Thinking Unenslaved

….but still….

so, essentially what i’ve done is migrate MY (not the guest-bloggers) content from otherwhirled.com over to here. that went pretty well, although, there were 1,297 items in the import file and i’ve only got 933 here, i believe. meh. and i’ve tried numerous times to import the missing content to no avail. no WP error message or anything. meh, again. pfft.

at any rate, the oldest stuff (ironically being that which was most faithfully represented in the import) lost the attached images years ago. that was back before i understood that yahoo doesn’t cache news images, sorry. they’ve been gone at the otherwhirled, too, sadly….all this time. more recent works from mid-2008 forward or so, i saved the images on my own server, so those are still good to go. i’ve even got them doubled up.

so, for those of you who only know me through unenslaved.com and twitter, these old posts may provide some interesting insights into where i’m coming from. for everyone else, consider these old posts some blasts from the past. i will be trying to re-find some of the old, missing images on the more popular posts. i have a semi-photographic memory, but that will be an ongoing process.

coming up next is actually getting this blogroll going. yay, fun. stay tuned. peace.

it may be overly ambitious, and actually, it probably is. but, i figure what the hell. we have one life to live and this is no dress rehearsal, after all.

anyway, i have installed, and even potentially correctly configured, the IntenseDebate plugin for comments here. IntenseDebate will facilitate better conversations than the default WordPress comments system.

i’m also using a plugin I hadn’t seen before, WP to Twitter, so that posts will go directly out to Twitter. we’ll see how this works as opposed to some of the external services. those are pretty slow (they poll their subscribed RSS feeds on a schedule, so if they tweet in real-time, it’s coincidental). i’ve already seen one go real-time, but with an error. we’ll see how it auto-tweets this post to determine if my tweak worked, i guess.

my thanks to these plugin developers.

other than that, i’m going to try to keep the site as slim as possible. i’m not expecting hundreds of gazillions of users, but faster is always better, and easier to maintain.

peace, out.

am currently working with tech support on redirecting dawnne.com (and .net) here to synthaetica.com. spent some time yesterday consolidating the over-massive number of categories in perpetual dawnne down to something digestible. i’ll try to reconstitute the image references that are currently broken, but i have a lot of things on my plate right now. it’s too bad wordpress’s import/export can’t handle that. there’s logical reasons why it can’t, but it still kinda sucks.

the transfer is complete, and dawnne.com now redirects to synthaetica.com. those of you who subscribe to the feed, the feed has been tweaked to point to synthaetica’s feed. the proper feed uri is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Synthaetica though. it’s not a terribly big deals since i’ve pointed the original perpetual dawnne feed through, but you may want to change it someday.

whoo-hoo! this is nice to have done. i think it’ll help keep me saner from now on.

Okay, so last night while waiting on a teleconference to start, I exported all the posts from here and imported them in Synthaetic Synapse. Everything worked just fine until I went to forward this domain over to synthaetica.com. BlueHost wouldn’t let me do that. That’s because this domain is the “primary” one. I can’t forward it anywhere, but I can forward things to it. Bah.

So, what I’ve got to do is import Synthaetic Synapse into here, then forward its domain to this one. Luckily, that’s still do-able because I had thoughtfully backed up synthaetica.com before running the import. The only tricky part is going to be the theme (I’m currently using a custom-made one by milo317 that was designed to complement ShadowMoon. I mean, I paid for it, you know? And not all that long ago, either. On the other hand, what I was really paying for was ShadowMoon and she kinda threw in the theme for Synthaetica for free, so what’s the difference.)

Anyway, that’ll probably take another day or so, because I’m once again in crunch mode photographically and work-wise. I was SO hoping to have this done last night. And moving Synthaetica here isn’t all that easy, as it entails the images and all that. However, I’m going to pull out of that gidgy system I use for the galleries currently on Synthaetica and use another little something I paid for and haven’t had time to deploy yet. Gee, golly, all sorts of changes happening. Man, I’m going to have some late nights!

