gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

One ’shop stop

Just a quick note to point out a new page I've added to the site. Over there, on the right (and up a bit, if you come to this late) you'll see a link called Photoshopping. It's a collection of the various digital images I've mashed together for cheap laughs on previous blog posts. The thumbnail images are linked to the larger image, and the "post" text link will take you to the story that spawned the image.

(I'm aware that Abode doesn't like photoshop used as a verb, and those who care what they think sometimes call it photochopping. I couldn't care less, though being something of a nitpicker, I'm generally no fan of turning nouns into verbs, particularly proper nouns. And "photoshopping" does sound like I'm out at Ikea looking for a cheap Ansel Adams print for my kitchen. But chopping is no better, though it does imply more of the coarse butchery evident in my sorry work.)

I really wish I had the skills to do better than this, or the nerve to enter something in Worth1000.com (combining two of my favourite pastimes, check out their Urban Legend contest) or even the Rick Mercer Photo Challenge (I've actually mocked something up for them thrice, but shown nobody. I'll post them if anyone cares.)

Finally, you may have notice that I've been burning a little [g] logo into my most recent photoshopped images. This isn't any sort of copyright protection nonsense - who the heck would want to reuse this crap? I'd be flattered - but merely a way of alerting the incredibly stupid to the fact that this is not a real photo.

But nobody's that stupid, right?

Spending the night with Ella

Just a quick note to say that I'm not dead, I'm just upgrading.

After a few days off, I was going to post something clever tonight (delusions!) but I got sidetracked, in a good way. WordPress has just released version 2.1, codenamed "Ella" (yep, after Ella Fitzgerald.) I had neglected any upgrades thus far, and it was long overdue... so I spent the night with Ella. And here she is.

It was a rather pleasant night, all things considered. One of those things to consider was how hellishly awful my upgrade from Blogger to Wordpress was. By comparison, this was a snap.

To make a long story short, Ella is designed to make my life easier, not yours. You won't notice any of the major changes, but they include:

• Autosaving
• Tabs between WYSIWYG and HTML views
• spell checker
• faster interface
• an upload manager
• blogroll subcategories
• a new antispam plugin

So far my site seems to be working just fine. I haven't been able to get a couple of the new features to work yet, but they aren't essential, and it's probably just a matter of doing some reading.

[EDIT: Ooops, just noticed that there's a problem with my recent posts plugin... seems to have the same cutline for everything. Have to fix that...]

Anyhow, this is mostly a test post. There are a bunch of new image management features I should try too. So, er, um... here's a picture of some bears my daughter drew.

Grrrrr!

Resurrections

A little bit of public shaming can go a long way.

A week ago I did a little bit of technical housekeeping, a mild closet-cleaning of my blogroll.

Nothing major - just pruning the dead and dying branches. I considered just doing it, not blogging about it, but then I figured there's nothing wrong with sending some props to the fallen. Plus I had nothing interesting to say, so I posted a little blurb (what Ouimet once referred to as Boring Administrative Notes.)

Well, I have the Lazarus touch, or something.

My first victim, Sinister Dan, suddenly came out with a shiny new WordPress blog, full of the irascible insight, political poignancy and grumpy goodness I've come to know and love (in an abusive sort of way.)

His latest offering of wit and self-admonition is, like Congresswoman Katherine Harris' breasts, equally attractive and repellent.

Time to put him back on the blogroll - and not just because I'm on his. (But it helps.)

Then there's fellow CBC'er Dan Misener, who I put on warning for not posting in a month. Sure enough, he's back at it too, with three posts this week. Give him a visit too. I should go visit him too, actually - one of the few CBC bloggers I'm not in touch with.

My "influence" (read: coincidence for which I claim credit) is not restricted to the faltering alone. I added active blogger Peter Janes to my blogroll, and he responded with a public shaming.

His main complaint: "If this sort of thing keeps up I’ll have to change my 'theatre bio' from 'writes an unpopular weblog' to 'writes an only slightly unpopular weblog'."

And then there's Joe Mahoney. Vowing to steal all my ideas from now on (which is, in turn, the worst idea ever) Joe whipped up a Great Purge of his own, much bloodier than my own.

Glad to see some survivors, and even some that have come back from the dead.

Speaking of resurrections... here are two completely kooky religious items I came across on the internet this week. No idea what to do with them, so let's put 'em here.

The Brick Testament is the complete Bible... as acted out by Lego men.

