Posted on January 29, 2008 in:
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Update: They’re Not Letting Him Out
See Press Release Regarding Cat-Luy.
Dubai is not a good place. It is not a good place for Westerners period. Do not go there. If you’re there, you should get out.
This is a repost of the message from _yungfuktoi_ at LiveJournal:
Going public: PLEASE READ AND REPOST
So here is what is happening with Diz, my partner.
I waited to go public with this because I wanted to preserve his privacy, and thank you for understanding the cryptic nature of my communication lately.
On Saturday morning Diz flew into Dubai airport and was detained at immigration. We kind of knew he would be profiled because he has long hair and looks oriental (they are very racist against Asians in Dubai, and ultra-conservative). He knew the score going in: prescription drugs are illegal, dress conservatively and detox for a week (even trace amounts of either illegal or prescription drugs in the urine are prosecuted as ‘drug smuggling’. I’m not joking).
They found melatonin on him, which he bought over the counter in the US. Legally, you can even buy it over the counter in Dubai.
They arrested him, anyway.
Click here to read more »
When I moved from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, I also switched domains1.
This brought pain in two forms:
- broken backlinks from other sites, which isn’t good, and
- search engine penalties for duplicate content.
Neither were easily resolvable because of the differences between Wordpress and Blogger, and because Blogger is no more a real hosting solution than LiveJournal is.
Click here to read more »
Out of the box, a Wordpress install is missing key features that even Beta Blogger had. Things like comment previews. Tag editing. Being able to redirect your site feed to Feedburner. Little things like that.
You could spend hours trying to find all the right plugins.
To keep you from spending time like I did, so that you can get down to the business of blogging in comfort, here’s my suggested list of:
- 6 Plugins you need
- 6 Plugins that show off Wordpress
- 6 More plugins
Click here to read more »
Posted on January 26, 2008 in:
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Working through midnight makes me feel like this
… without the actual fun leading up to that state.
And I still get a hangover.
The Sd editorial schedule is full to bursting, too. And me too tired to even Stumble Upon something right now.
I must get on with it… tomorrow….
Zzzzz.
There are a few things you want to set up before switching your domain over. Actually quite a few. We’ll cover two in this post, with the third (choosing plugins) in the next in this series.
The two for today:
- Importing your Beta Blogger posts properly with new Wordpress semantics, and
- Updating your theme from Beta Blogger to Wordpress.
Click here to read more »
Because my move from Beta Blogger to my own Wordpress site was so painful, I’ve decided to put together a series about how to get oneself moved from Beta Blogger to a self-hosted Wordpress installation, with relatively little damage (eventually) to page rank and external links, and probably less pain. Probably.
I hope this information is useful to somebody, so that my productivity hit was not in vain.
Click here to read more »
After the switch to Wordpress and another domain—which necessitated doing some magic for my Blogger blog and re-inventing my blog template in Wordpress and finding all the necessary Wordpress plugins to feel at home—I’m finally going to be back on schedule for posting everyday.
And since I now have separate areas to play with, posting everyday will probably not inundate any one particular category and thus reduce article turnover (as long as I don’t post too often in any single category. Like this one, heh).
I’m glad to be back to writing rather than hacking my blog.
Posted on January 23, 2008 in:
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So I’ve finally started to use StumbleUpon, after years of only using Del.icio.us. And I have to say, I really like it!
Both sites can be used to store your bookmarks on the web, but they have two entirely different aims in mind.
Click here to read more »
This is Ambien. It is nectar direct from the land of Morpheus himself. Nearly the perfect sleeping draught, peaceful and gradual is your descent into his arms–although I urge you to NOT do anything vital, like driving or, a few minutes after taking it, sitting up straight.
The best part about Ambien, apart from the utter effectiveness, is that there’s no hangover effect. None. Zero. Zip. It’s as though you’d gone to sleep naturally.
Gods know it’s been a long time since I’ve done that, even though these days I prefer to spend my weekends trying to sleep than do anything else.
Click here to read more »
Posted on January 19, 2008 in:
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Let’s hear it for UPS’s and laptops with their own batteries!
And I don’t think there were any particularly gruesome storms. I hope that it wasn’t just my place. But then again, power is power (e.g., unreliable) on the island, so it’s likely affecting a large number of folks.
Hmmm. I hear sirens. Good sign for me, bad sign for whoever’s at the power company. I hope nobody is hurt.
Time to break out the iPod nano, and break off the internet connection.
