If you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, sorry about the additional 5 old “Gleaming Wails” posts. As part of my quest to merge all my scattered posts etc back into ianmjones.com, I decided to also create Vlog category posts for videos on my YouTube channel.
That meant a handful of YouTube posts were slotted in the RSS feed as they’re dated within the last 10 posts on my site.
For the curious, I used the Auto YouTube Importer plugin, which seems to have worked pretty well. Sure enough, it worked more smoothly when I tested it locally than on prod, but I think a couple of runs of its scheduled task picked up the remainder.
Fingers crossed, it’ll auto create Vlog posts for any new videos I post to YouTube.
After a quick little chat with Kev Quirk, in the comments on one of his posts, I’ve decided to enable comments on my site for the first time in many many years. I think it’s been 18 years!
I’ve set comments to auto-close 2 weeks after a post is published, and as such, only this post and my post from yesterday will have comments enabled for the moment.
When I merged all my old sites back into this one, I was struck by how many comments I’d had over time, and remembered how nice it was to be able to have that brief interaction about something specific, with some very nice people. I miss that.
I’ve had a website of some form or another since 1998, but my oldest still available site dates back to February 2002. As I write this, that’s over 24 years ago.
I merged the content from my three archived personal sites into this current incarnation over some evenings this past week, and a chunk of time over the rainy weekend.
This site has now swelled from 20 posts and 3 pages, to 337 posts, 10 pages, and 289 comments!
Basically I’ve changed my mind about reinventing the site every now and then, where I’d effectively do a nuke and pave and archive the old site off to a sub-domain. I now feel that having all my old stuff together in my personal site is more valuable, and tells the story of my online presence.
And of course, I used WP Migrate a ton during this project, not only for pushing and pulling between my local machines and my WP Engine hosted dev, staging and prod environments, but also for backups at various stages, and the occasional find and replace.
I’ve still got a bunch of cleanup to do, I’m pretty sure a load of posts need images relinked from when I switched to using the text only Gemini protocol, and there’s many many broken links to deal with. I also want to flesh out and better organise the archive of all my projects, but I can deal with that bit by bit as time permits.
It just feels nice to have all my stuff in one place again.
For a long long time (I have no idea how long it really was), I used the venerable Nord theme colours to theme my desktop and apps, and even my old website.
Then, when I rebooted my website, I just went with ye olde Twenty Fifteen theme, using the dark theme, it kinda worked well as a reflection of the colours I was using everywhere else in my digital life, and therefore screenshots I posted didn’t look out of place.
However, I’ve not been too happy with how my blog posts look in the Twenty Fifteen theme, the content area is just too thin for the type of code and screenshot heavy content I post. It wasn’t a great reading experience. So I felt it was time to find a new theme.
I wanted something super simple with a nice wide or easily altered content area, and preferably a Nord colour scheme, or super simple palette that I could alter to Nord colours, because I miss using that colour scheme, and for reasons I’ll go to into a second, it’ll match any screenshots going forward.
After not much looking around actually, I found the Blockbase theme, which is about as simple as it gets.
And after just a couple of quick tweaks, I got it to something which I really like, and so this here website now looks something like the following screenshot.
“What?! I thought you’d fallen back in love with Solus?”
… I hear you ask.
Well, I do still absolutely love Solus, it’s an awesome Linux distribution, so fast and simple to use, but I’ve been hitting a show stopper issue with running Docker projects that the maintainers have struggled to fix, and a few other smaller day to day problems that over time built up to make me start looking around for another distro.
After playing with a few BSD and Linux distros again, I thought I’d give COSMIC Epoch another go to see how it’s progressed since I last gave it a spin early last year.
Even though it is definitely an alpha as a few feature aren’t complete, and being based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is a bit painful, it’s so good to have a working Docker setup again, and I really like the COSMIC desktop in tiling mode.
To be fair, I generally use one app per workspace, but the shortcuts that the peeps at System76 have set as the defaults are spot on, and work very well for me when navigating workspaces etc.
In the above screenshot you might just be able to work out that I have my COSMIC config checked into a git repo, which means I can easily use it across all my desktops by checking it out to ~/.config/cosmic. When I saw Jeremy Soller demo that it’s safe to do that in a recent presentation, that was a clincher to get me to try COSMIC again. I’m glad I did.
I did initially try keeping my cosmic config in my ~/.dotfiles repo, which I then use stow to put into place. However, every now and then COSMIC would clobber the ~/.config/cosmic symlink, creating a directory in its place. So I switched to making it a directory itself, which just so happens to be a git repo so that I can track my changes and push them out to all my Pop!_OS machines. That seems to be working very well.
And now that I’m back to using Nord for all the things, if I finally get back to making videos for my YouTube channel again, at least I won’t need to change my thumbnail theme!
Yup, it’s that time again, start my site from scratch time.
As per previous reboots, no promises as to whether I’ll be blogging regularly, or adding any content of worth.
One thing I do know, I’ll be saying goodbye to posting via the Gemini protocol. I’m not reading such sites on a regular basis, and I can’t be bothered trying to keep my Gemini site up and running.
