Blaugust 2024 numbers
This year was my first time participating in the Blaugust event. I accomplished my primary purpose of posting more frequently and I learned several things that will definitely help me be a better blogger.
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Some things Blaugust 2024 taught me
Blaugust 2024 was my very first blogging event of any kind. As August comes to an end so too does the Blaugust festival, and the topic of this final week is ‘Lessons Learned’. I obviously learned a lot since I’m a complete neophyte to such events.
I suppose that the most obvious thing I learned from Blaugust was that participating in such an event can be fun! But what else did I learn in the process? A bit of introspection is in order…
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Fixing my broken Fedora Linux
I run my blogs on a little web server in my basement. This is great because it means I control exactly how my web server is configured. It is also horrible because I control exactly how my web server is configured.
In simple terms, I screwed up. Some years back I configured Fedora to perform automatic updates after updating it to the then-current Fedora Core version 34. I thought automatic updates would keep the OS current. This was not correct.
Worse yet, my server wasn’t even actually running the Fedora core version 34 kernel: it was running FC kernel version 27. Fixing this took me far longer than it should have.
But I did finally fix it. This post explains a bit of how I resolved the issue, but for those in a rush: follow the instructions in the Fedora core documentation, including the ‘optional’ guidance to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. That bit about updating GRUB is not really optional for some releases.
If you are not in a hurry and want some details on how things can go wrong, then read on! The stooges would be proud of me…
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Motivation for continuing to post
It is the third week of Blaugust2024 now. Unlike some folks involved in the event like Blockade85, I have little interest in posting daily. I don’t see this as a ‘competition’ with myself or others. There is nothing to win, and posting daily won’t suddenly make me an object of respect and adoration.
I’ve already exceeded my original goal for being involved in the Blaugust event: to post at least once per week. In fact, I’ve more than doubled my ‘stretch’ goal of posting eight times. So what keeps me coming back to continue writing here?
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My brush with fandom: Star Wars
I read Monsterlady’s post earlier this week about ‘core fandom’ and their early Pokemon experiences. I have to admit that I really have no idea what ‘core fandom’ is versus just regular fandom. But reading that post triggered a set of old memories about how Star War’s impacted me back in the day: grist for a new post!
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On being tenacious
I have been working through some technical issues regarding upgrading the operating system on the web server that this blog runs on. This post isn’t about those issues, although I’ll likely write a long post on that topic someday soon. Apologies for the frequent outages over the past 48 hours, though!
What I am talking about here is a strange quality or aberrant pattern of behaviour that I possess regarding technical problem solving. I am basically almost entirely unable to walk away from an unresolved issue.
This oddity fuelled my technical career. Someone would say “I don’t know how to do that”, “That can’t be done”, or “No one has been able to make that work”, and off I’d go. More often than not no one said anything: I just saw the problem myself and got mentally trapped into fixing it.
So this post is a brief look into my brain’s misbehaviour around ‘unsolvable’ technical challenges: the good and the bad.
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Pingbacks, Webmentions, and IndieAuth on WordPress
I spent some time thinking today about how other blogs can refer to mine. This included a great conversation in the #blaugust Discord channels that was started in response to a post by JCProbably on manually implementing ‘community echos’.
I am what I like to call ‘constructively lazy’. I know that manually implementing cross-blog post references is not going to work for me, so I’ve always relied on the concept of ‘pingbacks‘. WordPress supports this protocol, and if everyone used WordPress that would work well enough.
But many bloggers today avoid WordPress for various reasons. So what do the ‘cool kids’ these days do to create connection between their blog posts? Apparently, the answer is Webmention, and so I decided to quickly activate something to connect this blog to that protocol.
Please note that, as per the ‘Is it Working?’ section below, the current plugin versions of both Webmention (5.3.2) and IndieAuth (v4.5.0) introduce bugs in WordPress 6.6.1.
(more…)NOTE: the featured image on this post is AI generated. I love the spelling errors 😉
Good Habits
My daily rituals…
I read a post over on Monsterlady’s blog today about her regular rituals. It got me thinking about my own daily patterns and how they affect me: this is food for a nice, easy-to-write post, and that feels just about right for a Sunday.
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Yesterday’s website outage
We had a windstorm here in Castlegar yesterday (August 9th), and that led to a three hour power outage between 5:00 PM and 8:00 PM pacific time yesterday. Three hours is far longer than my aging UPS can keep the blog servers and network paraphernalia here running, so both of my blogs went offline.
But a bit of a comedy of errors resulted in the outage being extended by another two or three hours. This post is about those problems and how I fixed them.
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