is going on, but I’ve got thousands of spam in the last several days. Its crazy.

It’s finally here! Wordpress 2.1 has been released. And it looks like it includes a ton of new features such as Autosave, Spell Checking, and much more!! I want to upgrade as soon as I can, but first I have to figure out if all my favorite plugins and my theme will still work if I upgrade.

Update 01/23/06 - I’ve completed the almost too easy update to Wordpress 2.1. It was soooo smooth. All my plugins so far appear to work as well. Let me know if you see any problems.

Ahhh…… now I can relax. I think I’ve finally got my websites, blogs, files, and everything else moved to my new hosting provider, Hostmonster. And so far, I’ve been real impressed with those guys. Unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, 999 gigs of transfer, and 50 GB of hosting space. What more could I want? And in the few times I’ve had to email them, they have responded promptly. I’m impressed. Ohh.. and did I mention it’s only 4.95 $5.95 a month??