I’m also not going to be writing a separate microblog. I may end up writing small posts to my main feed instead, but the chances are I’ll only use @ianmjones@fosstodon.org for smaller posts. Although, knowing me, that’ll no doubt be very rare too.
Guess who got hit by the WordPress worm that’s been doing the rounds?!
Ironically, it all kicked off as I started to work on the site in preparation for moving to a brand new format.
While Integrity was doing it’s thing, checking that I’d converted a load of fully qualified links to relative ones before doing a wget archive for posterity, I started to notice a lot of bad requests for pages that really should be fine.
When I hopped over to my site it was blank. Uh oh.
Luckily I still had another tab with the WordPress console open from where I’d been updating a few posts, and that seemed fine. As I browsed around I noticed a few strange things though.
First I noticed that I was getting some weird text in the upper right of the admin console, that later turned out to be the “Hello Dolly” plugin, which had been activated (not by me).
I then noticed the most scary thing, my post count was less than I expected. Instead of 173, it was 145, where had all the rest gone? Within a minute the count was down to 133, someone/thing was deleting all my posts.
I quickly killed Integrity, which stopped the deletes, and continued looking around the WordPress console. I found that all my themes bar the one I had had active were gone, and the one remaining was inactive. That’ll be why the site was blank then, there was no theme to render the site with.
Having remembered that Andy Ihnatko had been hit by the worm I went to his site and gathered as much info as possible about what the problem was and how to recover from it.
Luckily, I’d done an export from WordPress just the day before, so I was able to simply drop the infected database and create a clean one, download WordPress 2.8.4, install and configure from scratch, import the WXR file and copy across my unaffected images.
If you’re running anything less than WordPress 2.8.4 do yourself a favour and go directly to your WordPress console / Tools / Export and get yourself an export without looking at your own site. Get a copy of your wp-content folder quick smart. Then upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4.
You don’t want to waste approx 4 hours of your life to this mess, and you definitely don’t want to lose all your posts.
Tomorrow (actually, that’ll be later today considering the time) I’ll be going ahead with the move to a simpler site setup I had planned and was gearing up for already.
It must be true as the IMiJ Software and CaseDetective websites have had a bit of a face lift. There are further changes in the wings, but both sites are looking good, even if I say so my self.
There’s no date for when CaseDetective 2.0 will be available just yet, but be assured development is well under way.
“A developer, in so many ways”, that’s my new tag line for this here blog.
Seeing as my microISV endeavor is currently on hold, I figured the old “So, now I’m an ISV…” didn’t cut it any longer, even though technically I still have one foot in the game, and have even had a very good month of sales since I put CaseDetective on hold. How weird is that?
What does the new tag line mean exactly? I’m a software developer for one thing, but I’m also developing as a person in so many other ways. When I look at how Abi is developing day by day (in the last two weeks she’s gone from barely commando crawling to super fast crawling, blink and she’s gone, pulling herself up to stand against chairs and other props, and in the last couple of days she’s even taken to climbing the stairs, supervised of course) it reminds me of all the little things that I experience and learn daily that contribute to my own personal development, we never stop developing.
Also, I grew tired of the heavily graphical and very Mac like theme on the ianmjones.net website, it was fairly slow to load, which irked me quite a bit. I’m now using a much nippier theme from Brian Gardener. It’s a far simpler theme, which frankly is much more my style, I like the clean uncluttered look, and although I prefer navigation etc to be on the right hand side, I’ll live with it on the left as I’m way too lazy to got to the bother of switching it as I have before.
“In pursuit of simplicity”, maybe that should have been my new tag line!
I’ve had enough, SPAM on my company’s forum has got way out of control.
Day and night SPAMers are registering new users and attempting to post to the forum, meaning I’m having to do heaps more admin than I should, banning users and deleting the odd post that gets through the Akismet filtering. Not fun.
So, considering the forums haven’t really been a success anyway, I’ve stopped new user registration or any new posts. I’ve also deleted all users with no posts, which may have caught the odd genuine lurker in the cross-fire, but seeing as no one can post anymore, this can’t be much of an issue.
Forums are one of those topics often discussed in the world of the microISV, as they have many pros and cons.
Some of the pros being the potential for reduced support costs as common questions will be answered via a quick search of the forum, users can support each other in many cases, and a thriving community centred around your software can be a wonderful thing.
But there are of course negatives, the chief of them being that if the forums are quiet it can reflect badly on your products, people can get the impression that the product isn’t doing well, whether it is or not.
My forums have been very quiet, and the users of the forums haven’t really got into any kind of discussions, so there isn’t even a fledgling community there. Closing them seems like the most sensible thing to do at this moment in time.
The forums are going to remain up for the time being, simply because there are a couple of links to content in them from external sources as well as my own sites. But come the release of CaseDetective 2.0 I expect I’ll be removing them. I may replace them with a FogBugz style discussion group in the future, but there’s a good chance I’ll wait until I have too many requests for forums that I can’t ignore it, and am reasonably sure they are going to be used. That may be once I have more than just CaseDetective as an offering.
And yes, I’m very aware that I haven’t linked to the IMiJ Software forums from within this post, that’s totally intentional! 🙂
