Jarrett House North

Psst! New blog!

I don’t have all the lights on yet, but you can find me at my new WordPress blog. In a few weeks, this site will automatically redirect over there, but why wait?

What happened? And, going forward

A few people were surprised last week when the part of my blog at discuss.jarretthousenorth.com went offline. Well, me too! I had a lot of concert commitments at the end of last week and didn't notice over the weekend when the site went down, nor when my site was replaced with a default Weblogger.com page. But obviously it’s back now.

So here’s what happened: the Manila server that powers my dynamic site (the part where I actually create the content and that serves my RSS feed) suffered a hardware failure. Fortunately, my blog host, the redoubtable Mr. Erin Clerico at Weblogger, had a full backup; it took the better part of the day to bring the backup online on a secondary Manila server, and then my blog took a little longer because of its size (hey, seven years of blog content isn’t a trivial amount of data).

The good news is that after this event, Erin is even more motivated than before to move his Manila sites to a platform that’s more stable and that is being actively maintained. So he’s officially announced his migration service for taking Manila to Wordpress. At the end of the process I’ll have all my blog content (except, unfortunately, the old comments; but those haven’t been accessible for two years now anyway) in a new, modern container that includes far more support for management and spam elimination. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Or, as I told Greg yesterday: I for one welcome our new open-source blogging solution overlords!

Reports of my blog's death slightly exaggerated.

But just slightly. More details after I get out of this rehearsal.

Trying to use Disqus

I read with some interest that Dave Winer is experimenting with the comment service from Disqus on Scripting News. I turned comments completely off on my site one year ago today and really miss the interactivity. So I signed up for Disqus to see what I could get.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to make Disqus work with Manila. I use a hosted Manila site, so I can’t resort to back-end code to make the integration work, and there are two critical pieces that are missing for me to be able to implement Disqus:

A unique page for each post. This is obviously not Disqus’s fault, but the version of Manila that I use has one page per day, not per post. So it’s not clear where the comment form should go.
A way to modify the permalink URL. The generic Disqus instructions say to publish a version of the permalink URL followed by #disqus_thread. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have access to a Manila macro that will do this—I get the permalink as a fully formed link.

So it looks like, unless the Disqus people come up with something, I have yet another reason to accelerate my move to another blog platform.

Except...hmmm, now I have an idea about how I might pull it off. Let’s see if I can make it work.

Photo sharing

I was contacted today by Schmap, an online travel guide, to use one of my photos of downtown Portland (the sand castle contest photo) in their guide. They found me on Flickr and actually had the courtesy to ask about the photo before they reused it—it’s a Creative Commons-licensed photo. Rather novel, really—I’ve only been asked about one other of my photos, though I have no way to know if any of the others have been reused.

Lost post blues

Strange: I posted two items last night but neither seems to be on the blog.

Ah well. Neither was particularly illuminating, but I will link (again) to my coworker’s blog, Adventures In Technology, for all you release engineers out there.

Blogaversary VI

Six years ago today, I sat at a computer in the Seattle suburbs and updated this site, thinking I would manage to update it again only under extreme duress; hence the optimistic title Quarterly Update (I). A funny thing happened shortly thereafter, and I got the blogging bug. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

Oh, this blog and I have had our ups and downs: three redesigns in the first three years; periods of six posts a day and periods of a post every six days; posts about my family, technology, music, and beer; and our dogs and our house. And occasionally I might have written something worth linking to.

I’ve been through periods where I watched my hit counts and my referrers several times a day. Where I despaired if my month over month readership fell. Where I treasured reciprocal links like signs of friendship.

These days? Well, last year I was a little bummed over the fact that my frequency of posting was falling off. In retrospect that was an inevitable fallout of the Sony Boycott blog period, when I was updating two blogs several times a day. But I also think it was a year ago that I first decided that the important thing wasn’t post frequency or readership, blogrolls or PageRank. It was the writing.

So from here on out I think I’ll just keep writing. One post at a time.

After all, this blog isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. (For one thing, no one’s kissing the writer in Wellesley.) It’s more like breathing.

MoreConsuming

I finally bit the bullet today and pulled the plug on my old manual system of tracking what I’m listening to, reading, or watching at any given moment. There were all sorts of reasons to do so, but three factors combined to make me make the change. The first was the eleven step manual workflow needed to update each of the entries in that list. The second was an honesty factor; I don’t need to show a movie in the list all the time if I only watch movies once a month. The third factor, though, is how easy AllConsuming makes it for me to track the information. Now all I have to do is tell AllConsuming that I’m listening to, reading, watching, or eating something and it will show it on my site automatically with a single line of JavaScript.

This, of course, flies in the face of what I said two years ago about blog related services. What’s changed is that I don’t have the time to maintain some of the more manual parts of the blog any more, and there are better services available now than there were then.

BlogUnrolling

So I was looking at my website and wondering: why do I still have a blogroll? And does anyone care that I still have a blogroll?

Used to be that blogrolls were what everyone did. There were bitter discussions about being linked or unlinked. Now? It’s probably just a measure of my declining time spent in blogs, because I haven’t updated it in a long time. I’m lucky if I see one or two blogs (besides BoingBoing) on the blogroll that are actually updating in a 24 hour period.

So drop me a line if you still want to be on the blogroll, but I’ll be taking most of the items off in the next day or so. It’s time.

Where is my mind?

I’ve been offline for a really long time, in terms of this blog’s history, and thought I’d surface for air to post a brief update.

