Feorlen's Other Blog

I’ve been poking at WordPress plugins to see what I can do with one. (Hence the proliferation of sidebar gizmos.) I want to write something that will use the Splunk REST API to show interesting things about my server in a widget on the blog. The handy-dandy new PHP SDK will help a lot here. So that much is all good.

But in the process of checking out a bunch of different WP plugins, I have noticed an annoying habit of hiding the configuration pages all over the map. Sometimes there’s a link in the Plugin Management page. Or maybe it’s a tab on the Settings page. Some of the widgets are configured on the Widgets page, itself buried under the Design tab. Ok, I know they were written by different people, and for different versions of WordPress. Which radically changes the administration UI with each new major release. But boy is it a pain to go and hunt down where the settings went this time just to see if this thing I downloaded actually does something interesting.

Move along, nothing to see here.

One interesting development of losing weight (aside from the justification to buy fabric for the replacement wardrobe) is that I get a lot more unsolicited attention in public. I’m going to assume that this is fairly typical, although I haven’t had to deal with it in a long time. (I am back to my high school weight, for what that’s worth. Still not small.)

I came home the other night to the neighbors hanging around drinking, being the primary male recreational activity around here. I don’t talk to them much because I usually have something to do and I’m not into beer and cigarettes. Or loud Spanish covers of 70s Top-40. But I digress.

So one neighbor guy said hi as I walked up and clearly it had just hit him that I was, umm, “Hot” may be a word. Ok, I was wearing gym clothes that leave little to the imagination. He’s far too polite to say anything obvious (my being “somebody else’s woman” and all) but was clearly taken aback at the realization and stammered through a compliment on my new-found healthy lifestyle.

Now Dillo has long commented on the gloriousness that is my Oakland booty but aside from a few fat admirers (and, strangely, a gaggle of boys on Market Street one afternoon who clearly didn’t recognize I’m old enough to be their mother) I have mainly not thought much about it.

When I was younger, being overweight was still thought a horrendous curse and mostly I got the “maybe I’ll hit on the desperate fat chick” kind of crap. Now the way things have gone, I’m pretty small compared to a lot of American women. Fortunately I’m now dealing with middle-aged adults who have less awkward brain-addling hormones and a better command of the English language (umm, mostly.) At the risk of sounding like some airhead twit, I guess I should start getting used to it.

Finally the blog is up and running. I had it all working nicely last night and then somehow apache decided it liked “500 Internal Server Error” more than WordPress. The problem was that it wouldn’t allow access to either index.html or index.php, which I thought I had already taken care of with DirectoryIndex.

After mucking about with the conf files, I finally went back to Server Admin and did it from the GUI. Which, frankly, I still don’t really trust. Sure, the new Leopard version doesn’t totally eat my configuration any time it touches it, but it still does weird things I don’t understand. DirectoryIndex “index.php” “New”? Well, if it somehow decides to break later, I still have the backup copy of the configuration.

Spoke too soon. The damn thing changed AllowOverride for every single one of my sites, causing WordPress permalinks to break. I should file a bug, but I don’t feel like setting up a test server to reproduce and document.

I needed a new blog to talk about non-textile stuff. This would be it.