…or something like that.

as some of you know, i’ve been really, really busy lately, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. pretty much every morning, i wake up, look through my blogs, sigh deeply, and shuffle on to work because that was literally about all the time i had to spend on my blogs. all my online presences are suffering.

to make matters worse, i was recently appointed as South Dakota’s State Director of Referee Instruction for the USSF (US Soccer Federation), and this Saturday starts up a fairly heavy wedding schedule just as our fall soccer season begins. if my calendars are correct, I have 9 weddings between now and the end of October, and goodness knows how many games to referee. not to mention the fact i’m in the process of building a website for soccer referees in our state to streamline communications. never a dull moment, aye?

aye.

and with all this stuff going on, somewhat ironically, i increasingly feel the need to blog/vent/write/do something creative in some formative way on a reasonably semi-regular basis. the only real problem is, do i do such things here, on synthaetica.com, otherwhirled.com….where? do i do something one week on one, the next week on another, and continue this incredibly lame process of leaving my blogs untouched for extended periods of time?

no, ironically, there is another option. an ironic option, because it is to reverse what i did over a year ago, when i split my personalities into three separate blogs and created this conundrum to begin with.

so, over the next couple of nights, what I’m going to be doing is combining dawnne.com back into synthaetica.com. the way wordpress works is that the blog itself will only respond to one domain or the other, but the way DNS registries work is that i can force one domain to automatically push to the other, which is effectively the same as having one blog with multiple domain names (even though that’s not technically true). i will most likely simply import “perpetual dawnne” here into “synthaetic synapse” and create a category system to distinguish the wholly personal from the digitographic. so, be warned. at some point this week, those few of you who have remained kind and patient enough to stay subscribed to my rss feeds, it will eventually break and you’ll have to subscribe yourself to “synthaetic synapse”.

i don’t know if i will then combine “synthaetic synapse” with “the otherwhirled”. it’s still a thought: i just don’t know if it would really have that much value for me. doing so would obviously decrease my maintenance time ~ even with WordPress’s auto-update feature for plugins, doing it across multiple blogs is time-consuming, but combining the blogs at that level of thing, especially since synthaetic synapse currently has a custom template whose target focus is not necessarily the blog, may not really be a good idea. i dunno. we’ll see.

in the meantime, at least, i’m going to reduce at least a little bit of work and get these two combined. i mean, you guys don’t even know that we had Daughter the First here for a week or anything else that’s been going on cool in our lives. i am bad. very, very bad. i do think squishing these two blogs back together will be a good idea.

i may still not have any more time to post than i currently do, but at least i won’t be sitting here not managing to update as many blogs.

(cross-posted to synthaetic synapse)

Sundays, if you were not aware, are the days I set aside for “blog maintenance”. I don’t usually post on Sundays, but I did happen to notice a few photographs that I couldn’t resist today, so I went ahead and posted a few. At any rate, Sundays are the days when I typically run plugin updates, wordpress updates, and occasionally even go into the server configurations and make sure everything’s running smoothly. Besides my own four blogs, I also manage a few others, and the plugin updates alone would take too much time to do piecemeal. For those interested, the following are a list of the main plugins that I use on all the blogs I manage, and thus find incredibly helpful, in order of what I perceive to be their helpfulness:

1. Cforms II (runs all contact and comment forms on all my blogs)
2. NextGen Gallery (less so here than on my other blogs)
3. Shutter Reloaded (less so here than on my other blogs)
4. All in One SEO Pack
5. Global Plugin Update Notice
6. Google XML Sitemaps
7. KB Robots.txt
8. Simple Tags

Those are by no means all the plugins I use, but they’re in use on each of my blogs, and I think my blog-work would be far more difficult than it has to be without them. I will say this, however: I wish that some of the plugin developers would be a little more conscientious about update frequency. One of the plugins up there has been updated three times in seven days.

Now, on to more fun stuff. Sundays are also the days I set aside for checking out new things. Quite often on Sundays, I’ve got one computer tied up sending out print orders to my print lab, so I might as well do something useful and try to expand my horizons. Of course, the problem with an ever-increasing blogroll is the amount of time it takes to go through it each day, but I don’t mind, really. Doing what I do for a living, I quite often have one or more computers running a batch or upload process, so I might as well do something that’s relatively intellectually stimulating.

So, here are some new additions to my blogroll:

1. Little Bang Theory ~ okay, this is actually not a new stop on my blogroll, but i had screwed up my RSS feed to his blog and fixed it a couple of days ago, and i’m thoroughly enjoying reading his posts
2. The Nefarious Lair of LGPPP, Inc. ~ i really don’t know how i missed blogrolling Dr. Zaius’s better half running mate.
3. Blue Gal ~ i was honored to have received a link through her blog last night and immediately put Blue Gal on the blogroll. thank you, Blue Gal. you’re one of my favorite reads, and probably my biggest blogging inspiration.
4. Yikes! ~ great posts and commentary. i love it when i “discover” something that’s been around far longer than my blogs!
5. Bay of Fundie ~ i think Ron Britton may well be Bing McGhandi’s long-lost twin.
6. One Pissed Off Veteran ~ i’ve subscribed to his feed since the last Blogswarm Against Theocracy. Dunno why
   i hadn’t linked to him before now. maybe it’s because i’m actually quite stupid.

