whew.

I just finished entering most of the movies I’ve seen in the last month into media diet — I still have a list of books to add as well. I’m really bad at keeping up with my log of reading and movie-watching, but I know I find it valuable when I can’t remember if I’ve seen something already!

moderation in all things

after a few days with the WP 1.2 beta (I’ll be installing the final version later), I can say that the new moderation system is a success. messages from Elizabeth, Gus/Jill, and me have gone through right away, and on the other hand, I just got sent my first spam to moderate, i.e., to delete. 🙂 I am both impressed and happy.

farewell, puppy

Russ just took away the dog we found yesterday. I found myself sad to see them leave…that’s a good dog. but he’ll be living on four and a half acres out in the country, with two kids to play with.

st. francis of olympia

last night we were driving home from the grocery store and C. noticed a dog running across the (4-lane) road and up onto the freeway onramp. so he stopped (in the middle of the street!) and led the dog to safety (in a pr0n shop parking lot).

said dog was exceptionally mellow, a little skinny; had a collar but no tag. so we took him home — he happily jumped in the back seat of the car — and called animal control.

later — after some frisbee in the park and a walk around the neighborhood — they called us back and we went to the shelter (where Mr. Noisy went to die) to see if he has a chip (I guess they do that with licensing here). no dice, although the animal control guy was really impressed with the dog’s coloring and temperment. (I like him, and usually I hate dogs.)

so we took him back home, and C gave him some food, set up a bed, and made him an ad-hoc tag. it read, “I am lost” on one side, and “Last found by [C’s cell number]” on the other. then we went in, (finally!) had some dinner, and gave the cats lots of love while we watched old Kids in the Hall episodes.

’cause, wow, the cats were not happy.

we both woke up extra early this morning and talked about what we’d do. we’re not really set up for a dog — after all, we just took out the side/front fence! — and both the dog and the cats are a little too old to adjust at this point. Maddy in particular was/is freaking out….

when we got up, the dog was gone. I started working on tea/coffee, and realized we were out of half & half; C was talking about the “dumbass” dog, and as I stepped out with my grocery bag, there he was. so we took him for a walk to the store (not the one we were coming home from last night), talking all the way about what we’d do. after all, he was so friendly.

then C’s phone rang: a guy said he’d seen the dog this morning close by our place and written down the number. thought he looked like a nice dog and was interested in taking him. excellent.

later, after we rigged up a temporary fence, a city utility truck pulled up, and the guy who’d called us jumped out. came up, let the dog sniff his hand — very friendly, says he’s got 2 acres and kids, which is just perfect. (I hate to see dogs with not enough space.) so he’s coming back this afternoon after he gets off work, and then this lovely friendly dog will have someplace good to go.

then maybe Boingo will come back from the neighbor’s yard.

and this is the thing. I like animals, but C has this…I don’t know how to describe it. he just has a way with all sorts of critters, and an intense empathy with them. our first cat we got at the pound, but the other two were strays that he couldn’t bear to take to the pound. all the neighborhood cats just flock to him. and of course there was Mr. Noisy.

it’s one of the things I love most about him.

very cool

I’ve been playing around with Phase for a work project, and so far I’m darn happy. it’s more complicated than Whisper, which I also like, but in a good way, particularly for this project, where there will be sub-menus and blog sections and several authors.

not that it’s not beta-y. the documentation is scarily scant, and there are a few default behaviors that drive me nuts. but I got the basic framework of the site going in maybe 2-3 hours, and I think it’ll work for long-term maintenance, which is my constant concern these days.

the extra ingredient is love

today at lunch, I had a salad of arugula, spinach and radishes from my own garden, dug up first thing this morning, with a little bit of gorgonzola cheese. I’m foolishly proud of myself.

maybe if I make peanut curry for dinner I’ll cook a little spinach to do with it, too.

I keep telling myself it’s the little things….

oh, that’s how it works

I realized last night that Shelley’s multi-blog hack is essentially a system for registering and switching between already-installed WP blogs. I have more thoughts about that, including maybe a path towards a grandiose hack for “real” multi-blog support, but that will have to wait. (I had a flash of inspiration last night in the shower.)

how to upgrade WP

this assumes you are already running a relatively stock install of WP 1.x, where x is less than 2.

# back up the folder where you have WP installed on your server and back up your database. there’s a script floating around that’s supposed to be a one-click solution for WP database backup, but I found it easier to go into phpmyadmin and use its export feature. (copy the results into a file and save it with your old WP install.)
# download the latest version of the 1.2 beta; unzip it into a folder.
# open your current wp-config.php file and wp-config-sample.php in the new version. copy the settings from wp-config.php into wp-config-sample.php and save wp-config-sample.php as wp-config.php.
# delete the contents of your current WP folder on your server.
# copy the new version into that folder.
# run upgrade.php.
# delete upgrade.php and install.php.
# go to the administration interface -> options -> miscellaneous and copy the .htaccess instructions. create a new .htaccess file and upload it into your WP folder on your server.
# tweak your templates as needed. I found that I could just copy my old index.php into the new install and everything worked just fine, but YMMV.

I think that’s everything.

damnable apostrophes

fixing the escape in the feed item content was easy: open and save the item. (don’t know why, but it worked.)

the title, however, is a different story. at first I thought it was a problem with the character set on the page that it’s being pulled into. (fyi, my home page is generated by running all the feeds generated by the programs I run through Magpie.) so I tried change the meta from iso-8891 or whatever to utf-8. no dice, at least not in Moz 1.4. (nor in IE5; I just checked. man, this site looks weird in IE.)

then I looked at the WP script that generates the Atom feed…it takes the character set for the XML from the one that’s set in the program. I haven’t tried tweaking that; we’ll see what happens then…I’d just as soon stay with utf-8, but it’s not as though I generally write in Korean or Japanese or anything. (or even with umlauts.)

no dice; suggestions welcome. (it’s possible that an upgrade to the latest version of Magpie will fix it, but since I’m using the same Magpie install to power Feed on Feeds, I’m nervous about upgrading. might try it anyway, though.)

no better luck with that, either, although happily upgrading from 0.6a to 0.6.1 doesn’t seem to actively break anything that was already working. I’ll just have to leave that for a conundrum for another day.

hrm.

I installed Shelley’s WP hack for a multi-blog setup, but I’m not sure I understand what I just did. maybe I need to take a better look?

(tried a few things, and understand even less than I did before.)