Blog

After reading Getting Things Done and trying a couple times to implement the system, I think I've only taken away the parts that actually add MORE stress: everything is work, and you just need to prioritize and do it.

With that mentality, blogging falls in with booking hotels and airfare, planning bachelor parties, regular household chores, and of course, actual work work. The trouble is that all of those things take precedence over blogging, so I just haven't been doing it - and then I feel like there's one more thing on my to-do list.

I started this blog with the best of intentions: I wanted to actually write interesting, well-written posts - unlike the short trivial crap I used to post in LiveJournal constantly. I saw (and still see) a lot of really talented writers that are blogging about all sorts of things, and I wanted - to some extent - to emulate that. But the truth is, I'm not a good writer. I have ideas for blog posts all the time, but I don't feel like expending the time or energy to write something GOOD about it, so I just don't bother. In general, I really like writing about stuff on here - frankly, I think it's more for me than anyone else. It's kind of therapeutic to write about stuff, to work through my feelings on the matter. But so often, my desire to write something is overwhelmed by my desire to write something good. It feels like an obligation, but an obligation to whom? Only a small handful of people read this site, and as much as I love you all, I don't think any of you expect a whole lot of quality out of me. Maybe I need to adjust my own expectations and just post stuff when I feel like it, whether I can make it good or not.

Furthermore, Movable Type and 1&1 have been giving me hell lately. In the MT admin, I get 500 Internal Server Errors on almost every page load, so even a simple post is a frustrating exercise. I managed to import all my entries and comments in WordPress, so we'll see if this works better (and incidentally, you may get all my posts again in your feed reader - sorry about that).

Long story short, blogging has left a bad taste in my mouth for a couple of reasons. I'm going to keep doing it, though. It won't be polished and it won't be pretty, but I think I'm OK with that.

(And yes, I hate blogging-about-blogging as much as everyone else, but you'll get over it)

I just noticed that my toothpaste top can flip up OR twist off (it even has printed instructions) (actually, that's the only reason I noticed). Why didn't they think of that sooner? (And why do I feel like I should have a preference?)

Also: I almost forgot about it, but as of last Thursday, I've been doing this thing for two years.

Like the new look? Of course you do.

I upgraded to MT 3.2 almost a year ago, and "re-design blog" has been on my to-do list ever since. The default template isn't bad, but I definitely didn't care for the grey-blue crap. So, I stripped out most of the coloring, touched up some borders, and brought back the random banner images (who doesn't love random banner images?). I've got about a dozen of them from the old design and I'll be adding more when I get around to it - collect them all!

Interested parties may remember my post about copying LiveJournal comments from a syndicated account to a Movable Type blog. Wes and Bob (I think?) recommended some LJ developer pages, but the closest I could get was retrieving comments from an LJ account for which I'm logged in. Since I was looking to get comments from a syndicated account, there is (as far as I know) no way to do that.

So I spent a few hours this weekend hacking together this monstrosity of PHP to scrape the LJ pages and insert comments into the MT database. You can get the code on the project page. It's not that good and I wouldn't even really recommend using it, but you're welcome to it. If you have any problems, bug fixes, or ideas, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment here.

To anyone who has commented lately, I'm very sorry if it didn't show up. I've been getting slammed with comment spam lately, with mixed results from SpamLookup. I was flushing some of it today when I noticed one real comment amongst them, but this was after nuking hundreds of comments, so I have no idea if there were other real ones in there too. And it seems that I accidentally published a block of them instead of deleting them, so I'm cleaning up that mess now.

I'm going to keep a closer eye on things for at least a little while and see if my SpamLookup settings need some adjustment. In the meantime, if you post a comment and it doesn't show up after a few hours - I moderate everything, so it'll be a little while, anyway - please send me a quick note so I can rectify the situation. I'm at rboland[at]gmail[dot]com. Thanks!