It’s been a quiet Christmas here at Jarrett House North. My mom came up to spend Christmas with Lisa and me, and we’ve had some nice gift giving and some really excellent meals. With only two cooks at any given time, we had to simplify the feast of seven fishes for Christmas Eve—instead, we just did pasta aio i olio with shrimp covered in breadcrumb with parsley and garlic and baked. On Christmas Day we did a beef tenderloin studded with pancetta with a nice red wine and shallot sauce.

Christmas Eve services at Old South were nice this year, a ceremony of lessons and carols. The opening, as in the Anglican service, was “Once in Royal David’s City”; for us, the opening verse was intoned from the back balcony of the church as the rest of the choir stood in the aisles with lit candles, then sang the second verse a cappella before the organ and congregation joined the final verse. The choir was good, despite the last minute addition of a substitute tenor (and one other tenor—me—being exceptionally sleep deprived).

What else? We have upgraded the photo equipment here at the Jarrett House, trading our old sturdy Nikon for a Canon PowerShot SD600. (I wanted something with higher resolution so I could print photos larger than 3"x4"; to my delight, the PowerShot is also faster, simpler, and generally better. Proof eventually to come once I get a chance to take some serious photos with it.)

And my old trusty 10GB iPod has been upgraded for a 30GB video iPod, thanks to a slew of gift certificates to Apple from my family. Now I have more room for music—I can fit at least 20 playlists on the thing alongside my standard rotating roster of unlistened-to music, plus photos, plus videos, and the screen is beautiful, bright, colorful, and shows album art. Special bonus: it fits in the car cradle I bought prior to the cross-country trip for the old one.

Today: a trip to the North End to get cotechino, a little light housework, and maybe even a nap.

Closing the door: no more comments on this blog

I’ve touched on the problem of comment spam before, but this weekend I’ve decided to call a halt. Starting right now, I’m disabling access to the comments and discussion features on this site. If you have something to say, write about me in your own blog and I’ll read it in Technorati, or use the contact form to email me.

I hate having to do this; after all, this is supposed to be the two-way web. But I can’t keep up with an army of unpatched zombie PCs sending unsolicited spam comments. I had to delete over 900 spam comments last night, and there were 150 more when I checked this afternoon.

This will be a temporary measure until I can move this blog and its existing content over to a WordPress host, or to some other modern hosting system. But for right now I don’t have any other choice.

I guess this is the future of technology. Once it was only big players like Dave Winer who had enough comment grief that they had to disable comments. Now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, everyone can experience what Dave was going through four years ago.

Piskawhat?

I’m getting buried alive under an avalanche of spam. Most of the offending items appear to start with the nonsense word piskasosiska, plus a unique numeric code that appears to correspond to the contents of the spam message. Presumably this is to make it easier to verify the spread of a particular unsolicited spam comment.

Anyone got any idea which bot network is sending these messages? I want them gone, and I’m about a heartbeat away from shutting comments down on this site entirely.

10,000

This should be the 10,000th post on my Manila blog. Will time end? Will the calendar still work? Let’s roll over the odometer.

… Oh well, the spammers win again. This was actually message 10,013. Messages 9995 through 10012 are all spam comments.

Blogaversary 5

As e.e. cummings once wrote, Is 5. He wasn’t talking specifically about my blog, but today, on its blogaversary, he might well be. It was five years ago today, during the summer of 2001, that I got the bug to start writing in this website I had set up, originally on UserLand’s EditThisPage.com service, and I haven’t stopped writing since.

Five years is pretty much forever in blog years, and my blog has started to show its age a little bit. It was last redesigned over two years ago, and the content hasn’t been nearly as compelling in my opinion recently. Part of this is that my job has been very demanding, which is of course a good thing, but over the last six months or so I’ve been lucky if I’ve blogged once a day.

Generally the issue for me is time. I have approximately negative two hours every day for thought, and it’s really making my writing suffer. I hope that next month when I am on some of my retreats with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus to spend some time writing and thinking about my writing and figure out the direction I need to go with the writing.

In the meantime, I think the one thing that will likely stay on the blog is my music writing. Just as soon as I find time to write a couple reviews that I owe for BlogCritics.

But you know, it hasn’t been such a bad five years, as a brief look back over other blogaversaries shows:

2002: “Hard to believe that it was a year ago today that I started this weblog in earnest. At the time I certainly didn’t think I’d stick to it; the title (“Quarterly Update (i)”) indicated a certain… lack of optimism.”
2003: “Since my first blogaversary, graduating from business school, moving 3000 miles, and buying a house, the blog has been a lot less technical and hopefully a little more human (apologies to those for whom either prospect is daunting).’
2004: “I was just getting ready to lament that I hadn’t done so much technology blogging this year, but I really don’t know that I missed it too much.”
2005: “Dear blog, sorry I forgot our blogaversary. Yes, I know you’re mad. This is the second year in a row I forgot …”

Okay, so maybe not the most illuminating tour. Perhaps I’ll just shut up and start working on the next post.

Trackback, you are dead to me.

I finally turned off trackback on this blog. For a while there have been certain posts that were trackback magnets, and I was dealing with those through a manual review process. In the last month, though, just about every post started to collect trackback spam within a day or so of being posted. The version of Manila that my host supports doesn’t really provide any mechanisms for managing Trackback spam—there is no notification mechanism and no facility for centrally reviewing pings. So it’s gone as of last night, and good riddance.

I’ll continue to send out pings when I post, but given my experience with Trackback I don’t know if anyone will be receiving them.