Stephen's Personal Blog

I’ve been upgrading the blog further with plugins and customizations. This weekend it became more searchable by changing the post URLs from using sequential numbers to words that search engines are interested in. The recent book list has popups for the book covers now. Other plugins have yet to be implemented. Making polls, making tables in posts, and redoing the workout log.

This morning I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6.2 and I’m trying to change the appearance to something more suited to my interests. Currently, all the posts are in one stream. For persistent items, I make a page on the side. However, there are getting to be more pages and more pages that I would like to add that don’t seem appropriate for the root page of the website. Pages that would be more suited to a particular topic.

The topics that I want to have are based roughly on the tags; rambling, bicycling, apple/mac, house projects, news, and gardening. I would like my bicycle items, for example, to stay closer to the top, but the current home page is correct in how it works. So, if I give them their own space the website can filter and organize them to represent my interests more accurately.

After pouring over the code the trojan has been removed from the website. The StephenSite blog can no longer infect Windows computers.

It seems this started on April 9th. If you looked at this website on a Windows computer, Firefox or IE, since then you should run a virus and malware scanner.

Thanks to FireFox 3 and the corporate virus scanners for catching this.

There has been a trojan on the Stephen Personal Blog for a month or more. It only affects Windows computers, which is why I never noticed. Firefox and IE are vulnerable. The blog has been upgraded to the latest WP. However, the malicious code has been placed, it seems, in a php file and I have not yet found that. For now, a broken theme comes up the best, because it crashes before rendering the malicious code.

I’ve been using WordPress 2.3 for a while. The new blog is 2.5 and I got say it rocks. This is one of the easiest and most customizable pieces of software I have ever used.

Last year I wrote in a Garden Blog, but I’m needing more this year. More permanence for Plant Files, particularly rare varieties, a place for the garden calendar, and a place to journal or blog. Since Google seems to be keen on picking up things from my blog on topics that kind of fall in between the cracks, I thought I would make it a sub of my blog. Hopefully, others find it useful and it can become a hub for many gardening topics. What I’m particularly interested in are the topics that are difficult for me to find information; growing things in the Texas Panhandle soil, low water gardens, local suppliers and producers, rare and unusual varieties of plants, info on bugs, etc.

I also want to get a Weather Station that will attach to the computer to automatically log wind, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and pressure. So, that I can correlate these with plant yields. The more expensive varieties have many wireless sensors. This seems excessive until you consider the ability to monitor above the canopy, below the canopy, and several different spots in the yard. In effect logging the various microclimates. This would be extremely useful information. After all, I’m most interested in the interactions between plants that create such microclimates.

Wordpress is installing now. I looked for a different Content Management System (CMS), but none of them seem suitable. I have modified WordPress many times. Perhaps, I can hammer it into place to fulfill my needs.

None of the themes so far seem to fit the bill. One will most likely have to be heavily modified. I don’t look forward to this. It’s very time consuming. My needs are pretty specific here and a blog isn’t a good match, but the other choices seem confusing and excessive.

I would like this to be an excellent resource that shows up easily on Google for myself and my fellow dryland, cityfolk gardeners dealing with the thick muck that grows our landscapes and fruits and vegetables.

The link is Stephen’s Garden.

I added WP_Cache to the blog. It’s supposed to cache the most commonly hit web pages to make the site faster. Right now, it’s running pretty good. We’ll see what happens one of these times when the server seems to slow down. Cross my fingers that the 90 second page loads are gone.

What’s up with the site double printing all the posts!!! This used to happen rarely and now it’s all the time. Arggh! and not the pirate “Arggh”.

Patience sent this. I’ve seen it before, but it was just as funny the second time.

I was in Wal-Mart buying a large bag of Purina for my dog and was in line to check out. A woman behind me asked if I had a dog……..

Duh!

I was feeling a bit crabby so on impulse I told her no, I was starting The Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care unit with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms. Her eyes abo u t bugged out of her head. I went on and on with the bogus diet story and she was totally buying it. I told her that it was an easy, inexpensive diet and that the way it works is to load your pockets or purse with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The package said the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again. I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a tall guy behind her. Horrified, she asked if something in the dog food had poisoned me and was that why I ended up in the hospital. I said no…..I’d been sitting in the street licking my …. paws…. when a car hit me.

I thought the tall guy was going to have to be carried out the door.

Your smile for the day. Think about this the next time you’re standing in line at Wal-Mart.