Technology is so much fun! (2 of 30)

My intent was to produce today’s post early in the day and then get out to enjoy what is supposed to be a nice sunny day with temperatures in the 60’s. So far, that hasn’t happened, unless you consider noon-thirty to be early in the day.

The problem is that, as usual, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and just write something about life, love, laughter or whatever. I had to go and screw around with technology. At first, things went well with the installation of Google Analytics and Akismet plugins proceeding successfully. Not that I will need either one for a while, as very few people even know this blog is out here yet. I can still count visits on one hand without the help of Google or anyone else, and even the porn link spammers haven’t found their way here to invade the comments.

Then, I began the attempt to make my blog posts here also appear on my NaBloPoMo page and generate a one-liner on my Facebook feed. This is where technology decided to bite me in the butt.

Not right away though. Setting up the RSS feed to the NaBloPoMo page was very easy. Quite a few things at NaBloPoMo’s Ning site are not working at the moment (blog list randomizer, and worse yet, the friends feature) but the RSS feed is not on the longish list of problems.

After trying and rejecting Blog It (good app made by the Movable Type folks, but has some known issues with some WordPress blogs that are not part of WordPress.com) and FriendFeed, it looked as though Wordbook would solve the problem. And it would have, except that the server my blog resides on is still using PHP 4. Since it is a VPS server to which I have root access, I’m supposed to be smart enough to take care of all the geekly stuff, including noticing when I need to upgrade anything on it. This has not always been the case. In my defense though, all of the other PHP scripts that I’m currently using on the sites on that server are supposed to run under both PHP 4 and PHP 5, so I just took the path of least resistance.

I’ve got a ticket in for support as I do have a couple of questions before making the move to PHP 5. While I wait for the answers, I’m checking to make sure that all those other scripts don’t in fact have any issues with PHP 5. How fun would that be, to break everything else on the server just so my Facebook feed gets updated whenver I post my deep thoughts here?

I wasn’t planning to do much in the way of customizing or tweaking this blog. I spent quite a bit of time on making graphics, modifying layouts and adding little whiz-bang things to my old Movable Type blog. It was often enjoyable, but it was also very time-consuming and in the end, it didn’t really make things any more interesting or informative for the readers.

Technology was not my intended topic for the day. Before I got caught in the technology trap, I was debating between current events (specifically, my personal concerns about Barack Obama’s Election Night rally in Chicago) or Rottweilers (specifically, my own beautiful and intelligent Rottweilers) as today’s topic. We still have a couple of days to go until the election, so both of those topics can keep for another day.

Back to the wonders of technology. Enjoy the beautiful day if you are in my sector. I hope to be done here and join you outside before it gets chilly again!