2020 Hindsight

here's how to post a picture!

I'm showing some people from Corel how this weblog works. I just uploaded a picture.

Now, what the hell did I call it?

I never knew they thought "zed"

It's been a busy week here in Ottawa. I feel like the proverbial ethnocentric American who knows nothing about neighboring countries. Hey, I mean, I thought Ottawa was the city where Corel was located. Then I get here and find out that it's the national capital of Canada. Duh. I'll go on a tour of the parliament building tomorrow.. and rollerblading along The Canal.* Assuming the weather stays dry. The Canal is one of those The The things: Ottawans refer to The Canal in the same way that Californians refer to The Two-ten or The Five (freeways).

For the last three days I've been in a training room with a dozen computers conducting some advanced training in Bryce.

It's funny.... I go talking about things on the X axis and the y axis and the z axis. In my head, and when I speak, I say zee axis. But in the Q & A, the people here were asking about "when I'm on the zed axis and I...." So all this time as I was writing about Bryce, I never thought about how the text "Z axis" was being pronounced in the minds of some readers as "zed axis." Of course, I tried to say "zed axis" a few times. To me it sounds cute. To them it probably sounded normal. But I just couldn't bring myself to keep saying zed that way, eh?

*Note: I'm making this entry on the teacher workstation during lunch (wow! some free time! woo hoo!). So what I'm writing is up on the main screen while I'm still composing. So I'm getting a bunch of editorial comments while I'm writing. I was told to change "a canal" to THE Canal: Capital T Capital C; then the additional comment was made: Built to beat the Americans in the War of 1812. Got it?

Static, Manic, Canada, eh?

Well, the transition from a wholly-dynamic Manila site to a static site has transpired. Thanks to Erin Clerico of Weblogger for making it happen so painlessly.

There'll be a leetle more mop-up taking place. I still get to discover what all is involved with the setup. What I get so far is this:

Static Site — www.2020hindsight.org The static site contains the pages for each day's entries. If it's accessed by the calendar, you'll see it on the www.-url (most of what I do here goes on the home page, anyhow). The static site is served up on a fast apache web server.

Dynamic Manila Site — discuss.2020hindsight.org The dynamic site containing all the stories, pictures, and discussion group messages, is served up on a Frontier-running Manila server.

After a nice global find-and-replace to change all references of 2020Hindsight.editthispage.com to discuss.2020hindsight.org, there are probably a few weird references that were really meant to be for the editthispage.com site.

After toying with how it all works, I'll be tweaking things here so it'll feel seamless to go back and forth between the static and dynamic parts of this site.

Member Password Update Are you a member of this site? Did you get email telling you your new password? Please sign in. If you want to change your password from the random nonsense password you were given to something more to your liking, then please check out the Member Password page where I walk you through it all.

Oh Canada! It's been 20 years since I've gone north across the border into Canada. But today I shall venture north again, eh? Note to self: do not pack your 4 pound Real World Bryce 4 book in your carry-on bag unless you really, really have to. Dang. I really have to!

Member Password

How to transfer your membership from my old site to the new site. Heya! You were directed here because you signed as a member at the old site, http://2020hindsight.editthispage.com/. Now the site is here at http://www.2020hindsight.org/. You are already a member of the site, but you'll need to sign in again. If you want to change your password back to your old one (or just a different one), this page tells you how to do that.

Your site membership at 2020 Hindsight is based on your email address and a password.

1. You received an email that gave you a new, random password. The email was sent to you at the email address associated with your site membership.

   Use that email address and the new, random passwordto sign in to this site.

2. When you have signed in, you should see your name here:
   

   [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "whoAmI" hasn't been defined.]
   

3. Assuming that you don't like your randomly-assigned password, and you want to use your old password, you can change your password once you are signed in.

   Do you wanna use the password from the old site, but you forgot what it was? Piece of cake! You can have it emailed to you. Just go here (page will open in a new window). Type your email address only, and the site will send you email telling you what the *old* password is. (If you're already signed in, the site will tell you so. Sign out then try again.)

