We’ve been having some boring lectures lately so I’ve done some upkeep on my website. I finally got a spam filter set up for my email address at this domain, and went through some 6000 spam emails with maybe 50 real ones. I think I caught all the real ones, anyway, and I apologize for the ones I didn’t answer. Now that I have the filter I should be able to catch emails people send; if you’re trying to reach me and I don’t respond, leave a comment here and tell me to look for your email.
I finally got around to backing up my old Case web site; it’s now here. At first I thought a lot of it had been lost, because it turns out the old student-run hosting service is now defunct, but after some poking around I discovered that the new service had migrated all of my files! It was exciting to see my old stuff again, though some of it appears unopenable. And one or two of the section pages I made when I was a TA are missing; I think I might not have backed them up at the time, which is sad. I need to find a monitor so I can get into my old computer and see what’s there.
And all the meta links to the left should work. (Links to other people’s blogs, maybe not.)
I decided to take Adrienne’s suggestion and install Akismet. That required me to upgrade from WP version 1.5 to 2.0.whatever. A couple hours later, it looks like everything is running smoothly. (It shouldn’t have taken that long; chalk it up to my stupidity, the stupidity of the FTP client on Windows 98 [why am I using Windows 98? the department I’m working for can’t afford a new computer, and my laptop can’t connect to the network at work], and a little bit of stupidity on the part of the one-click installer at Dreamhost [I originally installed WP to one directory, then moved it, but the installer thought it was still at the old directory despite the fact that that directory was empty… that was bad].)
Please let me know if anything has become broken. Now that I’ve installed Akismet, comments should show up right away again.
I haven’t posted in over a month, which must be a record, but I haven’t abandoned the blog, just been busy and traveling, reports on which later.
FYI, comments are currently set to all be moderated, because my spam filter wasn’t catching enough of the huge volumes of spam. Also on my to-do list is installing some sort of intelligence filter; I really wanted to use KittenAuth but while I could have sworn it was available for download when I first heard of it, it doesn’t appear to be now. So I’ll probably have to use something less amusing.
Welcome to the new incarnation of Without Bound!
Yes, there are no posts right now. You can find my old posts as Blogger archives here. I expect to import them into WordPress soon (and write some more posts too).
You’ll notice that certain things aren’t quite there yet. (For example, the comment form doesn’t quite match, and category and archive pages aren’t labeled so it’s easy to get lost.) I think everything works, so let me know if you find something that doesn’t, or if you find a big usability issue. I’ll be continuing to improve the blog over the next few weeks or months, but I met my self-imposed deadline for rolling out a workable new version.
Some things that are there include nice permalinks and individual-post archive pages, a somewhat revamped blogroll (hold your mouse over the links to see my comments), better CSS under the hood, and a WordPress, rather than Blogger, back end.
I’ve enjoyed working on this - I missed programming. I’m trying to keep up my skills and stay well-rounded while a med student. Computer work definitely uses my brain in a different way than memorizing nerves does, and it feels good.