Filed Under: blog

Tech question: Anyone having trouble viewing the blog?

May 23, 2010 at 9:42 am

One of my readers recently let me know she is having problems accessing the blog, but is still able to read entries via the RSS feed. When she visits the site, she gets this error:

Method Not Implemented

GET to /blog not supported.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I’ve tried to figure out what’s going on here, but it seems to be beyond my area of expertise. To further confuse matters, the reader is using the Firefox browser, which I myself use, but I’m not experiencing any problems. If you are running into the same problem, or if you think you might know what’s going on, email me at blog (at) pastaqueen {dot} com. Thanks!

Farewell, Movable Type. Hello, WordPress!

January 17, 2010 at 2:12 pm

If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You’ve successfully followed the blog to its new home. This weekend I switched from the Movable Type blogging software to WordPress. You shouldn’t notice that many changes except for the big one: any links you have bookmarked for https://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/ should be updated to https://pastaqueen.com/blog For your convenience, any links to the old site are redirecting to their counterparts on the new site automatically, but it’s best to update your bookmarks as well. The good old https://www.pastaqueen.com/ link works the same as usual.

Attention Feed Readers!
If you read my site via the feed, make sure you are subscribed to my latest feed address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pastaqueen

If I’ve moved everything over properly, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference on the front end, although WordPress will make things much easier for me on the back end. I’ve wanted to switch to WordPress for over a year, but didn’t want to hassle with importing 5 years of entries, converting all my templates, and redirecting all my old links properly. However, the current barrage of spam I’ve been hit with served to remind me how clunky and difficult it is to do some things in Movable Type that are embarrassingly easy in WordPress. So I packed up my database and moved!

The only real functionality change is that I’ve gotten rid of threaded comments, even though WordPress offers support for them. I found the threads a bit hard to follow. I prefer it when the latest comments are all on the bottom of the page. You can still click a “reply” link, but all is does is add an “@commenter-name” at the beginning of your comment text.

If you run into any problems with anything, email me at blog [at] pastaqueen (dot) com

Happy Fifth Fativersary!

January 15, 2010 at 11:12 am

Cupcakes. Lick the screen if you must.

Photo by gerrysnaps / CC BY-NC 2.0

I had completely forgotten this until I read DietGirl’s blog this morning, but today is my five-year fativersary! It was five years ago today that I started my big fat weight loss attempt. DietGirl and I have the same weight loss anniversary, which would seem weird if not for the millions of people who start losing weight in January.

So, it’s five years later and I’ve maintained 75% of my highest weight loss. I’m working on making that percentage higher, but for now, I’ll take it! Woot! Some people think the five-year mark is a statistically significant indicator of your likelihood to keep the weight off. A quick Google search couldn’t find any articles that stated this, so it might just be folk wisdom or a total figment of my imagination.

All I know if that there was a guy who commented on the blog about two or three years ago saying he wouldn’t buy my book until I’d kept the weight off for five years. I only remember this because the guy was a douchebag about it. I truly appreciate the support of everyone who’s bought my book, but the decision is totally yours and isn’t something you need to extort out of me. I tried to find the comment, but after fifteen minutes of combing through search results I gave up. All I remember is that the comment was phrased as if I would only be worthy of having him purchase my book if I stayed skinny (or in my case, less fat). As I said before, I am very thankful to everyone who has purchased my book. But I think whatever happens to my weight in the future is somewhat irrelevant in regards to my memoir, which is the story of what it was like to lose a lot of weight, which will remain as true now and in the future regardless of whether I lose 100 pounds or gain 100 pounds. So if you want to buy it, thanks! And if you don’t, well, ok. Just don’t be a douchebag about it, all right?

By the way, did I say I was grateful? I am grateful!

With that in mind, happy fativersary and farewell to those 150 pounds gone!

Comment moderation is on

December 30, 2009 at 9:13 am

I’ve turned on comment moderation because the blog keeps getting hit with spam 2.0. This kind of spam is left by actual people, not computer programs, so the spam filter doesn’t catch most of it. They leave comments that sound real and refer to my posts, but they fill out the link field of the comment form with sites that are obviously spam sites. I’ve been filtering it out by hand for the last few weeks, but it keeps coming, so I’m turning on comment moderation until it subsides.

But, PastaQueen, why don’t you just use a captcha?

I didn’t want to use a captcha because 1) they’re annoying and 2) the spam is being left by humans who would be able to get past it. I suspect these spammers are third world citizens being paid a couple bucks a day to leave spam on blogs, sort of like what happens in that Cory Doctorow story Anda’s Game. Once their comments stop getting published, they’ll eventually go away. (I hope.)

So, if your comment is not published right away, don’t freak out. If you are a real person and not a dirty, rotten, spammer, I’ll approve it within 24 hours.

Update: Eww, I just Googled “blog commenting service” and discovered there are lots of companies offering this spam service, spinning it like it’s not unethical, annoying, and destroying the spirit of the Internet.

My blog, now with more tweets

November 29, 2009 at 3:08 pm

Not all of my readers follow me on Twitter. Either they don’t understand this whole Twitter thing or they don’t care about tweets and retweets and twittermania, or it’s just too much work to keep up with a blog and Twitter and Facebook and OMG my head is gonna’ explode! That’s cool. I get that. Millions of people were texting before I sent the first message on my cell phone, and I still don’t know what Google Wave is or what it does or why I should care.

However, I wanted to share my tweets with the segment of my blog readers who don’t subscribe to Twitter, but I also wanted to incorporate them in a more organic way than that widget in my sidebar allows. So I’ve updated the home page of my blog so my recent tweets appear in the stream. Both the blog posts and the tweets are sorted in descending chronological order in regards to when they were posted.

The tweets do not appear in my blog feed. I figure, if you want to subscribe to my Twitter posts, you’re already doing that. There’s no need to duplicate info you already have. I did this update for the people who read the blog by visiting the web site every day. The tweets only appear on the home page, not in my archives (though I might change that eventually, when my eyes aren’t burning from staring at my monitor). You can’t comment on the tweets like blog entries either, because that’s a bit more complicated and I don’t feel like figuring that out right now, because as I mentioned before, OMG my head is gonna’ explode!

Please let me know what you think of this new feature. Do you like it? Is it annoying? Do you not care one way or the other? Is it displaying funky on your computer? Thanks, and I hope you enjoy.

Filed Under: blog

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