Upgrade

If portions of this site were unaccessible with strange error messages for about 45 minutes yesterday, it's because I was upgrading WordPress, the blogging platform that this blog runs on. It's something I don't do very often due to the sheer complexity and (for some of you who tried to read the blog yesterday) inconvenience of the upgrade process. (I liken it to pulling out some of your own teeth and putting in new ones according to a manual. It is actually deleting some of your own files and putting in new ones according to a manual.) The process of being told to delete lots of important files but not others gives me such a sinking feeling that I only upgrade every six months or so even though running an old version of WordPress puts me at risk of known security exploits.

So I jumped up from Wordpress 2.3.2 to 2.6, skipping the entire version 2.5 in the process (there was no version 2.4). With each upgrade, it's pleasant to see the dashboard — what I see when I'm writing posts — subtly or not-so-subtly redesigned, even though it takes me a little while to get used to it. There are some new features back here that I like too. I like that WordPress shows me my word count as I'm typing this post, and how it seems to automatically save the post more often. And it gives me more fun facts at a glance, such as the following:

(The number of posts is not quite accurate; for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress. The actual count of posts can be found on the archives page.)

I had been vaguely aware that when you mark a comment as spam in WordPress, it disappears from your blog but isn't deleted. Thanks to my ingenuity, I never get comment spam anymore, but WordPress 2.6 alerted me to the fun fact that thousands of old, nonsensical offers for home loans, online casinos, and V1a-gr--@ were taking up room in my database. There were also a few legitimate comments that were automatically marked as spam even though I had no anti-spam plugins running at the time. Sorry, Evan and Kirsten. Your comments are posted now, six months to a year late. There may have been others I didn't catch, so if you've been waiting for two years to see your comment posted, you'd better stop now.

Evan's comment mentioned the word "porn" (a running joke from bash.org). I wonder if certain keywords or patterns trigger(ed) the automatic spam-marking of comments. Folks, why don't you talk about porn and we can see if your comments show up?

A final note: each version of WordPress seems to be getting more and more bloated. Please, stop the bloat. I don't want static pages, post revisions, widgets, link categories, or a media library. I don't even use tags. I probably should, but I don't want to tag all my old posts, and I don't want to convert my old categories to tags because there are undoubtedly some extra tags I could assign to each of them. I could spend a week doing that. Why does anyone need categories and tags, anyway? I mean, I think I understand the subtle differences between them, but they're pretty similar.

Another Lego-related link: Classic photographs restaged in Lego.

Something else about porn: Why ISPs' "Stand" Against Child Porn Is Actually Not a Stand Against Child Porn.

I've long been wondering what web browser Richard Stallman, the iconic head of the Free Software Foundation, uses. He's a principled man who would never use a browser that didn't meet his definition of free software. Even Firefox isn't free enough for him. But I was surprised to learn that Stallman does not use a web browser at all:

That's hardcore. Now I just wonder what e-mail program he uses.