Category: meta

Project #1

So far so good. One day into the new year, and not only have I spent a lovely day with my family, but I’ve also completed my first project. Done. Finito.

Well, sort of…

In an attempt to resurrect this ol’ blog from the trash heap I realized that I not only needed to start writing in it, but I needed to reacquaint myself with the inner workings and get inspired to actually work on it again. Thus sometime yesterday afternoon it came time to begin the transition from the awkward Site5 to the modern DigitalOcean. And so I built my first cloud server, learned how to setup nginx, re-learned how to setup mysql, and reinstalled WordPress from scratch. All while building the configuration in a way to lead room for some other sites/projects that may come this way.

But nobody will know this is going on. Because I still need to work out several kinks. Like connecting this site to social media so that I can tell people what is going on wasqea7.

But this is day #1 and project #1. So I’ll take the little successes where I can get them. Because 2016 was a pretty crummy year. And 2017 is going to have some rough edges. But I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.

Testing… testing…

This is only a test. I repeat, this is only a test. If this were a real blog post, this announcement would be followed by content. Instead there is nothing.

In other words, after monkeying around with my blog a couple weeks ago, I’m trying to figure out if the darn thing still works. Not that it might have suddenly stopped putting my random words up on the Internet, but that functions like letting my rabid fanbase on Twitter and Facebook know when I post something. Here goes nothing…

I’ll tumbl 4 ya

Is that headline lame enough? In case you can’t figure out what it means, I done started a tumblr. Actually, I started it… back in May? WTF? Why have I not been mentioning this? Why did I even need to start another blog that I would fail to maintain? And why does that first video use music from an obscure 80s flick?

I’m so glad you asked.

Video links are like a crutch for bloggers – at least for me. They are a quick and easy way to pretend I’m still contributing to a blog, when it’s really just cut and paste. The few times I’ve posted a video (that wasn’t a moment of (baby) zen) with virtually no commentary and then abandoned the blog for weeks it bothered me. Seriously. It was like cheating. And just like Matt Damon, it would be robbing you of your honor…

Anyone else watch School Ties last night? Anyone? Whatever…

After starting to follow a few tumblelogs it dawned on me that tumblr was the perfect service to keep track of pictures and moving pictures and moving pictures with sound that I wanted to share with people. Especially when it involves otters. While I’m not willing to commit my “creative” endeavors to an external service, this material clearly isn’t mine. And unlike posts that require at least the illusion of thought, why would I care if a list of things I didn’t create disappeared one day? Thus notTHOMnottom.com was born.

The eventual plan is to create a more seamless look and link it together with this site so that it’s easy for all 2 or 3 of my readers to find. The naming scheme is also why I’m considering moving this blog to the subdomain blog.thomnottom.com (with a potential other one called photo.thomnottom.com) and then the main site will bring them together. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Occasionally I may still share videos and pictures over here if they call for more than a one liner, like this one:

Alright, that doesn’t require any additional commentary. But I have been laughing at if for like 2 days straight.

Are you there blog? It’s me, Thom…

So that happened. Apparently taking my blogs offline so that I can fulfill some nerdy desire to have them installed in a very specific fashion for rational reason other than my own whims does not actually guarantee that anything will be accomplished. This is reminiscent of way back when I switched domain names and swore I wouldn’t write anything until the redesign was complete. A month later the transfer took place sans promised theme. At least this time more was accomplished… I guess.

As intended from the start, this blog is my major – perhaps only – outlet for creative endeavors. Shutting down for too long depresses me a little. Coupled with the torrent of e-mails inundating me with demands to return my content to the world as soon as possible, it became necessary for me to either figure out my way or switch to anyway that would work. What follows is an incredibly boring discussion regarding the technicalities of blog maintenance.

When WordPress 3.0 came out recently, my excitement level hit an all time high… in relation to other excitement levels recorded at WordPress releases. You see, this one included multisite! Finally I would only need a single installation to cover all 2 of my blogs! Alright, that may not be a big deal, but I dream big when it comes to websites no one but my sisters care about… plus my other site. The truth is I viewed it as a way to get more active by utilizing a single interface, and possibly open myself up to other projects. So what was the problem? Why didn’t I just upgrade and move on?

Way back in the early days of WordPress I had a single site that was sitting on my home server. All of the files sat in the main directory and it looked like a mess, but it worked so who cared? Eventually they made it possible to keep the bulk of the files in a subdirectory and only have an index.php and .htaccess file in the main directory. This made it easier for nitpicky idiots like me to keep software running in different parts of the website separate. It also made backing up and upgrading (before the automated systems in place) a breeze. It also worked well with my Site5 multisite plan which had everything not thomnottom.com as a subdirectory of thomnottom.com. It kind of looked like this:

public_html
   /_domain1
   /_domain2
   /_domain3
   /_subdomain
   /wordpress -> all of my precious WP files in here
   .htaccess
   index.php

Awesome, I know! But now multisite won’t play that way. It requires the installed directory and website to match. After debating moving my blog to a subdomain itself (blog.thomnottom.com? hmm, that actually sounds catchy now) I searched high and low for any kind of guides. Eventually some forum posts directed me to ideas of how to put the domain in a subdirectory and hide it via .htaccess. So I did. And it worked. So I reinstalled WordPress and imported my old site. And it worked. So I enabled multisite. And it worked. So I logged in… wait… it didn’t work.

For some reason it was botching the login process. Many more days of poking around Google and forums and whatnot led me nowhere. But a funny thing happened on the way to giving up. I realized that Site5 did not limit any of my other domain from being in directories above public_html. Why not just move everything else? So I did. And it worked. So I… you get the picture. Or else I can paint you a word picture:

mydirectory
  /domain1
  /domain2
  /really are there more?
  /pretend another directory goes here
  /public_html -> lots of WordPress files here

Maybe things aren’t exactly as I wanted them. And maybe I’ll still move this to the blog subdirectory because I just can’t leave well enough alone. Regardless, it’s time to move on and get back to writing about boring crap rather than just researching it…