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.

NOTE: the featured image on this post is AI generated. I love the spelling errors 😉

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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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Musk sues to try to force advertisers to use X…

There was a time several years ago when I actually had a bit of respect for Elon Musk. But any respect I once had is quite simply gone. The man is a bizarre combination of megalomaniac, conspiracy theorist, and troll merged with obscenely rich techbro. He just keeps rolling out insanity after insanity.

Now he is suing advertisers for not buying ads on Twitter / X. I just can’t make this stuff up and it makes me angry, particularly given what Twitter once was.

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My Blogging Journey: From Geocities to Self-Hosting and Beyond

How did I get started blogging and why? And why do I continue to periodically ‘shout into the endless void’ that modern blogging seems to have become?

I suppose it started out of a sort of arrogance. I have thoughts and ideas that I sometimes believe others might like to hear. There is also a more generous aspect of my reasoning that imagines my experiences might help someone else in some way.

This post assembles a bit of my blogging history and includes my attempt to explain what drives me to share my weird thoughts on the internet.

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Who is Kelly Adams?

You can look at my ‘About Me‘ page here. Thanks… bye!

Okay, that is a bit of a cop-out. That page is intended to be ‘light and airy’, and the story of me isn’t always that much fun. So I’ve decided to go a bit deeper here. Not too deep, though: I don’t want to bore / sicken / scare too many people away. So read on if you want to know what has made Kelly Adams- the man, the legend, the uber-geek.

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