It comes complete with all that biblical nastiness, too - adultery and beheddings galore.

Then there are the Armor of God PJs, pajamas "inspired by Ephesians 6:10-18".

Now your little ones can look like little crusaders and smite heathens in their sleep!

I recently started taking my kids to Sunday school (more on that later), but this stuff sort of creeps me out.

Nothing wrong with teaching kids about Jesus, but just I can't picture this being the sort of thing He was talking about.

Come and get me

Perhaps the worst thing about moving my blog to a new system is the fact that most people have lost me. Or I've lost them, or something.

Because stupid Netfirms forced me to use a new URL, the addresses of all my posts have changed, as have the RSS feeds. So people who have bookmarked my posts or look them up in Google go to the old blog, and those who signed up via RSS think I haven't posted in two weeks.

The worst part of it is that Blogger and stupid Netfirms simply will not talk any more. Ever. I cannot publish a message on my old blog saying that I've moved. (I may be able to hack into it manually and write something.)

I've tried all the supposedly simply ways of redirecting traffic (.htaccess, redirect scripts) but I simply can't seem to make them work. So I'm down to my last card: writing manual redirects for each post and pasting them into the HTML files for all 50-odd posts. Best I can do.

I'm also having an odd problem with Technorati, which won't acknowledge my pings. Other services do - if you search for "hrrrmmm" from yesterday's post, you'll find me via http://blogsearch.blogger.com/ or http://blogsearch.google.com/ or http://www.icerocket.com/ you'll find it, but not on Technorati (the important one.) It's in my WP update services list, and I've pinged it manually, but they haven't visited in 42 days. I've even tried deleting it from my claimed blogs and re-adding it.

OK, enough complaining. Here's my plea:

Please change your bookmarks and RSS links!

- Here's the best address for the blog (it does not have index.html at the end):
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/

- The new RSS feed address is here:
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/index.php/feed/

- And you can get a feed of the blog comments here:
http://www.gorbould.com/blog/index.php/comments/feed

Thanks.

Upgrading the blog, downgrading my lifespan

If there's anthing as inevitable as a first post that says "Welcome to my blog", it's a subsequent post railing about converting to a better blogging program. This is one of those. Mind the bile...

As you can see, my conversion from Blogger to WordPress is done. Mostly.

And it was as easy as... well, say, learning Sanskrit, or mastering the Japanese tea ceremony.

Don't get me wrong, I love WordPress, but those who say it's a simple switch are full of it. You need to learn little bits of MySQL, php, UNIX, and begging for help. I've worked online for 10 years without having to learn any but the last item on that list.

Why did I make the change? Well, it started not long after I started using Blogger, when I was unable to display a bit of HTML code on a page. Joe Clark got the ball rolling in the comments with "Blogger sucks for HTML; Why aren't you using WordPress?" And of course I had to learn WordPress to take over Tod Maffin's InsideTheCBC.com site, so I could clearly see the advantages.

But the main impetus came from the regular inability of Blogger to talk to my host site, NetFirms. About once a week, I'd try publishing a Blogger post and find it unable to communicate with my site at www.gorbould.com. Worse, it would always happen when my wife wanted to update her kindergarten class blog at www.mscook.com, hosted on the same server. I'd get a "Broken Pipe" error (and I thought the internet was made of tubes!)

Of course, I should have known this would be a bigger problem than just which software I was using.

Once I had downloaded and installed WordPress, I figured out the basics of setting up a database (you only have to change a couple of settings), then tried to import my Blogger content. WordPress 2.0 has a nifty Import tool to handle this... if it can talk to Blogger. Which I've just finished explaining was a problem. Here also: I'd get about three quarters of the way through the import, and it would time out, and I'd have to start from scratch.

I tried getting support on the WP forums, but it turned out just to be a matter of patience and luck. After perhaps 50 attempts, it imported my content. Most of it, anyhow. For some reason, only September files were imported, and older ones were skipped. In the end I worked around that problem by changing the dates on my old files (thanks, GreaseMonkey!) to September, then importing them and changing the dates back again. Ugly, but it worked. I had to resize most of my large images, but otherwise the import of content and comments worked all right in the end.

Problem solved? Hardly. The next trick was to change my links to the same "pretty permalinks" structure used on Blogger (e.g. www.gorbould.com/year/month/my-post-title.html) By default, WP just gives them numbers, which isn't as readable by people or search engines. Changing it was supposed to be a snap, but wasn't. You need to learn about great mysteries such as .htaccess files, chmod permissions, mod overwrite and flibbertygibbetybibbledyboo. Still didn't work, despite help from the WP forum folks, NetFirms support, and the extremely helpful Paul C. at CBC.ca.

