As you may have noticed, there is a new theme about the site. This is because I have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4 from *cough* 1.2.2, and, yeah. It was needed.<\/p>\n
Naturally, this took a lot longer than it should have, so the site was down for most of the day. I followed the simple five steps outlined<\/a> on the WordPress site and that was fine. The problem was that the files were a pain to get on the server. Granted, we have “high speed” internet here in sunny Iraq (or at least I do), and granted it is prone to finicky behavior. Since it is satellite, it is susceptible to environmental considerations, like sand, wind, and mortars. For whatever reason, I simply could not<\/em> FTP the files to the server reliably. Dropped connections, socket errors, and all manner of Very Frustrating Things.<\/p>\n In the end, I simply put them up via a web based interface that my servers have. And that took two plus hours with all the files involved. Fortunately, I missed only one that I know of, and that has been corrected. If you notice anything amiss, please leave a comment.<\/p>\n With all the time available to me, I noticed a couple of things. One, recursion is difficult for the human mind to grasp beyond a few levels. I think this has to do with memory, and that called to mind the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two<\/a>” dealing with the inability of the human mind to grasp large quantities of data for a given channel. So, tracking which files had to go up, which directory was the next one to recurse, and so on, was a bit of a challenge at times.<\/p>\n Two: as I did this, I noticed that I got into a rhythm with keystrokes and the like. Never one to leave well enough alone, I would switch hands with the mouse pad and which hand was doing what keystroke. Without fail, the process would suddenly stall, since now a lot of mental processing was being shifted. While I can and do often mouse left handed, switching in mid-stream would throw a wrench into everything. And I would lose my mental pointers of where I was at and what I was doing. Now, I would recover, and get back into “the zone,” but it was an interesting observation to me of what the costs are of interrupting the flow of things<\/a> and how long it takes to get back into the groove of things. Nothing like learning things for yourself, which is usually how I learn lessons in life. (Just ask The Wife.)<\/p>\n But things are running now, and all of this was to combat spam. What? Well, the blogging needs of mine were pretty much met with the old version, but I really didn’t have an effective way to trash all the comment spam in a timely manner. I was getting literally thousands of spam comments a week. Too much to do by hand, so I needed some code to limit it, or at least help me throw it out. Nor could I use a handy tool that I wanted to use on the site. It (the version I used) was simply Too Old To Begin The Training. So, I upgraded. And we’ll see if the New Cool Toy I wanted lives up to my expectations.<\/p>\n In the meantime, I’m tinkering with the newer features that I have. I’m undecided about the new theme, though. I kind of liked the older one better, but maybe it was time for a change. There are definitely some parts that I know I want from the other theme, like the calendar display of archives, but with a little toying, I’m sure that can be arranged.<\/p>\n Until then, enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you may have noticed, there is a new theme about the site. This is because I have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4 from *cough* 1.2.2, and, yeah. It was needed. Naturally, this took a lot longer than it should have, so the site was down for most of the day. I followed the simple five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-crap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinitytestsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}