Atomic Playboy

I’ve enabled OpenID validation for comments now. Feel free to try it with a comment on this entry.

Happy new one!

I kick this year off by switching this domain to a different server. Same web host; just a different server. I was one of the first to sign up with TextDrive, and consequently one of the first on their servers.

Sadly, those early servers suffered a bit from overcrowding and general early illnesses. Since I’m one of the VC200s, the 200 people that invested 200 dollars each in TextDrive when it started up, I have a free account with them for the lifetime of the company — and I’ve certainly gotten my 200 dollars worth of web hosting a long time ago.

The early investors were offered a Golden Ticket to move to an equivalent account on newer, fresher servers, and my new account was just activated. In a few days I’ll start the move, beginning with a fresh WordPress install. I won’t just copy the entire account over; it’s a damn mess behind the scenes and I want a clean slate to work with.

There may be some downtime while the DNS switches over, but overall it should be a transparent change.

For some reason I have immense problems writing bloggy stuff while sitting at my desk. So I grabbed my laptop and sat down in the couch and promptly got a strong urge to fall asleep. The comfy couch strikes again! But before I collapse I’ll try to squeeze out an actual blog entry.

The ten entries currently on the front page stretch back a year. The entry before this one was written six months ago. That’s… not really a good update frequency. So for the last week or so I’ve been reconsidering the whole format for this site.

It’s easy for me to tell why I’m not writing more: there’s just not a whole lot of stuff going on in my life. I was way more active back when I was in school and actually did stuff.

So writing full-blown blog entries is a no-go in my current situation. I have, however, been quite active on Twitter lately. That’s a format that feels a lot more comfortable for me now — bite-sized observations condensed into less than 140 characters.

Lo and behold, I shall actually strive to do some regular writing now. But not tonight; I need to fix various stuff on the site first. That’s on the to-do list for tomorrow.

Changed stuff. Site broke. Will fix later.

About time I upgrade WordPress around here anyway. I need to move it out of the root folder and into /blog, which is where the archive is anyway.

I’m moving my domain to a different server, so there may be some brief interruptions ahead.

And I should really get moving on redesigning here. And write more. Meh.

I had a letter waiting for me when I got home after watching V For Vendetta, of which I might rant later. US air mail, eh? I rip it open.

Some silly domain registrar, Domain Registry of America (who in the fine print state they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the government of the United States) wants me to host this very domain, and what a fancy name said domain has, at them instead of Gandi, my current registrar.

I would consider it if their yearly fee wasn’t 216% of what I’m paying right now. €26 per year? I pay €12 now. That pricing has no attachment whatsoever to reality.

And why does your spam look so much like a bill? Hidden deep in a paragraph you say that it isn’t, yet you do your best to make it look like one. Add some FUD about “losing your online identity” and I put you on my shit list.

Well, thanks for sending me something to light the fireplace with.

I just switched my feeds to pass through FeedBurner, so you probably saw some duplicate entries marked as unread recently.

I’ll write more starting next week. Promise. I’m visiting Stockholm now, so I’m kinda busy here right now.

So somehow comments have been down for a while, and I had no idea about it. No error messages whatsoever. Yelling at WordPress commencing.

Also, I love Ruby on Rails. More on that later.

Update: Aha. I think I had an extra empty line in the list of blacklisted phrases, meaning any comment would match the blacklist. Should work now. Now to wade through the spam comments to see if any genuine comments got caught.

It looks like somehow atomicplayboy.net recently got PageRank 5 by Google, whereas www.atomicplayboy.net got dropped from 4 to 3.

Good riddance, I say. I’m not a big fan of the “www” prefix in URLs.