What I wanted: A simple backup of all my tweets from my account and all my favorited tweets of others.

What I kept finding: Integrate Twitter into WordPress! Widget! Cross-post! Update Twitter about new blog updates!

I was dazzled by wp-lifestream and briefly considered backing up all of my social networking accounts. That was until I saw over 500 files for the plugin queued up in my FTP program. I didn’t want a plugin that required almost as many files as the WordPress install itself! (Although someone says he’s working on cleaning up the plugin, wp-lifestream2, so I don’t know how it’ll end up.)

I wanted to try out Tweet Tweet but it requires registration at Twitter and acquiring OAuth? Too much hassle just for a simple archive. But I did really like the possibility of storing Twitter replies to me, and of archiving tables. (Not that I tweet that much, although my current 1500 WordPress entries seems a bit much for me.)

After I found these instructions how to import old Twitter favorites into WordPress, I finally decided on running the Twitter Importer plugin after using the Tweet Importer to import all of my old tweets (versus only the last 20 with Twitter Importer).

Two tips I could have used, instead of having to redo my original import:

One, set the default category to the type of tweet being imported, eg “My Tweets” versus “Favorite Tweets,” if you’d like the tweets separated into different categories.

Two, turn off allowing comments! No reason to leave myself open to spammenting on old tweets!

I’d consider this a good day’s work. Even though I didn’t get paid. (Not enough work at my job at the moment. Bah.)

Okay, it was mostly the HTML code output that I edited, not really PHP or Javascript (basically code I don’t know), but still. I managed to not screw up my blog while working inside a file with PHP. :3

I also learned what “\n” or “backslash n” means. (New line.) hee. I’m learnin’!

Also, if you didn’t notice, I had a FlickrRSS plugin working in the sidebar before, but decided it’s not the way I want to go about inserting my photos.

Basically I want to upload a photo to Flickr and write a mini-blog entry in the description, then display both on my blog. But the sidebar is waaay too tiny for that (I think it’s too tiny for even the Twitter updates.)

Ideally I’d like the photo updates to show up with my blog entries, but I really don’t know how to go about doing that, so I guess I’ll just make regular WordPress entries linking to the Flickr image. How unspectacular. *snerk* That is, if I actually get around to doing photo updates. (I probably haven’t touched my camera for the past two weeks. How sad…poor camera.)

A little backstory: went to bed at 4:30 in the morning (technically yesterday…), was woken up off and on from 9 to 11 by someone working with a chainsaw, didn’t get up until 1:30. I spent the day very very tired.

I don’t know when I messed up, maybe it was 11:30 pm? I accidentally uploaded the WordPress config file to the wp-content folder. I thought, Oh crap, and just deleted it. No biggie, right? Wrong.

(I’m going through my old entries and closing entries I don’t like, recategorizing entries, tagging entries… I do this too often, I know. I’m an organization freak.)

I go to edit an entry and find that there’s no place to edit tags. I thought it was the plug-in Simple Tags, so I kept turning that on and off, but that wasn’t it. I kept turning on and off all my other plug-ins, but that wasn’t the problem. (That created more problems, actually. It’s sort of irritating having to rely on plug-ins for my blog to display correctly…)

I realized that not only were tags missing, but all the Advanced Options weren’t nicely hidden away like they usually are.

I tried re-installing WordPress, just keeping my wp-content folder, but that didn’t change anything, so I moved on to deleting my MySQL database and re-importing the SQL file. That didn’t work either, though. (I got a scary message, “Error in ZIP archive: CRC32 checksum is not equal with the value in header information.” Found out I should try to import from the .sql file, not the .zip file. Luckily Steadfast allows importing of sql files up to roughly 8 mb! [Don't remember the exact number; don't sue me.] Yes, my blog .sql file is over 3 mb big now. *meep*)

That didn’t fix my problem, though, so I just scrapped my whole blog and put in a completely fresh install, all new uploaded files, all new MySQL database, and re-imported my .sql file.

