DancingSamurai.ca

I’ve been playing around with Joomla as a platform to store some documents, (i.e. guidelines etc. for ease of searching). What I have in mind is sortof a OneNote replacement, except the ability to actually integrate PDFs (i.e. a search inside PDF function). And do it online, in case I’m not at home when I need to refer to stuff.

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I added a Twitter Wordpress widget to the sidebar (discovered here). Obviously, I’ve also joined Twitter to see if these micro-updates make me update more often. We’ll see how it goes!

UPDATE: Never mind, I should have just started with the official widget. Works nicely!.

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Some of you may have noticed the obvious theme change on my site. It coincides with an upgrade of Wordpress to the latest version. I was running a horribly outdated one on my site, and something with it went horribly, horribly wrong (database got corrupted, pages dissapeared, plugins shut off). I suspect some script exploited a security vulnerability in my unpatched Wordpress install to cause that mayhem…

In any case, it’s fixed. Didn’t take too long thanks to DreamHost’s one-click installs. Unfortunately, when porting over my entries, the categories and tags got wiped. So I’m slowly going through my nearly 500 entries and re-categorizing & re-tagging them. Since it’s exam time, this is happening at a glacial pace. Bear with me!

Ok, I have to play around with Technorati a little more. Apparently I have to sign up for it. So here goes…

Technorati Profile

I’m moving some posts over from my other domain. I was toying with a more serious, medically-oriented blog under my real name for a while, but I don’t have the time to maintain one blog, much less two. So… my next couple of posts are going to be the couple from that other site that are worth saving, and then I’ll park it.

I’ve moved my site to BlueHost DreamHost. Why you ask? Well, a few reasons. I was getting tired of running my own webserver, especially since I got hacked a bunch of times and really don’t have time to keep up with the security patches. I hope (although maybe not) that these professional hosting solutions actually patch their systems…

Also that box sitting in my living room I was running my server on… well… the fan is breaking down and getting pretty noisy. Besides, I need that space for the Xbox Media centre I’m going to set up soon… :)

And also, this article inspired me to try and set up some kind of off-site backup solution. I signed up for DreamHost as per their recommendation (they really do have awesome deals). Unfortunately, I guess I chose the wrong time to sign up — the server they stuck my account on was first among a cluster of them that were experiencing severe SLOW network issues… and then MY server was one with faulty hardware they had to replace.

I had given up on them by the time they fixed it and moved on to BlueHost, another excellent provider. I switched back though because their control panel really limits what I’m able to do. I want to keep my current registrar handling the DNS since they let me update things for my dynamic IP here at home. Although I won’t need that for my web server any more, I will want to remote desktop into my home computer from time to time, so I need that functionality.

Also, BlueHost doesn’t offer catch-all e-mail, which I really need for some of my domains. So, although their servers are faster than DreamHosts, and so far have had greater uptime (from my 1 week sample…. not saying much), I went back to DreamHost.

Thank goodness for money-back guarantees, eh? :)

I wish more politicians were like this. Garth Turner speaks to his riding via his Blog — something that caused the ultra-conservative Harper to throw him out of his party last year. Now, he has joined the new Liberal party, and he’s quite articulate on the reasons why.

Well, I re-did my site. Again. I was frustrated by drupal — very powerful software but, like the powerful Linux distros, takes waaaay too much time and knowledge to get working.

Wordpress took a few hours to set up. The most time consuming thing was porting my posts from Drupal over — I had to do it manually since I have no SQL skillz and there weren’t any handy-dandy plugins for it. No matter, all done now.

If you had an account before, you’ll need a new one (please register again. There are only three of you, how hard is it? Thanks!).
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