Classical Convert » wordpress

Comment Spam

Me — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:56:26 +0000

Good god. Every few weeks a spammer will latch onto this blog and start piping hot buttered spam into comments on random posts, despite the supposed protection of CAPTCHA (which, incidentally, is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This results in me receiving in the neighborhood of on hundred emails over the course of a mere couple of hours. THIS results in me getting annoyed and setting WordPress (THANK GOD for this feature) to automatically block comments which contain parts of the recurring spammy URLS.

So, if you are not a spam-king and are rejected trying to make a valid comment, you might be mentioning something which is taboo. This might be obvious (e.g., viagra, day-trading, etc…) or not so obvious (e.g. groups.yahoo.com) so drop me a line via the contact form if it’s problematic.

On the other hand, if you are a spam-king, go die in a fire.

Redesignated

Me — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:39:38 +0000

Well looky here… I’ve caved to the all of the peer pressure and fallen in with the cool kids in the website redesign crowd. Hopefully everything is basically working as it should be and it isn’t all about to fall apart, unlike my very classy 1995 Civic. It’s fuel efficient though.

The car. Not the website. Wait, actually that is too.

It’s nice that these modern times it’s about infinity times easier to do a website overhaul than it was in the early pioneer days, when all a man had to get by were his wits and a battered copy of MS Notepad.

WordPress, we salute you.

WordPress Upgrade Issues

Me — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:35:12 +0000

Eagle eyed ones might’ve noticed that for a bit back there, errors were all over the place up in this blog spouting out such tidbits as:

Warning: array_key_exists() [function.array-key-exists]:

The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /home/classif5/public_html/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 176

Which happened after upgrading to WordPress 2.3.2. To fix this problem I changed:

To:

In the main index template, and tada! All working again. Hopefully this will help anyone else having the same problem. If anybody sees anything else gone awry, let please me know!

This was going to be detailed…

Me — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:12:18 +0000

Yeah, this was gonna be a great, insightful, touching post about why I find Beethoven difficult to really, really love. Unfortuntely my brain has been slowed down by the huge hunk of sirloin and six Sam Adams white ales I gobbled down at our first BBQ of the year earlier. So, instead of all that I am simply gonna point out that by the wonders of WordPress I now have a generic all-purpose commenting form thingy, so everyone can tell me how awesome or not so awesome I am. Yay.

WordPress 2.1 Upgrade

Me — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:07:26 +0000

Yay I have the shiny new version 2.1 of WordPress staring out at me instead of scummy old version 2.05 or whatever. Things went a bit crazy for a short time because it now has built in support for static front pages, which sort of messed things up. The is_home command stopped claiming that the front page really was the front page because it was static, it only returns true on the front page of the blog, so I had to rewrite my is_home() statements into is_page(‘Home’) after setting that page as the front one.

This new version seems really nice after my initial frustrations. It means that I don’t have to hack it around so much to use it as a CMS (content management system), and my blog can actually be at classicalconvert.com/blog instead of classicalconvert.com/category/blog which looked kind of retarded. The new editor is cool as well, it’s got ever so trendy Web 2.0 style tabs on it.

Sorry for this post being so unmusical, but I need to geek out every now and then.

Development

Me — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 03:13:35 +0000

The parts-of-sonata-form titles will die soon, don’t worry. I’m just milking ‘em while I can so that I don’t have to be creative enough to come up with an actual, quality, content type title.

Yesterday I’ve been hammering away at the background of my charming old WordPress template (aka the thingy which makes all this website look like it does) to stick a blog button at the top of the page, and make archive indexes appear on blog pages, but magically not on the other pages. It’s pretty nicely easy, surprisingly. PHP and WordPress are a joy to work with.

Musically: the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Pathetique got stuck in my head after last night – a sign that it’s growing into me in serious ways, setting roots down deep in there, somewhere. When I wake up in the morning and a melody fades into me as soon as the daylight does, I’m almost certain it’s going to be a favorite. I’m also starting to try and pick up the piano again, but from a classical point of view this time. There’s this book in the music library which is from the twenties and aimed at teaching older people. The language is fantastic, quite literally. Some sample snippets should appear up here when it gets retrieved from the lab.

I should have titled the last posts Exposition

Me — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 04:24:18 +0000

I think I’m starting to get the hang of WordPress, and the site seems to be coming along pretty well. Maybe next week I’ll start publicizing it a bit. Today I made a new logo (much better than the old one) with a snippet from Shostakovich’s string quartet number 8 in the background. I even worked out how to do transparency gradients in the Gimp, which wasn’t actually very hard, but it makes it look kinda professional. Ish. Prefessionalish. I also wrote a page with some common issues people have when listening to classical music for the first time.

I’m going up to Maine to see my dad and stepmum for the Christmas break on Thursday, which means I won’t be able to do my next grand scheme too well, yet. I’m going to make little pages for each composer, and put 30 second representative samples on each page. Maybe a large scale piece and a small scale piece, or something. I’ll link to good resources for them as well. it’ll be fantastic!

I also want to do something similar for the different musical eras. Maybe if I upload a bunch of music files tomorrow I can write some of the pages in Maine, if i can get on my dad’s Mac. I wish I had a laptop…

Post beginnings

Me — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:02:14 +0000

Today I managed to write a guide to taking one’s first step, instead of working in lab – but that was kind of expected since we had Lucy’s farewell party and everyone had to skive off early to go buy stuff. I’m now exhausted from lots of hot-pot and beer, and look forward to collapsing quite promptly in bed.

I’m still finding it difficult to write in my own voice, while teaching. I think some people are really good at doing both in the same way, whereas I tend to switch personas. I think I adjust to my situation too much at the expense of my personality, sometimes.

Beginnings

Me — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 06:04:38 +0000

Today I really started getting this site together. I played around with WordPress, trying to pretty up the front page and make it look less like a list of blog entries. The logo is still pretty horrible, but I ain’t no graphic designer, and I don’t fancy spending hours and hours trying make it look great – it seems more important to get some real content up.

In terms of actual, quality, content I put together a list of reasons for choosing classical over pop music and did a little front page blurb. It’s hard to get the tone of writing right. I worry that it comes off sounding like some fanboy trying desperately hard to be funny. It’s tricky writing to an unknown audience… I try to imagine I’m writing an eMail to one of my friends instead, but not quite with so much free deputizing of the language.

It’s seems good to have this blog area in addition to the main content to get my thoughts straight and just blab on a bit!