In the end, both Netfirms and WP sources told me a simple, ugly truth: NetFirms doesn't really support pretty permalinks. The best you can do is to use them with "index.php" inserted in the URLs. Not terrible, but not what I want. More to the point, it means there's no way I can use the same URLs as my old blog entries, thereby screwing up my existing traffic.

Whatever. I learn more Sankrit and figure out how to redirect people from those posts, even if I have to create 52 redirects to do it. But suffice it to say that I won't be recommending NetFirms to anyone, and I won't be recommending WordPress to anyone who isn't technically inclined.

So, I still have a lot of work to do.

• I need to figure out those redirects.
• I need to install some of the whiz-bang WP widgets I've been reading about (and using on Tod's blog.)
• I need to figure out how to get everyone using my old RSS feed onto the new one.
• The search engine is screwy - it doesn't seem to work when it isn't on the homepage.
• And I need to finish customizing my template, completing my blogroll, etc.

If anyone out there has advice on such things, please let me know. If anyone is still checking my blog after being so long neglected, that is. If so, well, thanks.

Mind the gap

As you can see, I'm in the process of switching from to WordPress. Unfortunately the Blogger import isn't going well, but I'll get there. Thanks for your patience...

Not Tod worthy

I have a new part time gig.

For the next few weeks, I'll be filling in for Tod Maffin on Inside The CBC, CBC's official ("but never officious") blog. Tod is off on medical leave, and will hopefully be back soon, so I can give it back to him in one piece. In the meantime, I'm beaming good thoughts his way and I hope you will too.

Big shoes to fill, or at least keep warm. Tod was invaluable during the lockout, a contributor to the Manifesto, and I really think he's done a good thing setting up Inside the CBC. It's an interesting arm's length experiment in letting CBCers tell their own stories, an investment in openness and one of the few good things to come out of the lockout. Contributing to it should be quite a learning experience. (Where else does the corp let you go live, nationwide, without any vetting?)

What a short, strange trip this blogging has been. From Chairman Mayo to Official Blogger in three months. There are better CBC bloggers and better CBC blogs - Gushue's is bigger, Mahoney's is better, and Ouimet's is more interesting - so while I'm flattered, I have a lot to learn (including the nuances of WordPress...)

Regardless, I'm very glad to see Inside back in play - it's a terrible thing to leave a great blog to wither on the vine. With any luck, those with e-mail and RSS subscriptions will know it's back in business, and spread the word.

Thanks to all those who helped steer me in the right direction. You know who you are.

PhotoUnrealism

Ahem. It has been suggested that I should probably clarify something frightfully, astoundingly obvious:

Many of the pictures on this blog are silly, poorly-produced Photoshop jobs. They are not real.

Clear?

I try to include an image for every item I post, and I also like have some fun with Photoshop. I like to think of it as a jokey little treat for my three regular readers. (Question: Do you enjoy these? Are they worth the effort? Let me know in the Comments area.)

But, if I were doing this for CBC... well, I should probably return my paycheque. That aside, I'd have to identify doctored photos (like this one) to prevent stupid people from stupidly thinking it was real.

As should be obvious, this blog is not a CBC product. But it was never clear whether or not the CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices apply to my blog, or my Flickr photos, or my Christmas cards. So here's your disclaimer. Please forward it to all gullible people on the internet (hmm, maybe I can buy the mailing list from that Nigerian banking scam.)

To be absolutely, crystal clear about things:

• This is not a lady of the night working the Sunshine City.
  I don't know if Orilla has prostitutes, but if it does, they probably don't ply their trade right in front of the city sign (helpful though that might be.)
• CBC and CTV hosts have never had a war of mutant powers
  
• Buttercup and Westley did not once set foot in Toronto City Hall
• Astronomers have never sighted a stylish coiffure floating in a globular star cluster
• There is no room for mayonnaise in the Cultural Revolution
• Nobody would buy this car

I don't lay claim to any particular skill at photoshopping. To see some really skilled work, check out b3ta, Something Awful, Worth 1000 (my personal fave), and even CBC's own Rick Mercer blog.

Which, I notice, makes little effort to identify fake photos. You'd think it'd be obvious. Except it isn't.