It’s spring and time for some lightness and green. So I switched to one of our alternate stylesheets for the blog, at least, for the moment. Maybe I’ll make a new one later. Or not.

No posts lately. Strep throat. No fun.

Luckily strep throat can be treated through the magic of antibiotics, so maybe I will be back next week. See you then. (Or sooner, if I feel up to it.)

Hopefully you are seeing the blog and all of its posts today. We have been working on migrating slumberland.org to a new server. For 3 or 4 days the blog was partially migrated, but not completely, so I couldn’t post. Now I think everything is OK. I hope to post a few things this week as things get back to normal.

So, I haven’t really been around for a while. I decided I just needed to take a break. I haven’t been blogging or reading blogs, so if anything particularly newsworthy happened to any of you, I’m sorry, I probably missed it.

Nothing serious happened, really — I just wrote a paper, and when I was done, it was like my brain completely shut off for a couple of weeks as far as writing is concerned.

The paper in question is my final course paper in my MA program. So it’s a milestone. But I still have a thesis to write and a lot of red tape to get through, so don’t congratulate me yet!

You might have noticed some slight changes around here. I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.5. Unfortunately, in the process, some things were broken — most noticeably, the site themes that used to be user-customizable. For the moment there’s only one theme on the site. I will add more if I get a chance, but it’s likely to be a while. Sorry about that. I hope things aren’t too messed up.

I’ve just turned off the ability for this weblog to accept trackbacks or pingbacks. Seems the blog spammers figured out that, while WordPress has some anti-spam security in posting comments, trackbacks were wide-freaking-open. So I discovered today that 75 trackback spams advertising porn were placed on my site overnight.

The spams have been deleted, and the trackback loophole has been closed. I am disappointed, because I liked being able to see when other people were posting about topics on my site. I guess now they’ll just have to post here instead.

Spammers, I repeat what I have said previously. You are very nearly the lowest form of organism crawling on this earth. Go to hell.

I apologize to those of you who may have seen a lot of test messages pop up in your Slumberland RSS feeds lately. I’ve tried to delete them within a couple of minutes, but some of them might have gotten out anyway.

Basically, I have been having problems with the WordPress posting process generating errors in Safari (“NSURLErrorDomain:-1011″) and also not sending pings out to the sites such as weblogs.com that keep track of which blogs are newly updated.

Restarting the web server has fixed it for the moment, however, I don’t expect that to be a permanent fix since the server’s been restarted several times over the last few months and yet this problem has been going on at least that long.

So there may be more test messages to come, but hopefully the problem won’t reappear for a while.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been unusually ill. Still am. I’ve got a couple of posts saved up that I’ll get posted today, but in general I’m just not so energetic right now. I don’t eat chicken any more but I swear I would love some chicken soup right now. And 7-up, like I used to have as a child when I was sick. Chicken soup, 7-up, and a pile of comic books. sigh.

I threatened to add a new theme to the blog the other day, and here it is. It’s gray and rainy in Seattle for Memorial Day weekend, but at least you can get some blue sky from this new theme. It’s a bit lower in contrast than some themes, so it may not look good on some monitors, but I hope that most of you enjoy it.

As always, you can change the visual theme of the site at any time, just by clicking one of the themes in the menu bar.

(Edited to add: Ah, what the heck. I just added yet another theme for you. This one is lilac/white, a three column-layout, structurally based on the Dots WordPress template by Alex King. I’m not sure about the 3 column thing; it might be overly busy. But it’s a nice change.)

(Edited yet again to add: Bored already, I tweaked the lilac style sheet some more. The purple grid is gone.)

Some people have told me that my RSS feeds were broken for them since the WordPress 1.2 upgrade. Other people have said that my pings to weblogs.com, etc. aren’t working. I think I have figured out a possible reason why this may be happening. We’ll see if this post pings, and if the RSS problem is fixed for those who were having trouble.

And if none of the above made any sense to you, just skip this post and wait for the next one.

Apparently some folks think that WordPress weblogs are ugly. Mind of Mog begs to differ, and includes Slumberland as an example of a WP blog with “spiffy design.” Aw, shucks!

This reminds me… time for a new site theme, soon.

I’ve just installed WordPress 1.2 on this site. It didn’t go as well as expected (so the site was broken for a while this evening), but everything seems fixed and working at the moment. There’s even a new feature — the “Recent Comments” list in the sidebar.

It’s possible you may see some weird behavior on the site that is related to the upgrade. If you see anything like that, please post here and let me know.

Kung-Tunes is an OS X program that makes it possible to generate a list of your most-recently-heard iTunes tracks, and post them automatically on a web page. So, with some script help from Tim’s Bandwagon, I’ve got the thing up and running on this very page. Look in the menu bar (scroll down) to see what I’ve been listening to, and try not to be too appalled at my taste in music. I’ve been listening to an awful lot of cheesy pop from my junior high years lately. That’s what the iTunes music store is great for — buying the singles you’d otherwise never touch in album form.

(If it seems that the Posies are playing an awful lot… well, I have an… unusual amount of Posies tracks. For obvious reasons.)

Finally upgraded from the RC version of WordPress 1.0.1 to the release version. I was getting some weird php errors at the top of the page at first, but they have mysteriously gone away. Hmm. If you’re still seeing them, please let me know.

While browsing through the submissions to the WordPress CSS contest, I stumbled on one I liked called Sub:Lemon. So I tweaked it a bit (well, quite a bit, believe it or not…), and now you can choose it from the Choose Themes menu on the right.