And that’s sadly all I could do today. With our house on the market, you never know when some realtor is going to call, and naturally, one just did! I’ll be SO happy when this crap is done with.

UPDATE: two more added. one has been in my google reader since google reader came out. however, since so many things are in my google reader, it all begins to blur sometimes. i actually just asked the guy which blog was his. gah. somebody please buy my damn house. i’m tired of being this scatter-brained.

1. Neural Gourmet ~ excellent brain food, even for the brain-weary like me.
2. Carnival of the Liberals ~ i will be hosting the June 4 edition. haven’t determined a theme yet.

i am updating several plugins this morning across the seven blogs i manage. comments may be disrupted by my doing so, because the new version of cforms ii (see link in the footer) no longer requires hand-coded integration with the wp core files, and i may have to back out the existing hand-coded integration code and such. just bear with me, please!

{update 2/15 9:45} it appears that the resident quality tester can never get away from testing things. indeedy, there was a bug in upgrading the forms processor, but i have got it fixed now. whoo-hoo! and it’s even faster! wheeeeeeeee…..

…that you hadn’t noticed, the transition to BlueHost, as mentioned here, is finally complete on this domain and dawnne.com. i refrained from posting yesterday during the DNS transfer, much to my chagrin, given the happenings in New Hampshire. some minor tweaking will be done throughout the site over the next several days. i just replaced a bunch of images i had forgotten to pull over during the interim between when i started this and finally managed to get done, for example. i have to make a new post template, but that’s not a big deal.

with moving eleven domains to BlueHost, i’m now fairly well versed in content migration, especially where WordPress is concerned. if you need some help with that kind of thing, hit me up. also, if you’re thinking of moving to a service like BlueHost, talk to me, and if you decide on BlueHost, use the link over there on the left. doing so would help keep commander other blogging! okay, so it’s like the only thing i’m going to pimp.

and yes, i used that graphic, because she’s got pretty eyes. click her! click her! BUY NOW!!!!

…i have been on temporary hiatus due to preparations for a move and the fact that my new provider has not yet been able to respond to my support ticket for getting this blog imported at the new location, which also adversely affects the move of synthaetica.com and the draft of our business site. there has been very much i have wanted to snarkerize, but i’ve been partly trying to balance out duplicating the work between two installations of the same blog (the last time i tried importing it on the new system, it stopped at October 1), and there’s a lot of clean-up work for us to do before we drag a realtor out here to see what we need to do to this house before we put it on the market. we’re not the messiest people in the world by a long shot, but we’re not exactly neat-freaks either. and Mrs. Other and both the Otherlings were apparently remarkably proficient pack-rats in previous incarnations.

anyway, i guess since filing a support ticket during the middle of the holidays was a bad idea, i’ll just continue on here. there’s a lot of crap to do today, but i’ll try to get some good snarkery up later tonight. it would certainly be good stress-relief.

be careful out there, ‘mong the English (i don’t know why i just thought of that line from ‘The Witness’. i suppose i should actually take offense at it since i’m Scotts-Irish).

….i’m just waiting to see if a support ticket with my new provider, regarding the failed imports of the contents of this blog into the location of its next incarnation, will be rectified in the near term. elsewise, you’d've already been redirected to the new digs (with a fancy-shmancy new theme, i might add). in the meantime, be patient. i’m trying to be. but as mentioned here, i may just do it the database way and have done with it, at which point or shortly thereafter, you’d already be at the new digs, anyway….

geez, that was almost painless

if the feedburner feeds do not automatically revive themselves after i get the theme and plugins uploaded (i will also double-check it through feedburner), then if the few of you who subscribe to the feeds will let me know, i’d appreciate it. that seems to be all done correctly now, though.

i forgot that WordPress’s export/import process wouldn’t retain images. i’ll try to get the images back in. sadly, i didn’t do a very diligent job of ensuring that i kept images i uploaded to here all in one concise place. they’re probably not that big of a deal, but i’ll get that fixed a) if you ask to see one specifically, or b) if not having it up here just really bugs me.

