...annnnnnnnnd it looks like Blogger's decided to no longer send me an email notification when someone posts a comment.
I guess if you were feeling the need to leave some scathing reply to an older entry but didn't want me to find out about it, now would be the perfect opportunity.
D.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Satanic Details
So: looks as though the Blogger Migration tool did the job fine, with one major hiccup - a hiccup that I knew going in was likely to happen. The search function no longer works. Something similar happened with Noah's blog, which I'd moved from FTP to Blogspot hosting a few weeks back. For him, merely an inconvenience, since he'd only posted about ten entries. For me, something more of a web-tragedy, since even with the much-reduced frequency of the last few months, this particular entry is Rambler number 727. Having 700+ entries with no way to search for content is depressing, and I sure hope there's some way to fix it.
Beyond that, everything else looks like it worked fine. All the comments came over fine - my other big fear was losing them. So once I get the indexing/search function back up and running, I'll pick a new skin for the Rambler and call it a success.
D.
Beyond that, everything else looks like it worked fine. All the comments came over fine - my other big fear was losing them. So once I get the indexing/search function back up and running, I'll pick a new skin for the Rambler and call it a success.
D.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
The Portrait Train Kept a Rollin'
Another portrait, this time of mathematician Mel Henriksen, a research colleague of my father's who passed away recently. This will hang in the math offices of the school where he taught, Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.
I knew Mel a little bit - he and my father worked on a number of papers together in the 1980s. I remembered him as a jocular, somewhat socially oblique man - as all genius-level mathematicians are. An early girlfriend of my father's once told my dad that he was 'beyond manners.' And why not?
At any rate, Mel always struck me as a really positive presence, so watercolors felt the right fit to memorialize him. I was originally planning to go with my default 'Illustrator Dave' technique, which is a basic watercolor wash, textures and volume added with colored pencils, and then given contour with brown ink. But as I worked on the watercolor phase on this, I realized that the colored pencils and ink weren't necessary - which actually makes this a unique piece by me, since I always fall back on them.
The final result feels less cartoony and more naturalistic than my work normally does, and for that, I'm pleasantly surprised. Hopefully, my father and Mel's colleagues like the finished work. And I hope Mel does, too.
D.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Blogger Is as Blogger Does
Man, for some reason, I thought moving the Rambler from one location to the other on my site would be easy. I probably should have taken a clue from what Google has chosen to name the process and specific software package they've come up with to make it all go - 'migration.' That's kind of a loaded term, don't you think? I mean, if it calls to mind flying thousands of miles a year just to get away from a little cold weather or if it makes you think of piling all of your belongings on a rickety mule-driven cart to escape the pogroms, there's really no usage of the word 'migration' that doesn't sound like a huge, peril-fraught pain in the ass.
Even given that Google's 'Migration Tool' leaves premonitions of the Rambler stuck in a muddy ditch on the side of a Siberian meadow, I went to take the plunge today. Of course, I immediately did something wrong (in fact, I'm kind of wondering now if this entry is going to publish!) - and it's only partly Google's 'fault.' As my understanding of just what a 'CNAME' is and what it does expands; it's a subdomain on the main site. And I thought that StartLogic (my host) set it up for me. And it does exist! But... the next step in the process is telling the subdomain to redirect to some Google something or other, and for that, I need to know which DNS numbers to enter for the main domain, and...
Uch. More and more, I'm thinking that I just want to use this opportunity to switch to WordPress. I'll still have to set up the CNAME and add a dedicated database, but I'm just getting super, super tired of Google's half-assed technical notes for all of this. Regular readers of the Rambler - if there are any of you left out there - are no doubt familiar with my growing general bad feeling about Google as a corporate entity. Even putting aside their questionable moral grounding, they'll always look poor in my eyes for the shambles that is their technical support. Look: it's fine that there's no-one to speak to, or no-one to email. I get it; you're giving the stuff away, so you don't feel the need to spend any money on helping morons use it. And I'd be fine with that if Google's technical notes and support sections for their various applications weren't such a labyrinthine tangle of recursive impenetrability. Where their help sections aren't under-informative, they're overwritten and poorly organized.
Case in point: the 'help center' for the FTP Migration Tool is some dude's blog. Written in first person, and only seemingly in answer to specific problems as they crop up. Nowhere is there even a simple, easy to navigate FAQ. The best they have on that front is a video showing the Migration Tool in action, narrated by the same dude, which makes it all seem sweet and straightforward but really glosses over some major technical details - such as how to set about getting Google to find the new subdomain once you've set it up.
As you can tell, I could seriously go on and on about this issue. And it'd be one thing if I'd just used Blogger for the Rambler, but over the years, I've used it for a lot of functions - always using the FTP publishing tool, of course - and now I have to go back to all of those sites and deal with the fallout from this.
I'm doing my first WordPress experiment with one such instance, the blog for Noah's site. Based on how that turns out, we'll see how I feel about just throwing the Rambler that way, as well. Stay tuned.
D.
