When Knitting Was a Manly Art

Last night we had a little weather incident. Lots of lightning, a couple of near strikes, loss of power. Computer came back up this morning, but when I got home this evening, I found that drive one of my two drive desktop system was making very nasty noises. Very nasty noises. It’s dead and the system won’t boot. But…. With a Linux rescue disk, I’ve confirmed that the second drive is good and that’s where most of my data is and as far as I can tell, all is well with that drive. Unfortunately, I can’t easily get at the drive. I’ll need to replace the primary drive and figure out a way to get to boot and access the second drive. Meantime, I’ll be using my laptop.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I use Firefox for my web browser on my Linux box. I’ve tried most of the various browsers available and always seem to come back to it.

One of the things I like is the ability to extend the capabilities of Firefox with “Extensions”. One of my latest extensions is Smiley Xtra plugin. It allows me to add any of more than 2000 smilies to my blog or anyplace else I post regularly.

Light snow this morning, but I took another walk around the yard anyway. Laurie asked for a close up of a filbert/hazelnut male blossom. If you look closely, you can see each of the individual flowers down the length of male catkin.

And just a the top of the male catkins are the *little* female flowers that will become the nut. Just below center are the tiny red petals of the female.

And bit more of the yellow crocus. Still nothing open yet, but a few more buds enjoying the chilly sunshine.

Popularity: 100% [?]

A young lady with much insight, who writes about the web, blogging and WordPress in particular has put up her list of Things She Wants Gone From the Web in 2007.

While you might not agree about with everything on her list, if *most* were gone by the end of 2007 the web would be a much nicer place. *I’d* love to see everything on her list gone, but then I’m just a crotchety old fart….

Popularity: 37% [?]

I’ve upgraded one of the two tools I use on my WordPress blog to block comment spam.

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts that attempts to block spam bots from even getting access to the comment area of my site. Unfortunately, it sometimes blocks real users. If you’re a real person and you are blocked from adding comments, please let me know. There’s a mailto: link in the left hand column in the ‘Links’ section.

Between Akismet and Bad Behavior, I’m preventing more than 1,000 spam attempts each week. Less than a dozen have managed to bypass the filters and actually get posted, but none have survived more that a few hours before being deleted.

Technorati Tags: Geek

Popularity: 59% [?]

No flowers this time. Just a graph of this blog as rendered by Websites as graphs

There’s even a tag set on Flickr - websitesasgraphs - with over a 1000 graphs of other websites. The graphs are so different and interesting.

Popularity: 21% [?]

UPDATE Since nearly all the problems have been resolved, I’m removing the sticky bit to let this drift off the top of the home page.

For the next couple of weeks - until I get all the problems worked out in the new weblog - this will remain at the top of the homepage.

Sidebar problems:

• Bugs in IE 5.x and 6.x are causing problems with the sidebar. If I’m not careful, the sidebar overlaps with the content on the right. Currently fixed - Remove from list unless I hear of other problems..
• Any screen size 800×600 or smaller pushes the sidebar to the bottom of the page. Not resolved.

Internet Search:

• Internet search (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc) returns results from my old software and links are no longer available. Eventually the old information will age out and good searches will be available from search engines. Search on sidebar does a decent job. Google site searches now work.

RSS feeds

• RSS feeds (Bloglines and other aggregators) have changed due to changed software. Former feed URLs will fail due to WordPress creating feeds dynamically. Most online aggregators are now picking up the right RSS feed URLs

Popularity: 24% [?]

I really dislike Microsoft at the moment (I’d use the word hate, but that would make me seem petty and juvenile).

The blog loads perfectly in Mozilla, Firefox and Opera, but the sidebar overlaps content in Internet Explorer 5.x and probably 6.x due to a IE bug. I have reports that it works with 7.x, but I only have access to whatever was available in Win98SE.

At the moment, it appears that my weblog loads correctly - without overlap. Something about the ‘About Me’ block seems to have been causing problems and has been removed.

I’d appreciate hearing from those of you had have reported problems and whether the overlap is gone on your browsers.

Popularity: 24% [?]

I know everyone has been waiting eagerly to click on those little category links and now you can. No more Page Not Found errors

Now if I can just fix the sidebar/IE issue.

Popularity: 24% [?]

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite some time and decided to search this morning and see if they had anyone subscribed to the new Wordpress feeds. The search also brought up the URLs to the old MovableType site (http://www.gaiser.org/knitblog/index.rdf, …/index.atom and …/index.xml). These are now all invalid, as WordPress creates the feeds dynamically and Bloglines is marking them all with ‘Feed Error’ warnings.

If anyone intends on using Bloglines or any other aggregator, the correct address for the feeds is now http://www.gaiser.org/knitblog/?feed=atom, …/?feed=rss2 or ../?feed=xml.

Oh… And for the time being nearly all searches on Google will return bogus URLs also. Hopefully, in the sometime near future, Google will have spidered the new site and the searches will become valid again. The search box on the left (or down below if you’re using IE) works pretty well and everything in the MT database exists here.

Popularity: 25% [?]

First.. There seems to be a bug in IE 5.something and 6.something that doesn’t render valid Cascading Style Sheets correctly, which means the side bar gets pushed to the bottom of the page. I originally thought it might be the 45 XHTML errors that were on the page, but I’ve managed to correct them all and the page validates cleanly now. As the theme author’s page views correctly in both IE 5.x and 6.x, it’s still something I’m doing. I’m working on it, though it’s not one of my high priorities. If you want to see how it’s supposed to look you can download free copies of Firefox or Opera.

Next.. Molly Bee asked about pictures of the Feather and Fan circular shawl. It’s getting pretty scrunched on the two circular needles I’m working on and it’s not very interesting right now. Currently on row 114.

Finally.. About 4 years ago, Eileen planted a Japanese Wisteria. It’s blooming for the first time this year. She was close to ripping it out, but I’m glad she held off. It reminds me of the Wisterias you see in old Japanese block prints.

Popularity: 34% [?]