i have to re-upload the one gallery i had up here and configure the gallery plugin. that can probably wait a bit, since you family members, according to my previous statistics, had pretty much looked at them all.

i’ve got to reconstitute my blogroll and tweak the sidebar as well, so for those of you who were on it, i apologize for the sudden lack of linkage. i’ll get that fixed next, while i’m batching out some client photos.

if you’re wondering, i changed hosting to bluehost.com, one of the most reputable national hosting systems available. i found very few negative reviews, and their price is literally a fraction of what i’m being charged from my local host. i do think i should make it clear, however (and not just because they might be reading this), that i greatly appreciate my local provider (see the footer of the otherwhirled for details). i have learned a lot from them and have appreciated the efforts of especially one individual there (Isaac). the bottom line here is, frankly money. money, and the fact that support, while effective, is often rather slow. bluehost’s system is so comprehensive that in many ways the need for active, personal support is moot. i was able to get dawnne.com transferred and running, setup with email, ftp, and statistics, over here without talking to anyone. and the few questions i had before signing up were answered within 30 minutes in person, via telephone, in response to questions from a guy who pretended like he couldn’t read a website, no less. very impressive.

enough about that. moving on….

well, i’ve got to do some work for a bit.

and i won’t be back again. well, at least not at the current ip address.

i don’t know what i was thinking. wait, yes i do. i was thinking that keeping the money in our community was a better thing. and it typically is. and i am a big proponent of keeping the money in the local community. so doing this bugs me on several levels. however, when it comes down to the fact that for the hosting of six domains, i am being charged $150/month, when i could just be paying $6.95/month (for better service, greater configurability, and higher bandwidth, no less)…well, it’s time to move.

so, that’s what’s going to happen. i have already semi-successfully moved dawnne.com. i say “semi-successfully” only because i have to re-upload a couple of galleries and a few images (stuff that didn’t make it via the WordPress export/import utility), and because someone in the WordPress development group thinks we like to have to hand-enter our blogrolls if we ever pick up and move. that aside, moving over to BlueHost was not only a complete no-brainer in financial terms, but was also done in less than 12 hours, although DNS propagation outside North America may take longer. and goodness knows i have a bazillion readers from overseas on my personal blog. har-de-har-har.

did i mention it was BlueHost? it’s BlueHost. shameless plug from a woefully shameless man.

so, like, over the next few days, i will be moving everything. the hardest part of this is going to be moving the blogroll. because i like to serve the click-through method (the supposed reason why blogrolls exist), i will have to add some of the more recent additions into my google reader so i can do the export thingy from that to the wordpress blogroll. i’m going to take my time on that, however, as i am more focused on getting some client stuff done before Christmas. just be advised, you’ll see temporary burps not only in the website, but in the feeds, and when the website comes back up, it won’t be perfect from the get-go.

i just said “get-go”. yes, i was raised in Texas. carry on.

i do want to say that i deeply appreciate the services of my local provider (see the current footer). this is primarily a money issue. sure, as with any other small-business host, service sometimes isn’t what i would ideally want it to be. but i have learned quite a bit from them, just as i have hopefully helped them learn about WordPress hosting as well. they are good people, and i do somewhat regret bailing on them. but, like i said, at $6.95 a month, i can simply choose not to eat out ONCE each month and i draw even, or better. pfft. what was i thinking….

ironically, this comes immediately after making the comments plugin gravatar-compliant. if you haven’t setup a gravatar on your email address, why not? well, the reason why commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com doesn’t have one is because apparently they can’t handle email addy’s with [dots]. that aside, it’s a fine way to make your comments across your favorite blogs—all of whom should be supporting the gravatar project—more consistent, so peeps can recognize you and see how cool you are.

there may be burps and glitches this morning as i install a few plugins. it shouldn’t affect the feeds.

if you look at the footers here, here and here, you can probably guess what i’m installing, but also to give them credit where credit is due, and probably because i’ll screw up and forget to put them in the footer of this blog….

