This is probably stupidly obvious, but I’m putting this blog on an indefinite hiatus. It started out as equal parts inane prattling about my life and complaining about how screwed up the world is, and I don’t really feel like writing about either any more. I’ve got a Twitter account for all the pointless life-related stuff, and my rants have historically had too much rhetoric and not enough substance. I’d rather not be a liberal version of Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly.

Once I figure out what purpose this blog will serve, I’ll be sure to let everyone know. By writing a post. On this blog.

(That was smooth.)

Oh, and for pity’s sake, people, stop sending me stuff about Alex Jones. I’m sorry I ever mentioned the guy.

For the first summer ever, I have managed to actually get a full-time job. I honestly don’t know what was going on the past couple summers when I tried applying to every business in my home town, but this year I’m working for the county’s parks and recreation department. Not my ideal job, but it’s steady income.

As a result of my new 40-hour week, I haven’t had much time to get on my blog and post stuff. This is unfortunate, but it’s happened before. Everyone hits a slump now and again. I figure I’m just too beat to get properly irritated at world events. Or maybe I’ve become jaded enough that I simply can’t get properly irritated? That would be disturbing.

For lack of anything better, here’s a video. It involves SCIENCE. Kind of.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As usual, my WordPress upgrade (to the much-hyped 2.5) gave me grief. Unfortunately, much of it was my fault. For some odd reason, my FTP client moved files on the server instead of copying them, so my backup was essentially useless (I copied the original blog directory to another directory). Thus, when I deleted the new directory when it got messed up, I deleted everything. Themes, plugins, even images. Can anyone say “stupid mistake”?

Luckily, any pictures I used on the site are on my computer, but that just means I’ll have to re-upload them and fix any posts using images (such as the most recent post before this). And on the bright side, I can start anew without the clutter of useless themes and plugins. On the downside, I don’t remember what all the useful plugins were…

And yes, Bagel, I know I could have avoided this by just having a blog on WordPress.com, but I’m too stubborn for that. I just wish I had made better backups…

UPDATE: All right, I’ve got a new theme going, but I’m still missing a lot of stuff. And I still feel stupid. Argh. At least WP 2.5 is nice. It’s a good thing, too, considering the trouble I went through.

If you’re like me and run your own copy of WordPress that’s not actually hosted by WordPress.com, upgrading can be a little bit annoying, especially with the minor security fixes that come out every so often. Luckily, there’s a fairly easy way to do this, as Zack of All Trades illustrates. You can do this if you have access to an SSH or Telnet shell. Some hosts don’t offer it, but others do, so you’ll need to check with your web host to see if you can access your account via a shell client. It’s is not for the weak of heart.

I wouldn’t recommend this method for major upgrades, but I suppose it’d work out just fine. I’ve used it for the past few minor updates and it’s been great. Less time spent using an FTP client and more time spent…uh…writing, I suppose. Maybe. Sometimes.

Oddly enough, my rather disjointed rant on Alex Jones and his status as a case of nuts is the most popular post on this blog, having received 242 total views since it was posted last September. It’s also the most commented on with 21 comments (mine included). Just goes to show how easy it is to piss off conspiracy theories, doesn’t it? Just mention their leader and an insult and the referred searches just start rolling in…

And yes, I know 242 views over 4-5 months is nothing, but it’s a lot for this blog. And if that’s not enough to wow you, I even got a comment from Morton Devonshire, the Wikipedia editor who got Jones all riled up a while back, which pushed me to write the article in the first place. How’s that for full circle, or whatever? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

You may have noticed a rather large jump in the number of posts here at Mad Rants. I don’t know how you might have noticed such a thing through a casual glance, but hey, it could happen. Anyways, I broke down and paid for a premium Xanga account so I could import all my old posts (back to September 2004) to this blog. Looking back, I don’t know why I bothered. Most of my posts were rather meaningless and certainly not anything like the things I write about now. Well, I suppose it at least gives me credibility for having an active blog for so long (“I was blogging when blogging was still the realm of people who had nothing to talk about!” …wait, that still holds true…), and I suppose the posts are fun to read through. I had a strange sense of humor three years ago.

Anyways, please bear with me as I go through and categorize, tag, name, and cleanup all the imported posts. Permalinks may be broken for these old posts, so don’t go Digging them just yet. I only wish I knew why some of the later (more recent) ones are lacking names and links for the comments. Very odd.

So I upgraded my blog to the latest version of the ultimate blogging goodness that is WordPress. One of the cool things this version (2.3) has that everyone’s been talking about is tags. This is Web. 2.0: you have to have tags. Categories just don’t cut it anymore.

Anyways, tags are cool. I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 for all my tagging needs but when I upgraded to WP 2.3, I decided to give the built-in tagging features a whirl. Of course, this entailed extensive modification of the theme to switch everyone over from UTW but things were made easier by a neat little tag importer that took all my tags from UTW and put them in the WordPress tagging table.

A few minutes of use almost sold me. It looked just as nice as UTW, and since I don’t use tag clouds, the features were good. However, I stopped short when I couldn’t find any kind of management for the tags. There is no (easy) way to add, delete, or modify tags other than going into the database or editing every post individually.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. As I was writing this post, I began to get strange errors telling me that I was missing a table in my WordPress database. I couldn’t even save my post. Investigation led me to this support article. Apparently, the developers saw fit to completely rename three tables in the WordPress database, which means that many plugins and themes are using outdated code which will cause errors just like the ones I was getting. Now I’m forced to use the featureless WordPress tags because UTW is one of the incompatible plugins crashing my blog, as is the nifty AJAX archives plugin I had managing my archives page (which is now the boring old version until I can figure out what to do with it).

