… but I can publish a comic.
Go figure.
I need to think about what I can do with this.
For starters, I’m taking Larry Young’s True Facts down from the shelf again.
All posts created in January 2008
We're running a bit late.
As luck would have it, I'm on call for a little while. The real haul stretches into next week. Expect things to be pushed back by about four days.
… but I can publish a comic.
Go figure.
I need to think about what I can do with this.
For starters, I’m taking Larry Young’s True Facts down from the shelf again.
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:
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.
When I moved from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, I also switched domains1.
This brought pain in two forms:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Auria Cortes’ thought-provoking post about finding your voice as a writer made me think about something—something that stopped me for so long from actually writing in my own voice. Even stopped me writing fiction for years, I admit. But, as it always seems to be, the reason was fear.
Communication is a scary business.