Birmingham Blues

WordPress has been putting me through the wringer lately. A couple of months ago, I was suddenly unable to log in. No reason, hadn’t changed anything recently, just no recognition of my password. I cycled through endless loops of entering my information and going right back to the login page.

After countless hours digging through the WordPress support forums, I finally discovered that this was a glitch related to the most recent software release — to which I had upgraded at least a week prior to the login loop. I also discovered that the suggested solutions didn’t work for everyone. And that at least one of the WordPress admins needs a serious attitude adjustment. Anyway, I tried several fixes and got one that worked (deactivating and then reactivating my plug-ins, just in case anyone out there is having similar difficulties).

All was well. Until yesterday.

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We had a bit of down time today, as we were unable to login to post anything new.  After spending many hours poring over threads in the WordPress support forum, I think (hope) that I’ve fixed the problem.

Two things that tickled my fancy today:

On the way to work, I heard a snippet of John McCain’s acceptance speech where he said, “And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big spending, do nothing, me first, country second Washington crowd: change is coming.”  Okay, am I confused, or is McCain?  He does remember that he’s running as a Republican, right?  And that he’s been in Washington since 1982?  Sounds to me like he dissed his own party, and himself, big time.

Yesterday, Del sent me a post by an Alaska blogger detailing Sarah Palin’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request for emails sent by two of her aides.  She claimed executive privilege for some of the emails despite releasing logs that showed her husband was included on the distribution list.  Seems to me giving access to a private citizen might just negate a later claim of privilege, but that didn’t stop her from trying.  Gee, does this sound like anyone we know?  This morning Del sends me a link to a Salon piece entitled “Sarah Palin’s Real Soul Mate,” who would be none other than Mister Executive Privilege himself, George W. Bush.

Oh, goody.  Just what we need.

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Let me be clear, lest anyone misunderstand.  I have no problem with Palin talking shop with her spouse.  Who doesn’t?  But when he (a private citizen, remember?) is copied on emails that are later withheld from the public, something smells.  And it doesn’t smell like the transparent government she championed when she ran for office.

I’m hoping this post will at least show up in IE. Right now, trying to view the Blues in IE gives me a mess and a “Done, but with errors on page” message. Everything is working fine with Firefox, so now might be a good time to download it.

I’ll have to turn this over to my technical support team (that would be Zach). Meanwhile, if any of you have a clue as to what could be causing the problem, drop me an email at birminghambluesATbellsouthDOTnet. We’ll get the IE problem solved ASAP.

Never mind.  It’s fixed.

When we last left our heroines, they were hanging in limbo, waiting to see if the LargeCorporateFirewall would reconsider its classification of their beloved blog as pornography.  Today they got their answer:

From: **********
Date: 2007/08/23 Thu PM 02:30:28 CDT
To: birminghamblues@bellsouth.net
Subject: Your rating submission to SonicWALL

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:

Rate queervoice.net as “25.Political/Advocacy Groups” at 2007-08-22 12:25:00.293

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
“41.Glamour/Society” at 2007-08-23 12:28:08.510

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.
Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support

Glamour/Society.  Well, alrighty then.  I guess we’ll be seeing lots more Hollywood celebrity posts around here.  Or not. 

…is spambots can’t get through.  DreamHost was so very dead this morning that I couldn’t even access the status page, which is supposed to be an entity unto itself, always working even in an apocalypse.  Well, maybe not then.

It’s ironic to me, a moderately technophilic type who nevertheless understands relatively little about the intertubes, that a web hosting company can’t keep its servers up and running.  Reminds me of my four trips to Best Buy this week.  I got a portable satellite radio for Christmas a couple of years ago (see? technophile), and along with it came a service plan that covers repairs or replacement.  So last Friday when the antenna connection got so loose that I couldn’t listen without holding it in place — hard to do while driving — I sallied forth to the Best Buy.  No problem, said they; the radio couldn’t be repaired, and they don’t sell that model anymore, so they would replace it.  Okay, one small problem.  Their receipt system was down, so they couldn’t determine how much I paid for it (and of course my receipt was long gone).  No worries; the system would be back up soon, and anyway I had to go back home and gather up every little attachment that had come with the radio so all of it could be shipped back to the manufacturer.  Why, I don’t know, given that they no longer make this particular unit, but I had to make another trip anyway, so no big deal.

Back I went that evening, with my ziploc bag of pieces and parts in tow.  After waiting thirty minutes while a harried customer service representative went back and forth between trying to find my receipt and helping other customers, I ascertained that the system was still down.  This did not make me happy, but the supervisor took my name and phone number and promised to call when it was working again.

I heard nothing over the weekend, so Monday afternoon I went to Best Buy again.  I was in the neighborhood, and this time it only took a couple of minutes to determine that the system was still down, so this visit was marginally less stressful than the previous ones.  Wised up and called on Tuesday morning to find that — after four long days — this company that sells and services computers had finally managed to get its receipt system up and working again.

Technology is a wonderful thing.  When it works.

Sorry about that — I think they’re resolved now.

Bless you!  What?  Oh, never mind.

I readily admit to being a bit slow at times.  Last year, I was experiencing a virtual flood of spam “comments” — over a thousand a day for a while, until someone finally told me about the Akismet spam blocker that comes with WordPress.  I activated it, checked it a couple of times, and let that sucker do its job catching tons of ads for porn, pharmaceuticals, gambling sites, etc.

But then I forgot about it.  Until this weekend, when I had a tiny epiphany.  First, a reader emailed that her comments had started to disappear — not going to moderation but instead going into some black hole in cyberspace.  Then, I met up with some other bloggers for lunch, and one of them mentioned that he has a commenter who always gets caught by Akismet.  A little light bulb went off over my head, and when I got home, I checked my Akismet list.  Sure enough, there were my reader’s comments, sandwiched in between Viagra and Monster Cock (I guess one might lead to the other ;)).

Now, it appears that more than one commenter is getting stuck in Akismet hell.  So if you’ve ever tried to leave a comment here and seen it simply disappear (not “awaiting moderation), I apologize.  I’ll be checking my Akismet list at least once a day from now on — and if anyone knows how to stop it from blocking real live comments, please let me know.