4. To change your password, you must be logged in to this site. [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "whoAmI" hasn't been defined.]
   Once you're logged in, go to the sign-up page. Enter whatever password you desire to have in both places for your password, and your password will be changed! (You'll also receive a confirmation email.)

5. There. I think that should do it. Welcome to my new digs and I hope this wasn't too painful for you!

Migration Matters

I'm keeping track of what all I needed to do in order to conduct my site migration in this story.

What I've already done

1. Migrate the site. Get a new site location, and then, once I was ready, export the site.

2. Register new domain name (optional)

3. Sign in and change my own password back to the preferred password. Details here.

4. Change listing on weblogs.com. http://www.weblogs.com/prefs has site preferences for my site. Change the URL of the weblog to new URL. It's that easy (presumably). I also added Weblogger to the ISP section of the site.

5. Compose a note that will go out to all the members about the site migration.

6. Search out all the hard-coded URLS containing "2020hindsight.editthispage.com" and change them to the new url "www.2020hindsight.org" Update In the course of changing over to a static site, some of what I did before didn't work exactly right. I may need to revisit this again to get pages to read discuss.2020hindsight.org

Still to do:

• Find out what's up with the email address being entered into the top of the home pages and on the "most read messages" page. I don't want it to have my email address; I want it to say my name. Must figure that one out.

• Keep checking referer logs; send emails to referers notifying them of the new address

• Now that I'm a static site, how do I find out the static page serve stats?

• update the design? geez, this site design is old, old, old!

• Figure out MetaData plugin. Ouch.

Other miscellaneous notes about migration

www.2020hindsight.org

master of my domain Whee! This site now responds to the following typed url:

http://www.2020hindsight.org/

(Now that I've got a dot-org domain name, I guess I'm gonna do a bit more learning about the hands off my dot-org thang)

Passwords: Right now, if you were a member of the old site at 2020Hindsight.editthispage.com you are a member of this site.

But in the process of transferring the site from editthispage.com to weblogger.com, all the member passwords were sent into the ether. That was a nice, protective measure for you members. But that protection comes at a teentsy pain-in-the-ass price: you will be given a new, randomly-assigned password.

I've put together an explanation on a page called Member Password. But the thing is, it's only good IF you are a member of the site AND you've been sent a leetle email giving you a new password.... something that has now happened (if the bounced email messages are any indication).

Manual URL labor Oh joy. Do you know that in a site that has over 2000 entries (okay, so lots of them are pictures, too), there are lots of hard-coded links to discuss.2020hindsight.org that need to be changed to 2020hindsight.org? Well, now I do. I did a search on weblogs.com for the site 2020+hindsight and the search term http://discuss.2020hindsight.org/ Over 300 matches found. Happily, it's pretty easy to look at the URL and just change editthispage to weblogger in the browser address area in order to change things over here.

It's also a nice retrospective of various things that have occurred on this site in the past. Kind of a nice way to get ready to dig into that ol' MetaData plugin that I now have at my disposal. Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

Amtrak's new site makes it easier to buy train tickets...easier than the last time I did, I think. Good for them.

Ottawa weather outlook is warm... not as humid as it was a few days ago. Oh fooey. the humidity changes hourly, it seems. Was at 50% or so a little while ago, is now at 73%. And what, pray tell, is in Ottawa? Put two and two together, eh? Plus, after tomorrow, *I* will be in Ottawa. That's great, eh?

Heat Prostration

It is warm. It is California. I am avoiding using my air-conditioner, in hopes of keeping electricity down, in hopes of doing my part to avoid rolling blackouts. My brain is woozy. I got very sunburned yesterday, in a spot where sunscreen wasn't thick enough. now there are angry red patches of skin, next to clean white lines of bathing suit straps; I predict that it will be a week before they calm down. I am a white girl. Sunburn happens.

Summertime Migratory Notes

This will be incredibly boring for many. But have I ever said that my weblog is meant to be scintillating?

notes to myself about migration Let's see... I am here now hosted on weblogger.com. What are some of the things I need to do?

