Changes Behind the Scenes
February 4th, 2007
Today I coughed up some money to upgrade to Mint 2.0. I also installed a few more Peppers created by Shaun Inman. Now with Secret Crush and Bird Feeder I’ll have even more information about the people who stop by Muschamp.ca. I still have Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, and my webhost’s stat package, but I can’t recall the last time I checked out any of those other than recently installing MyBlogLog.
I also upgraded to WordPress 2.1 which was more work than upgrading to Mint 2.0. I also culled my plugins, updating a few. I fiddled with Gravatars2, then installed Comvatars and Favatars then Gravatars instead of Gravatars2. I tried various combinations along with many changes to my comments.php file. I can’t say any of them worked perfectly. Gravatar.com itself has been under revision for months now, but according to their blog in early February big things will happen.
I think I’m going to turn off all the little images. Gravatars along with the OpenID plugin never quite worked or at least didn’t work as I expected especially when combined with my custom theme and whatever plugins I’m trying to run at a given time.
The autosave is the new feature of WordPress that was most overdue. I’ve lost posts due to dodgy internet connections before. That is one of the reasons I don’t like using webmail and random internet cafe computers. That doesn’t even include the spywear fears.
My upgrading to WordPress is a not necessarily perfect and I wonder if the fact I’ve been using WordPress…
The Bears just ran the opening kickoff back in the Superbowl!
… for a long time and my own less than optimal perhaps WordPress theme is an issue.
One of the companies I applied for, interviewed for, and then applied for again has at least one staff member who likes me. He wanted to meet me face to face as I’ve had a lot of phone interviews. He happened to be coming to a conference in Vancouver. I was suppose to just meet him for coffee after not getting another position or two I interviewed for, but now he’s gotten me a discount to the conference itself. I’ll now be attending Web Directions North next week. I don’t have any plans to see any of my Sauder MBA classmates.
The reason I updated my website probably had a lot to do with my sudden decision to attend the conference. I only registered on Friday or Saturday. Having my blog up-to-date, along with my use of the various web analytics packages and my many trials and tribulations using WordPress may give me an anecedote or two to share while networking. I guess I’ll have to dust off my old Sauder MBA business cards, I think I gave away all 200 Tsinghua business cards I had.
Now I’m going to watch the Superbowl, Payton Manning has thrown an interception. I planned to have all this done before kickoff, but WordPress plugins frequently require a lot of trial and error to get them to function properly. Now there have been two turnovers due to rain in Miami. There will probably be a lot of live blogging from the floor at Web Directions North, I don’t know if I’ll be doing any. Long time readers may recall that the last conference I attended I ended up writing the most about, at least in English.
Update: Another Super Bowl is approaching and I just did a major overhaul to my WordPress installation and blog theme. I’m also once again looking for a new job and less and less people want to make any effort to turn my career and life around after my MBA at the Sauder School of Business.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, Mint, Plugin, Superbowl, WordPress.
I swear I’ve had more problems with comments and plugins that modify comments.php than any other part of WordPress or at least any other part of my theme. I spent a lot of time getting it to look write, but these plugins don’t work well together and frequently seem to break and make commenting impossible.
I just upgraded to version 2.1 of Subscribe to Comments and learned who has subscribed to what post. Now I understand why some people have registered but never left a comment, they subscribed…
I also learned what my most subscribed post ever is. I can’t say it has any other claim to fame other than being partly in Chinese.
Even turning off OpenID didn’t completely purge it from my blog, I had to delete several filess and modify my comments.php. I’ve also noticed some other changes to WordPress 2.1 I don’t like. And that my comments box is too big again after de-evolving my theme to pre-OpenID plugin. Apparently some guy is working on a new OpenID plugin. I don’t know if I’ll try to get that working again.
I have much bigger problems. I wish some of my former Sauder MBA Classmates would truely realize this. I think my MBA from about March 2005 on and every single blog posting past the first were futile. As I told Sverre:
I actually checked Google Analytics last night after posting this. One feature Google Analytics has is a map based on IP address of where people possibly live who visit my domain. The two biggest circles are Beijing and Vancouver. I’m pretty sure some of my former classmates use this blog to spy on me, they certainly don’t leave comments, which leaves them out of the 1%.
If they cared and if they believed me they would have said and done something long before now. They for the most part were content with the status quo. I tried the status quo it hasn’t helped me.