Even given that Google's 'Migration Tool' leaves premonitions of the Rambler stuck in a muddy ditch on the side of a Siberian meadow, I went to take the plunge today. Of course, I immediately did something wrong (in fact, I'm kind of wondering now if this entry is going to publish!) - and it's only partly Google's 'fault.' As my understanding of just what a 'CNAME' is and what it does expands; it's a subdomain on the main site. And I thought that StartLogic (my host) set it up for me. And it does exist! But... the next step in the process is telling the subdomain to redirect to some Google something or other, and for that, I need to know which DNS numbers to enter for the main domain, and...
Uch. More and more, I'm thinking that I just want to use this opportunity to switch to WordPress. I'll still have to set up the CNAME and add a dedicated database, but I'm just getting super, super tired of Google's half-assed technical notes for all of this. Regular readers of the Rambler - if there are any of you left out there - are no doubt familiar with my growing general bad feeling about Google as a corporate entity. Even putting aside their questionable moral grounding, they'll always look poor in my eyes for the shambles that is their technical support. Look: it's fine that there's no-one to speak to, or no-one to email. I get it; you're giving the stuff away, so you don't feel the need to spend any money on helping morons use it. And I'd be fine with that if Google's technical notes and support sections for their various applications weren't such a labyrinthine tangle of recursive impenetrability. Where their help sections aren't under-informative, they're overwritten and poorly organized.
Case in point: the 'help center' for the FTP Migration Tool is some dude's blog. Written in first person, and only seemingly in answer to specific problems as they crop up. Nowhere is there even a simple, easy to navigate FAQ. The best they have on that front is a video showing the Migration Tool in action, narrated by the same dude, which makes it all seem sweet and straightforward but really glosses over some major technical details - such as how to set about getting Google to find the new subdomain once you've set it up.
As you can tell, I could seriously go on and on about this issue. And it'd be one thing if I'd just used Blogger for the Rambler, but over the years, I've used it for a lot of functions - always using the FTP publishing tool, of course - and now I have to go back to all of those sites and deal with the fallout from this.
I'm doing my first WordPress experiment with one such instance, the blog for Noah's site. Based on how that turns out, we'll see how I feel about just throwing the Rambler that way, as well. Stay tuned.
D.
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Friday, March 5, 2010
Enter the Draggin'
So, good and bad:
1) Blogger extended the cutoff date for FTP support until May 1st. But
2) They put a message at the top of the Dashboard that pretty much said 'fucking get with the program, already.'
So I think the time has come to make the switch. Starting soon - not this weekend, but early next week - the Rambler's new address will be 'www.subway-rambler.copper-man.net'. I have no idea how this will affect those who access these dwindling presumptions and observations via RSS, but just the fact that you use RSS means you know about this stuff and will plan accordingly. Or is that play accordion? I forget.
Supposedly, the migration tool that Google has set up will port not only all the existing entries, but the comments, too - but I apologize in advance if I do something that makes your comments on previous posts go spiraling out into the black haze of the digital void. I actually do really treasure the comments here, and in fact the main reason I haven't yet dealt with the FTP situation is that I was afraid of losing them.
The Blogger migration tool also promises to make sure that all links - internal and external - to individual entries will be automatically redirected when the blog republishes. Which seems pretty magical, to me. They also promised me a pony and a new bicycle, so we'll see just how trustworthy they are. This is Google, after all.
Anyhow, I've gone ahead and called my host and set up the CNAME, so as soon as that resolves (within the next 24 hours), I'll be free to make the change. I will, of course, place a redirect at the Rambler's current address, so you can't miss it.
D.
1) Blogger extended the cutoff date for FTP support until May 1st. But
2) They put a message at the top of the Dashboard that pretty much said 'fucking get with the program, already.'
So I think the time has come to make the switch. Starting soon - not this weekend, but early next week - the Rambler's new address will be 'www.subway-rambler.copper-man.net'. I have no idea how this will affect those who access these dwindling presumptions and observations via RSS, but just the fact that you use RSS means you know about this stuff and will plan accordingly. Or is that play accordion? I forget.
Supposedly, the migration tool that Google has set up will port not only all the existing entries, but the comments, too - but I apologize in advance if I do something that makes your comments on previous posts go spiraling out into the black haze of the digital void. I actually do really treasure the comments here, and in fact the main reason I haven't yet dealt with the FTP situation is that I was afraid of losing them.
The Blogger migration tool also promises to make sure that all links - internal and external - to individual entries will be automatically redirected when the blog republishes. Which seems pretty magical, to me. They also promised me a pony and a new bicycle, so we'll see just how trustworthy they are. This is Google, after all.
Anyhow, I've gone ahead and called my host and set up the CNAME, so as soon as that resolves (within the next 24 hours), I'll be free to make the change. I will, of course, place a redirect at the Rambler's current address, so you can't miss it.
D.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Digging the Foundation
Sketch (above) and colored study (below) for a portrait I'm preparing for. Obviously, there's some distortion in the drawing - the elongated head - this happens when you work freehand. I only have photos to work from, and I wanted to really try to internalize the subject, and sitting and drawing is the way to do that.
Click for a closer look, if you like. More on this later.
D.
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