Category Archives: Blog News

News about my blog

A New Domain For My Blog

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For nearly 14 years, my blog’s domain name has been Viper007Bond.com. As of today though, it’s now alex.blog!

The company I work for, Automattic, purchased the rights to the new .blog TLD last year. As an employee perk, we all received a free .blog domain including the option to get a hard-to-get premium domain like this one. Very cool.

I also took this opportunity to switch from a server run by a friend of mine to the managed WordPress host Pressable, a company that Automattic is a heavy investor in. This will still allow me to run all of my custom plugins while taking away any worries about having to keep WordPress up to date or even my site online.

New Theme (Work In Progress)

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For those of you who have visited my blog before, you may notice that my blog is rocking a new theme. Yes, after over 4 years I’m finally ditching my very hacked up version of the “Neat!” theme for something a bit more modern. It’s called Mystique and it was made by digitalnature.

I’m still making minor tweaks to the theme, so bear with me while I make the transition and feel free to report any issues in the comments for this post. 🙂

v007.me

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Due to the tr.im scare, the increasing trend of site-specific shortening services such as WordPress.com’s WP.me, and the awesomeness that is YOURLS, I’ve decided to join in and purchase my own short little domain name. I went the same route as WordPress.com did with a “.me” domain and ended up with “v007.me”.

It’s powered by YOURLS which is written by the well known WordPress plugin developers Lester “GamerZ” Chan and Ozh. It even comes with a WordPress plugin that can automatically create shortlinks for your new posts and even post it Twitter (I had been using Twitter Tools previously).

For example, here’s the short URL to this post: http://v007.me/1

Cool, huh? 🙂

Ugh, I Lost All My Uploads / Plugins On This Blog

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So I tried to upload another blog on this server via the automatic upgrade and it apparently freaked out and apparently it deleted all of my plugins and uploads for this blog. I have no idea why, but it did.

Waiting on my friend who runs this server for me to find a backup, but until then this blog is mostly broken.

UPDATE: Turns out automatic file backups were never set up, so the most recent backup we could find was from exactly 2 months ago. I think I already reinstalled all of the new plugins I had installed since then, but I’ll need to reupload any uploads I’ve done in the past 2 months. Please report any issues via this post.

I’m Turning Off Weekly Twitter Reports

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Since I don’t post enough on this blog, I’m going to turn my weekly Twitter reports. If I blogged at least once a week, it wouldn’t be a problem, but I often don’t so it was spamming my blog.

If you actually care about what I have to say on Twitter, just follow me. Note I do try to keep the random boring personal crap to a minimum, so don’t be scared to follow me. Infact I find I’m often Tweeting something interesting I find rather than writing a short blog post about it.

Feed Error

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Sorry to anyone following my blog via RSS. I was updating my custom plugin I use to redirect people to FeedBurner and accidentally had it set to redirect to the RSS feed for another site of mine. Apologies for cluttering your feed readers with stuff from FinalGear.

Your Comment May Have Been Deleted

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So I woke up today to find this e-mail in my inbox:

Dear Defensio user,

We have reasons to believe that a few of our api keys might have been compromised and our research indicates that your key(s) might be among them.

Don’t worry, YOUR ACCOUNT WAS NOT HACKED AND YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IS SAFE. However, in order to protect your privacy, we thought the best thing to do was to regenerate new api key(s) for you.

As of now, DEFENSIO IS NO LONGER FILTERING SPAM on your website or blog. To re-enable it, please login to your account at http://defensio.com and then go to “My API Keys” where you’ll find newly generated keys. You should then update your website or blog settings with the new key(s).

When an API key is invalid, apparently it’s supposed to go to the moderation queue, but it didn’t for me which meant I got 400-500 spams overnight on my blog. Lovely.

So, I just spent the last few minutes deleting page after page of spams from my blog. I thought I skimmed through each page looking for legit comments, but I know I missed at least one (of mine specifically). If you found one of your comments from the last 24 hours has gone missing, please post it again. I probably accidentally deleted it. Sorry.

As for Defensio, I’m still happy with their spam accuracy, but I really wish they’d fix that bug in their plugin. It was hugely annoying to wake up to so much spam on my blog. That’s the whole reason I use Defensio — to avoid that. *sigh*