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You Can Go Home Again

wordpress-logo-simplified-rgbI’m back home.

For years I ran this site as a self-hosted WordPress blog. Nearly a decade, in fact.

I set up Leoville in September, 2007 as a refugee from Vox (remember that?) That was the blogging platform that convinced me to own my own content. Many of the missing pictures and links on this site were left behind in the migration from Vox. They’re lost forever. (If anyone at Six Apart knows where the Vox content is warehoused let me know!)

Prior to Vox I had used every blogging platform under the sun (including Grey Matter, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad). But WordPress was the best. I won’t go into the reasons I moved away, but I’m very happy to be back. And the advantages of using wordpress.com instead of self-hosting are guaranteed to keep me here for a long time.

Disclaimer: WordPress.com is a sponsor on my TWiT network. 

 

 

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Updated to 3.0.1 But…

wordpress logo.jpegFor some reason the automated updates are broken on WordPress and I have eight out-of-date plug-ins. I’ll be fixing them over the rest of the day, so pardon my dust (and occasional down time).
(You may wonder why I’m bothering you with this trivia – I’m still trying to get my Buzz working and I’ve been posting to it using every possible means, including this blog post. If you’re following me on Buzz, and would like to get all my Buzz posts back into your timeline, unfollow me then re-follow me. That seems to fix the bug. You can see all my recent posts whether or not you do this on my Google Profile. If you don’t care in the least about any of this, I don’t blame you. I’m having a hard time caring myself!)

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I’m Back Baby

BlueprintWell I think I’ve got this place pretty much back to where it was. In fact, I took this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of my theme, Revolution 3.0, and make some minor cosmetic improvements. I’m liking it even better now than before.
I lost many of the images from past posts, but it turns out that both my graphics program, Skitch, and my blog editor, MarsEdit, preserve uploaded images in an archive, so I was able to get most of the pictures from 2008 back on the blog. Thanks Plasq and Daniel!

Only one thing is stumping me. I can’t remember the WordPress command to insert the most recent post in a given category. I use that on the front page to put the most recent news and blog posts at the bottom on either side of the Stickam video. It’s a little WordPress PHP and it’s quite handy, since I don’t need to do anything to update it. Do you know what I’m talking about? Got any idea what the syntax is?

UPDATE: Tollie gave me the command – I’ve got it working. Thanks Tollie!

General LeoNow it’s on to resuscitating the TWiT Army and TWiT Contributor Forums. I’m going to take this opportunity to fold the forums back into the TWiT.tv Drupal. Among other things this will automate logins from new contributors.

The TWiT Army Canteen should be up pretty soon with a much improved design, thanks to The Frogman and Mongo. Sounds like a Morning Zoo team, doesn’t it.

And I’ve learned my lesson. Daily backups are in progress. Automatically. So, knock on wood, this will never happen again.

Let me know if you spot any bugs. I think everything is back working again.

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Ugly In So Many Ways

Yes Leoville is looking pretty awful. I’m reconstructing it from scratch. Fortunately, as you can see, all the posts survived the apocalyptic demise of my server’s RAID 5 Array. Unfortunately, none of the WordPress customizations did. So I’m downloading the plug-ins, restoring the template, hacking the CSS, and desperately trying to remember the changes I made.
All the comments are safe with Disqus and will return when I turn on the Disqus plug-in. (Done. Thanks, Disqus!)

Unfortunately, the image directory was not saved. That means all the attached images will be blank. I will be able to recreate some of them from my local archives, but most are lost forever. -sigh-

All of this is because I was too cheap to buy the many gigabytes of storage required to backup that data. It was a false economy. I’ve purchased 200GB of storage from my host, Softlayer, at the extortionate rate of $180/month. (That’s twice what a hard drive of that size would cost outright – 2400% more per year – and I thought the cell phone companies were bad.) And I’ll be setting up rsync and S3 for a secondary backup, as well.

Meanwhile it’s back to the depressing and very time consuming work of fixing this place up again. Now I know, in a very small way, how it must feel to survive a hurricane.