I just switched this WordPress.com blog over to the Twenty Twelve theme — freely available for WP.com and self-hosted WordPress.org blogs.
It’s refreshing. It’s clean. And I’m tired of Twenty Eleven (and Twenty Ten before that). Funny how that happens.
I’ve heard reports from a very reliable source on trouble with the latest rendition of WordPress.com and Firefox 3.6.17 for Mac PowerPC.
The trouble concerned the Javascripty popups used to insert links and images.
Yesterday they didn’t work.
Today they do.
Problem solved, it appears.
WordPress.com is a very nice service. I haven’t been on here in many, many months.
So when I do get in the interface, I tend to want to change things for change’s sake. Hence the new theme.
Last time I looked, even though Mozilla didn’t seem totally in love with supporting Firefox 3.6.x, they still were. But it looks like WordPress.com, the Automattic-hosted mega-blogging service, was intent on leaving FF 3.x behind.
At least that’s the way it looks right now in Firefox 3.6.x for PowerPC Mac. Running TenFourFox — the Firefox 4.x code built for PowerPC Macintosh — seems to help.
That’s what I love about WordPress.
Remember my last post about how Thunderbird didn’t have a proper import/export function? Since then I discovered, installed and used ImportExport Tools to allow me to import Mbox-formatted mail archives into my main Thunderbird installation.
I was able to easily bring all the messages from my Windows Thunderbird install into my OpenBSD Thunderbird, and now all of my e-mail is in one place.
The reason for this was switching over from IMAP to POP because I was (and am) not comfortable leaving my mail on the server and want to have it all on my local drive (and backed up to CDs/DVDs).
To consolidate my two Thunderbird archives into one, I took the whole local directory from one, burned it to a CD, moved it to the other PC and then used ImportExport Tools to bring the folders into my current Thunderbird local directory one by one. Once I had the new folders in my new Thunderbird install, I then distributed the messages to the appropriate folders and deleted the temporary folders I created to hold the transferred mail.
I continue to think that this import-export function should be done wholly in Thunderbird with Mozilla-maintained code, but having an add-on that works is better than nothing at all.
Using IMAP, as I did for a few years, allows for quite a bit of flexibility, since the mail stays on the server and I can use any number of clients to access it from any number of machines.
To give me some added flexibility now that I’m POP-ping the mail down to one computer, I have Thunderbird configured to keep the last 10 days’ worth of mail on the server so I can use my mail service’s Web interface at any time to see all the mail in the past 10 days.
The one problem with this 10-day solution is that any e-mail I write in Thunderbird goes into the Sent file on my local machine and is never on the server. To get around this, if I write an e-mail that I’d like to have access to via the Web address, I BCC it to myself so it goes on the server as well.
I do the same thing if I write an e-mail in the Web interface, copying myself so I have it both on the server and in my local directory.
Before I close, I should say that I chose Thunderbird as my mail client because I’d been using it for a few years (and was comfortable with it) and because it’s a cross-platform app that runs in Windows, Linux, Mac OS and every BSD. I really like any app I can easily get in every OS I run (or might run).
Today in Click, I rant about the Thunderbird e-mail client, which is only too happy to import your e-mail from another application but isn’t quite so free and friendly when it comes to exporting that mail out of the Mozilla-based program.
I believe that it’s fairly easy to turn just about any Linux server into a WordPress installation. There is even a port of WordPress for OpenBSD. I thought that I’d try to run Movable Type on OpenBSD, but getting PHP and Perl working with the Web server looks incredibly difficult. If somebody else did this and laid out how they managed it (like How to Forge), I could probably follow along, but the difficulty of dealing with the chroot environment in OpenBSD’s default Apache Web server — which isolates the Web server’s files from the rest of the computer for security purposes — makes it extremely difficult for mortals to set up services in the Web server environment.
For a normal Web server with nothing but HTML pages (and no PHP, Perl/CGI), OpenBSD couldn’t be an easier system to use. It’s when things get more complicated that this that the non-OpenBSD geek is especially challenged.
But as I say, there is a WordPress port for OpenBSD, as well as WordPress packages for GNU/Linux systems such as Debian. I also seem to remember talk about a Movable Type package for Debian Lenny, and if it made the installation and configuration of the blogging system easier, I’d be all for it.
As it is now, between installing and configuring MySQL (or PostgreSQL), making sure PHP and Perl are running and getting all the directory permissions correctly set, putting together one of these blogging systems, even on Linux, is no trivial matter. The last time I set up Movable Type, all the MySQL issues I was having prompted me to dump it and use SQLite as my database software. At least MT gives you some options in this regard.
I’m using my WordPress blog to write about Movable Type because it’s time for an MT break. I’m suddenly knee-deep in reconfiguring a few dozen Movable Type blogs and find myself baffled by layer upon layer of templates and widgets.
I know there’s a reason why this project uses Movable Type, and I’ll probably figure it out eventually, but in the mean time, I remain baffled by all that is MT.
In an effort to have just a little more control over what I write, on which of the many PCs I use I write it, and where I post it (i.e. to one or more of the blogs and other sites to which I’m spreading the news), I started to use Google Docs again.
The problem being that I can hardly keep track of anything that I didn’t write and post instantly. I’ve got three notebooks, each a different size (one “moleskin” type book, though no skins were harmed in its making; one composition book; one steno notepad), and a number of computers ($15 Laptop, $0 Laptop, converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, Dell Optiplex GX520, iBook G4), have of which change Linux distros as often as most people change underwear (that’s daily, for those of you not following), with /home partitions constantly moving, being deleted and otherwise being ignored.
So the theory is that by centralizing everything on Google Docs, I can better keep track of what is where, what is going where and what went where. That’s the theory anyway.
And while I’m on the subject, it’s time for me to make complete backups of all my blogs, especially Click, which has the most posts and is on a server that is nowhere near as reliable as those of Google or WordPress. The great thing about WordPress, as far as backups go, is the ability to export the entire blog as XML. For Google, and probably for Movable Type, I’ll just have to save monthly archives going all the way back
But I haven’t been the most prolific blogger of late. It all began when the esteemed, highly qualified individuals who run the insidesocal.com blogs (including Click) decided that the best way to stop DNS-level spam attacks was to put an IP block on the entire European continent, costing me every link I could hope to get for Linux-related material (yep, Linux and FOSS is huge in Europe; where else would they even think of publishing “Debian Fur Dummies”?).
So I stopped pimping Click and started this blog, also throwing items to the great LXer. Losing Distrowatch as a source of links to reviews of Linux and BSD distros was probably the biggest blow. So I’ve pretty much been not caring about traffic on Click, which hovers at a steady 150-250 a day.
The CTRL freak 