• search and replace links in the site that were to http://2020Hindsight.editthispage.com/ and swap 'em out to weblogger.com

  Of course, once a certain domain name registration goes through, then this editthispage.com-transfer-to-weblogger.com becomes moot again.

  Corollary: What's up with relative links? I'd like to be able to have a reference for relative links where I don't have to do the domain name. But the message thing changes from one place to another. Is it possible to go through and make them all relative links such as "2000/07/29" and let it go at that? I can try, I guess. We'll see if that link works or not. (woo hoo! It worked! Now what happens when I look at the site on this day in this way?) Nope, it otherwise breaks. Alas. Perhaps there's another way to do it.

• Put a search form on the site to search the site itself.
  

  Oh boy. I am just looking through all the prefs items, and found this one at Prefs > Searching:
  

  What is the URL Of the home page of this site? What I have there now is this: http://www.editthispage.com/2020Hindsight. That will need to change. But to what? www.weblogger.com/2020Hindsight ? or 2020Hindsight.weblogger.com ?

• Figure out how to change my own password, before sending out email to all da world telling them to re-sign in again or whatever. So that they can change their passwords. I guess that Al figured it out, but it'll take a certain amount of my own head-bruising before I'm able to do that.

• Prefs > Membership; Email Bulletins. Well, there's some text in the template area that has urls that are editthispage.com specific. I'll need to change those, too.

Migration

Site migration (from another Manila server to here) in progress... not much here for now till it's finished.

. . . Summer Solstice is at 2:24 tomorrow Eastern time, which is tonight at 11:24pm..

Happy Summer!

magenta, blue, ruby

Sweet Potato Queen there's nothing so wonderful as opening up the front door to see if Fedex brought that software disk I was expecting (nope, not yet) and to see instead a package from a dear friend on the doormat. Woo hoo! Inside is a whole treasure trove of mardi gras beads, doubloons, and moon pies, plus some cups, a cloth rose, and a funky plastic whistle, all from gen-you-wine mardi gras parades in Fairport and Mobile, Alabama. The box also contained a book by Jill Conner Browne, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love. A box of treasure!!!! This assortment of color and gaudiness insisted that I drop everything I'm doing, eat all the moon pies in one sitting, and sit down and begin reading. I'm only on page 7, but I had to share with you this one passage of the author's eminently sensible outlook on life as she compares being a self-appointed sweet potato queen with being a queen in one of those other beauty contests:

[In a beauty queen pageant] you get that crown for one year and one year only, sweetie, and during that year, you will step and fetch at the total whim of the folks who gave it to you. you do this for one entire year, at the end of which you are no longer Queen of Anything. You are a former Queen. Consider, too, the status of the other pathetic ninety-nine percent who entered the fray?losers, one and all, and no doubt scarred for life by the experience. Sweet Potato Queens, on the other hand, don't have to do jackshit that anybody says, and we are Queens for Life.

Like I said, a very sensible attitude about life.

Oh Canada! (I guess if today's a color-themed day, then this is red and white) It turns out I'll be in Canada for Canada Day! (July 1) Somehwere between Ottawa and Montreal. There's a jazz festival and swing camp taking in Montreal then. Anyone gonna be there? Got any suggestions?

blogging grrls birthday duo! Birthday greetings and many happy returns of the day to Andrea and Sheila!

all your journalism are belong to MS--er, us A chilling Register story about how MSNBC doctored a WSJ story that took a harsh view of MS. [via Dan Gillmor]

Some more Catalina fotos from the trip last week. More than pictures of swing dancers, they are some visual impressions.

The final dance on the beach... The ruby slippers belong to Steven Mitchell, of Steven Mitchell and the Hollywood Hepcats and dance teacher. The man has (among other things) stylin' shoes!

Magenta and blue?An eatery on the waterfront (called Antonio's, I believe), played an excellent soundtrack and the inside was covered by decorated dollar bills. Here are the decorated bills near the bar, lit by neon lights.

I ended up drawing over some tabletop card advertising Bacardi rum, and then wrote that "no U.S. Curency was defaced in the making of this restaurant art." Here is a close up of the standard defaced currency to which I referred.