1. Alex Rabe’s Next Gen Gallery ~ i have some plans for the otherwhirled that may include a gallery format on certain photos, especially as we near the next major elections and there will be plenty of photos of Republican candidates ducking past the White House, etc. and gallery-izing my LOLcons and otherwhirled originals (whenever i put more than two up, lol) is just an option i’d like to have.
2. Andrew Ozz’s Shutter Reloaded ~ i use this on my other blogs to preview images. the code is phenomenally clean and it works much faster than Thickbox or Lightbox (the two more popular versions of this type of thing). but if good photoshoppers such as Tengrain are going to post here occasionally, i want to give them the opportunity of providing higher-resolution versions of their talents, and Shutter Reloaded is a grand way of doing it.
3. Oliver Seidel’s ContactForms II ~ used on my other blogs to replace the wordpress comment mechanism, and i simply would like to have it here for consistency’s sake. to implement this one, i have to edit core wordpress files, hence my reasoning for this post as warning that things might go “boom”. i haven’t screwed up implementing it yet, but there’s always a first time. after it’s installed, commentators will have the option to contribute their comments as an email to the author instead of a regular comment, and will have to prove their humanity. sorry about the latter requirement, but in the past week, i have seen the spam beginning to shift off the original otherwhirled over to here. neat-o!

as a reminder, i still would like others involved here in the otherwhirled. if you’d like another place to share your insight, witticism, and/or anything else talk to me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com.

for those of you on wordpress (hosted at wordpress.com or not), i offer two items of advice, if you are interested in knowing who’s really linking to you, and how many people are visiting your contributions to the general irresponsibility of the world at large:

1. WordPress statistics is very generalistic. they depend entirely upon whether or not the proper tag {wp_footer()} is contained somewhere within your main index page and any other pages that might serve content (author templates, archive templates, category templates, tag templates, single post templates, and wordpress ‘page’ templates). if your theme has all those separate templates, but lacks the proper code, those templates won’t trigger information into your stats. and if you’re on the hosted wordpress.com, you can’t edit the themes. see why i left? well, that was reason # 57, i think.
2. When blogs that link to you directly, as in through a particular post, update their content and that post scrolls to the next page, that link will disappear from your wordpress dashboard. i just saw that happen with links from Jess and Tengrain. so basically, you can ignore that kind of shit too in your dashboard. Also, if someone simply hasn’t clicked a link to you, say in someone’s blogroll, for a while, wordpress drops reporting it as well. this is one of the reasons why i try to take time out every week to click through people’s blogrolls.

in short, the wordpress stats and dashboard information never come close to matching the real stats i get from my server software itself. so, at the risk of pimping something my wife may or may not be working for in the near future, i humbly suggest google analytics. it’s free, for one thing, the stats are far more verbose, and they match succinctly with the actual statistics i get from my server software. it does a lot of other useful things as well.

i also have a sitemeter thingy running from my sidebar. it’s not very verbose, either, for what it’s worth. at least not the free one. my stats from feedburner are absolute crap (they report less than 30% of the hits my server stats say touch my feed. kinda sad, that, and i’m glad i don’t pay for it).

okay, that was your handy tip for the day from Commander Other. carry on!

okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.

…fwiw, largely because i have not been lacking in the business. my apologies to the five or six of you who check in here regularly to see what i’m not doing and how funny i am not being.

parts of what is eating my time and/or my mental energy is minimally alluded to here and certainly consumed here (because “here” is not just “there”, but it’s also my presence on two other websites), while also trying to get my fall wedding shoot finished up and out for proof. wheee!

i’ll try to get back to teh funny as soon as i can. i also turn 41 this week. commander other is not getting any younger. dammit.

dunno why or how. stuff happens, i guess. we’ll have ‘em back on as soon as we can!

You may have noticed some slight changes to this here bloggy-place I call “the otherwhirled”.

Maybe. Even though the thingy on the right says only ten of you subscribe to my RSS feed, the server metrics software claims I get over 150 pulls on the standard feed URI daily (even though feedburner is supposed to divert those requests to itself), so it’s quite possible that many of you have no idea what the site looks like at all!

At any rate, I added a Google Gadget to the bottom of the left side-bar on the right (and the left side-bar is on the right almost exclusively so that I could refer to it as the “left side-bar on the right”) because Mrs. Other was somewhat responsible for its creation. Or actually very responsible. And because I think it’s just nice to see a government initiative that is genuinely focused on finding ways to make beneficial use of old satellite data instead finding ways to use it against the citizenry.

I also finally found a decent social bookmarking plugin. I use these things a lot, when they exist on the blogs I read, and I’d like to ask you to do the same in return. More people should be aware of my ineffectual ramblings, after all. The plugin supports something like over fifty social bookmarking networks, so if you don’t see one that you prefer to use, drop me a comment and I’ll add it in.

Yeah, I still can’t bring myself to put GW’s vacant stare on my blog today, sorry. We’ll return to the regular programming later this afternoon.