I have thought about what I learned from my very first participation in the Blaugust event. And I’ve tried to understand the stats related to my blog during the month. But I haven’t listed the Blaugust achievements I ‘earned’.
Achievements are not something I pursue in computer games, and I’ve carried that attitude to Blaugust as well. But it is perhaps a bit fun to at least spend a moment to consider them, so here goes.
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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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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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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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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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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 😉
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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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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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.
