I’ve resolved the very significant problem that was preventing people from reading post pages or leaving comments. (Thank you to Gábor Bernáth, who provided some third-party TCP captures.)

I’m not quite sure what this has cost me in terms of regular readership. (I know there weren’t many of you to begin with.) But I’m hoping this is the last time it’ll happen. Read on if you care about the details.

Read the rest of this entry →

It smells like a problem with WordPress, but I can’t track it down and I can’t find anything on Google that looks like the same issue.

People are reporting that clicking on links within my site brings up the RSS feed (or, on Internet Explorer, brings up a “Save File” dialog). I thought it might’ve been a problem with Apache’s mem_cache, but disabling that hasn’t solved the problem. It might be something going wrong with the Content-Type, but I haven’t looked very hard at that yet.

If anyone out there is trying to comment (and can’t), please be patient. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, because I like hearing from anyone who still reads this. I’m trying to figure this out.

(And if anyone’s heard of a similar problem, please let me know.)

Man, is it good to be done with this. I’ve got a new design for the site, and it’s already getting mixed reviews (who cares, I like it). I’ve also given up on writing my own content management system and embraced the five-minute installation that comes with WordPress. That means five minutes of installation and five weeks of migration; I’m a perfectionist, and it means it took forever to get the site design right. But the biggest change, for me, is that a lot of the content on this site is not managed by this site.

These days, our digital personae are the aggregate of events that happen on the sites we use. I am what I write, but I am also what I digg, what I tag, and even what my friends tag. So I’ve tried to simplify the site by pulling others into the mix. I use Flickr to manage my photos, so I don’t have to build my own photo albums. I use Delicious to manage my bookmarks, and I use SimplePie to list them on the sidebar. I don’t have a resume page anymore, but you can see my LinkedIn profile. I even tried building something like a lifestream, before I realized someone else had done it already. (Then I lost interest.)

The biggest problem I had with the old site was that I couldn’t keep it all up-to-date. So with most of the “extras” delegated out to third-party sites, I’m hoping it won’t take so much effort to keep the content from growing stale. And with a new system that makes remote editing a lot easier, I’m hoping to find more time for actually writing.