The problem seems to be fixed now. Except … I realized while writing this post that the post page I was working on was messed up still. Argh! At least I was able to save it, then through editing the draft I got the regular page back…

Hm, nope. Every Create New Post page comes up with that blank look. >_< ARGH! Why won’t WordPress fix itself?!

edit: Wow, I guess it was just that one tab in Firefox (2) that wouldn’t display the page correctly. I spent over two hours trying to fix this on my site when it was just the browser?! *falls over*

[comments closed to reduce spam]

Um, I noticed that in the “Write Post” page of WordPress, the selected categories are no longer at the top of the list… Why was that changed? I was a little annoyed when they first switched from alphabetizing all categories regardless of if they were selected to having selected categories on the top, but I got over that. It was very handy knowing without having to scroll what categories I’d placed the post under.

It’s doubly annoying now because the Categories window is so freaking tiny now. (Height-wise, I mean.) Scroll a little bit and I can barely see where the window scrolled to. Three lines? Five lines? I can never tell! Very disorienting.

edit: Vote for this idea! “Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3″

I just don’t like how much scrolling I have to do on the Write Post page. (I have to go all the way down there to add a password?! Or even to categorize my post? Which also involves much more scrolling…) It seems to me like there’s so much wasted space to the right … because I don’t use a lot of the stuff there, haha.

And the tags thing … maybe it’s just me. I’m used to Simple Tags. WP’s tag guessing thing is so slow. boo. Then again, Simple Tags could slow down my system a fraction of a second. But … at least the reaction to my typing, say, “bu” (completely random letters, yes), wouldn’t take a whole second (more?) to show up.

Also, why can’t I customize this page? I was able to change the last version’s around. Well, sorta. Going from one WordPress blog panel on this domain to another, the position of those things (widgets?) changed back to default. mrrr. But … theoretical customization, come on, people!

I dunno. I suppose I’ll get used to it. I have to, don’t I? *grin*

[comments closed to combat spam]

[Oct 18@10:47 Woohoo! I stopped being a dumbbell and read in the support forums that there's an import available IN WordPress for Simple Tagging! Saved myself ... a few hours' worth of work. But I have now discovered that the Category Cloud plug-in cloud doesn't validate. Ugh. That'll be sitting on my mind.]

In WordPress news … native tagging support? Does this mean all the work I put into tagging my entries with that plug-in (too lazy to look up and link) was a waste? (Too lazy to go read about WordPress 2.3 any further. I should have been in bed two hours ago anyway.)

“And sometimes this Blog is just a diary, or a reminder. You forget the things you were certain you would always remember, especially the tiny things, and all too often they’re the things that matter.”
Neil Gaiman, December 1, 2006

I know he said that in reference to his daughter, but dang I still love how he writes.

Yesterday I went to lecture, art lab, then printing lab. Oh. Before lecture I was in the library “tracing” over the landscapes/cityscapes/interiors (abstracting everything into geometric shapes). I got two thirds of it done in an hour. :o In lab we got a half hour presentation on what are abstract geometric shapes, and what are not. Then I spent another half hour finishing the third page of examples. Rest of the time I tried coming up with my own pictorial design. I came up with two then couldn’t really think of any more. x.x Have to work on that this weekend.

Had a lab final in printing. Oh yeah! My teacher said in class: she’s lived in Michigan, where it snows, and when she was moving to California she thought, oh yay, the sun is always out! But it’s so cold here! Not outside, but inside. Her husband said “we have to go get sweaters!”

Hah, yeah, no one heats (public) buildings around here. >_> My mom’s even got the thermostat at home down to 66° since last winter. I never even gave that a second thought. Do other places heat to a comfortable level during the winter?

Yesterday I forgot to turn off the heater (we don’t have a thermostat) in the morning, so it was on pretty high all day until I got home at 5:30. C and his friend had the windows open since they don’t know how to work the heater. -.- So I don’t have the heater on now, and I’m wearing a tank top, shirt, thermal top, sweatshirt, leggings, and sweatpants. Still a little cold though.

Wednesday night it was really cold. I think it went down to 42° while we were checking the weather. Thursday morning there was ice on my car! Only the rear window, but still! This one site C’s friend checked said that average and record temperatures in SLO are more extreme than temperatures in Berkeley/Davis. O_o I understand the highs; they’re more north, so naturally it’s cooler. But the lows! How in the world can we get colder than the Bay area??? They get fog! It rains often there! We’re in what’s called the Gold Coast. (I think it’s a just marketing/tourist gimmick though.)