Alas, this isn’t a new thing with WordPress. It seems that every major upgrade brings with it major problems for existing installations. I’ll have my blog just perfect with everything all figured out. Then I upgrade and I can’t use half of it. That’s the price of staying on top of things, I suppose. I guess my biggest frustration is being forced to use the inadequate WordPress tagging feature, but plugin authors will probably catch up soon enough. I hope.

I was looking through my archives (I’m nostalgic, what can I say?) and realized that this blog has really changed in content from when I first started it way back in 2004. I know the archives don’t go back that far, so don’t worry. I blogged on Xanga before moving here and was unable to keep all my old posts. That’s actually a good thing, since they were the usual thing you’d find on Xanga: vague ramblings about how my day was and how much I hated my German/math/gym teacher, or how lame my car was (there was a funny post in there about the family Crapavan…good times), but nothing you’d really want to read.

However, as time’s gone by, I’ve written less and less about myself. I kind of switched to writing about how I feel about more important stuff, which is what blogging is really more about. Writing all about yourself is either egotistic or whiny, depending on how you phrase things. The rants started probably around late 2005 or early 2006, but they were few and far between, and I wrote more and more about technical stuff: my experiences with Linux, games I liked, movies I’d watched, or, when I moved to my own hosting, about WordPress and other blogging platforms. (Yay for lame history lessons…moving on.)

Now, however, my posts are almost exclusively news and rants. Or both. By now you’re probably wondering what the point of this post is, considering I’ve gone on and on about what I write about. Anyways, I’m asking you, my readers, what you would prefer to see out of Mad Rants. In short: what do you expect from this blog?

This has become less and less a personal blog–and that’s not a bad thing–but I want to make sure that’s okay with my readers. One of the best things a blog can do for itself is write towards its audience. If Maddox started writing about fluffy kittens and DDR (in a non-sarcastic fashion), his readers would be pretty taken aback. Heck, they reacted bad enough when he pulled an April Fools’ prank.

The question I asked is optional. I half meant it, but I also half wanted to just write something to make it look like I’m doing something. I also half wanted to see how many people replied. And now I think I need to go work on my fractions. Kolleg iz lerning me gud, arn’t it?

As you can see, I’ve updated the look of Mad Rants a bit. I’m messing around with a new theme, Redoable, which I finally got working right. The new logo is just something weird I came up with; it may not be permanent. I’m still on the fence as to a crazy logo like that or a more plain one. Maybe a picture…I dunno. I’ve got too much to do the rest of this quarter than mess around in Photoshop.

Anyways, hope the new colors aren’t too hard on anyone’s eyes. I’m just never satisfied with things.

WordPress 2.2 broke my theme. I just upgraded to the newest version and suffered a setback when I found that the theme I was running is slightly incompatible with how WordPress uses widgets. See, if you know much about WordPress blogs, you realize that most themes feature widgets, which are useful little gadgets that you can drag and drop around in your sidebar to change the functionality. A few people (mostly developers of the popular K2 theme and its derivatives) decided to use something different for managing stuff in the sidebar, and they called their stuff modules. So, modules and widgets…the same, but not. The main problem is that the two are utterly incompatible. Enable widgets on your blog and the modules break. I personally like the modules better, but apparently WordPress decided to go with implementing widgets. No surprise there considering the widgets were originally developed by Automattic, the company responsible for bringing WordPress to the masses.

Anyways, the theme I was originally using was Unsleepable, which is based off of K2 and thus uses modules. It’s actually a version that was released a while back and then taken off the developer’s site due to bugs. I managed to fix my copy and it served me well. However, today when I upgraded to WordPress 2.2 from 2.1, I noticed one big problem: all my module configuration was gone, and there was no way to get it back. The little menu tab that let me mess with the theme’s modules wasn’t there at all. There was something new, though: a widgets tab.

In previous versions of WordPress (from about 1.5 to 2.1), you had to install a plugin to enable widget functionality, and that only worked on themes that were widget-ready. As of 2.2, the widget plugin is essentially built right in, which is nice for most people, since most themes use widgets. Since my theme used modules, the widget functionality broke the theme. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to disable widgets.

Due to this, I’ve switched to another theme, Redoable. This theme is also based off of K2 and uses modules, but I’ve found that it’s a lot nicer-looking than Unsleepable when I can’t change the modules. The base sidebar stuff is just what I need, and it’s a little newer than the other theme. Hopefully as time goes on, something will be done about the widgets. I’d mess with it myself, but I’ve no clue where to start. As knowledgeable as I am about WordPress, I’m no good at editing PHP to the extent that it would be needed. I’d probably end up screwing up my whole installation, and I personally think a half-working blog is better than a non-working blog.

EDIT: I spoke too soon. Not five minutes after I posted this did I come across a handy little plugin which disables widgets in 2.2. I need to learn to look before I speak. Anyways, with all things put back as they were, I’m back with the Unsleepable theme. I’m tempted to permanently switch to Redoable, but the sidebar modules still aren’t working on that (I’m not sure if they ever were), so it’s the tried and true for now. The pink is starting to get to me, though.