This morning I decided to take the plunge and convert to Wordpress 2.0.2. The upgrade is incredibly painless, and only took a few minutes.

So - fellow tribal bloggers - if you want the new Wordpress, let me know and I’ll upgrade you. Some of you may wish to use the SpamKarma plug-in, which doesn’t work correctly with the original version of Wordpress I installed, which some of you are likely still running. K@ for instance, was running that version, necessitating me upgrading her. When I realized it was super easy to upgrade her, I decided to do it myself.

The new post editor window is super cool, among other things.

I would imagine that everyone is going to want to upgrade. But I’m going to wait until you ask, because I don’t want to suprise you, and I’m lazy.

Here is something you should really look into.

It will make your life much happier.

Tribers - I have it..if you need it, let me know and I’ll load it into your Wordpress folders. All you’ll need to do is activate it in your plugin page.

It never fails…the server will ALWAYS crash once a year, while I’m off in Oregon.

This year was pretty spectacular…and has required a move to a totally new machine. It also happened on January 1st, according to the system logs, which isn’t such a good omen.

However, I want to say I love the ability to plug the drives into a new machine, boot it up and go. Windows can suck my balls. We’re running two 100GB drives in an LVM configuration, using SGI’s filesystem (XFS). It almost brings a tear to my eye when I think of how far GNU/Linux has come since I first set up The Tribe on my personal workstation. So happy new years, y’all.

I’ll write up a more detailed description later…but suffice to say, we’re back.

Ok - I’m posting this here so that I don’t forget how I did this again. It just took me about 2 hours to figure out what had changed.

If you notice my blog archives over to the right…when you click on one it takes you to the archive page for that month, and shows the oldest post first. The navigation links at the top and bottom then make sense “Next Entries” take you forward in time, previous entries take you back…and the individual posts are listed chronologically down the page, rather than in the main blog structure where to newest post is at the top, and them reverse chronological down the page. I like it much better this way. The stock way is totally retarded.

Anyhow…in the interests of remembering how to do this next time I upgrade I’ll outline the procedure, as I have to make a change to a core file that gets overwritten during upgrade.

First, you must have a permalink structure set up. I just took the default one, and after hassling with my .htaccess file for awhile, got it working.

Now my links to the archives are like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/

Instead of like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/?m=200504

This is important as the old, non-permalink way will not allow the next step to work.

Then, I went in to ‘../wp-include/template-functions-general.php’ and edited the “get_archives_link” function, and added “?order=asc” just after the ‘$url’ sections of each line, so that now the archive links all look like this:

http://www.thetribalunderground.net/brightness/2005/04/?order=asc

The only other thing you need to do is edit your archive template in your theme, and reverse the navigation links, as they will now do the opposite of what you expect. For instance, the “previous entries” link will now take you forward in time, rather than to a previous time.

So I’m running the newest version of Wordpress for my blog now.

I haven’t spent enough time with it to know what’s new about it or anything, other than the administration backend seems a little quicker.

If another Tribal Blogger would like the newest version, I’ll be happy to install it. I would particularly like to try it on K@ and Taylor, whose comment RSS feeds seem to be broken. I don’t think anyone else is running as many weird plugins and shit as I was, so installing it for the rest of you should be a lot quicker than it was for me.

Anyhow, I cleared all the snow off my car, and upgraded wordpress. So that’s two accomplishments for the day.

Too bad I have to go to work now.

Hmm..looking at the comment accumulator here, it appears that the tribal blogs are getting hit pretty hard.

The best way to stop it that I’ve found, and at the very least, not displaying the links and thus depriving the spammer of their motivation, is to set comments with links to be moderated unless they have had a previously approved comment.

To enable this feature, go into your admin panel, then options. Select “discussion” and enable “Comment author must fill out name and email”, and “Comment author must have previously approved comment.” Then in the Comment Moderation section, set the threshold link value to one.

God I hate spammers.

K@ and Taylor - you have some comment deleting to do. If you care.

So…as you have all probably noticed…the site has sucked ass for about 2 weeks now. At first it was completely down because of the aforementioned router issues. Since then, it has been periodically going down on the order of 20 times a day, when the cable modem mysteriously decides to reboot, all on it’s own.

At first, I called Comcast, and was told they couldn’t send a technician out until September 1st. I was pissed, but resigned myself to the fact I would have to go to the Comcast office and kill every single one of the motherfuckers pick up a new cable modem on my own, which would hopefully fix the problem and then the tech wouldn’t need to come, and I could get back to playing WoW in peace. Yet, that idea failed since the account is in my bosses name, and they didn’t want to give me a new cable modem.

I called Comcast back, told them the situation, and said I wanted a tech here sooner, or I wanted these last two weeks pro-rated and the bill lowered. At that point, they said they found an opening for yesterday between 11:00am and 2:00pm. That sucks…but was acceptable.

The tech showed up at 2:07pm…and of course, the modem behaved perfectly, and the tech could detect no problem. He said that within 72 hours a lineman would come out, and verify all the cabling to the building was fine. He left, after browsing the Internet from my computer for an hour, to “make sure it stays working.”

I got home from work, logged on to WoW and within five minutes the modem rebooted and I was disconnected.

So today I called them back again. This time, the guy on the phone said he could clearly see from his remote tests that the modem had a problem and that we would need a new one. The earliest he can get a tech here to give me a new one is the 30th of August.

I told him that was unacceptable, but there was nothing he could do. So I called back again, posed as my boss, and had Dimitri’s name added into the notes on the account stating that he would be coming to pick up the modem because “I” can’t get away from work to deal with this nonsense.

So that’s the update. We’ll see how it goes. If everything works as it’s supposed to (unlikely), we’ll have a new cable modem up and humming by 5:00pm or so tonight…otherwise, we’ll be screwed until the 30th.

UPDATE: Got a new modem. It’s installed and working. So far I’ve played Warcraft for roughly 1.5 hours with no disconnects…so hopefully we’re back in business. Keep fingers crossed.

Yeah guys…sorry about that. The router blew up when I was out in Oregon. Dimitri replaced it with another one, but didn’t know how to configure it. So it had to wait until I got back out here to Craptastic CT.

I really, really don’t want to be here. Like…seriously. I got off the plane at 9:45am this morning, and have since been sitting at my desk plotting schemes to quit my job.