Today I vacuumed my room and called the evaluations office to see if my transcripts were marked with the equivalent classes at Cal Poly. That’s it. bah! I should be working on art stuff, but I’m so lazy!

Last night I stayed up til 1:30 am working on my blog. XD; Moved the last of the pMachine entries to WordPress. No more pMachine floating around uselessly on my domain anymore, woohoo! Installed plugins for tags and weighted tags and for weighted categories. So now you’ll see those around.

The one that I think is perfect is CG Archives by Year, but only with his additional coding, so links to entries show up under each month. I e-mailed him asking about it, a week ago, and he hasn’t written back. I think he ’net-died. (His blog hasn’t been updated for a while.)

The Engineered Boulderer’s Super Archives Plugin comes in at a reluctant second. One, I’m not a fan of Javascripts. Perhaps because I just can’t get the hang of them just by looking at them. *snrk* Two, I don’t really like the way the archives are presented (three columns/whatever you choose). Three, Sometimes, if the page takes too long to load, when I hit the back button from the entry I’ve looked at, I’m sent back to the most recent year/month. Which, if I’m perusing my old dreams, would get annoying really quickly since I usually like reading the dreams that occurred around the same date.

Regardless, I was willing to use it, since I can’t find anything else that would show the entries by year. But I got a permission denied error, something about something (I understand the problem, I just can’t explain it), people comment about it on the plugin page. One guy posted something of a solution, but I don’t feel like editing stuff at the moment.

I also tried something from MtDewVirus but that didn’t work for some reason. I don’t remember what it was, but I probably couldn’t have fixed it without spending a lot of time on it, or I didn’t know what the heck was going on.

Right now I’m just using Clean Archives. It was nicest/most suited to my aesthetic tastes (or simplest?) of all the “list links to all blog entries on one page” plugins. It shows the archives as a link to the entry using the entry title, which is mostly what I wanted. But I have 100+ more dreams to add to my dreamlog, which is already at 550+ entries … so the archives page will take a very long time to load/scroll down indeed. :/

*sigh* Wish that guy would write back with his extra codes.

(And I spent 37 minutes on this entry. *blink*)

It’s kind of weird. I look over the list, and I think, Wow, I read that book then? It seems like so long ago… Like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I want to reread Ender’s Shadow again. XD (Even though I already have about a half dozen books on my to-read list, not including class required reading. *ack*)

Also, wow, I’m gone for only one week and WordPress is updated. Hmmm, maybe I should leave other things alone and maybe they’ll get updated too… (Note to self, upgrade WordPress after backing up current state.)

1. Lirael, Garth Nix
2. The Haunting of Hill House, Idunno Hername
3. Abhorsen, Garth Nix
4. Like Water for Chocolate, dunno hername
5. 1-22 Stuck in Neutral, Terry Trueman
6. 1-25 Ringu, Koji Suzuki
7. 2-2 The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
8. 2-6? The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
9. 2-10 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
10. 2-18 Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card
11. 3-3 Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
12. 3-6 I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
13. 3-16 Xenocide, Orson Scott Card
14. 3-18 The Ordinary Princess, M.M. Kaye
15. 3-31 Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card
16. 4-12? Shadow of the Hegemon, Orson Scott Card
17. 4-21 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
18. 4-27 Shadow Puppets, Orson Scott Card
19. 4-27 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
20. 5-21 Mary, Called Magdalene, Margaret George
21. 5-25 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
22. 5-26 That Summer, Sarah Dessen
23. 6-3 Life, the Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams
24. 6-11 Stardust, Neil Gaiman
25. 7-16 Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
26. 7-18 Three Junes, Julia Glass
27. 7-22 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling
28. 7-30 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
29. 8-02 The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, Ann Packer
30. 8-04 Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Roald Dahl
31. 9-08 Alicia: My Story, Alicia Appleman-Jurman
32. 9-30 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
33. 10-05 Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
34. 10-12 Camille Claudel, Odile Ayral-Clause
35. 10-15 Homecoming, Cynthia Voigt
36. 10-18 Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut
37. 10-19 Holes, Louis Sachar
38. 11-3 Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
39. 11-15 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Daniel DeFoe
40. 11-19 Send Me Down a Miracle, Han Nolan
41. 11-20 Sport, ladywhowroteHarriettheSpy
42. 11-23 Someone Like You, Roald Dahl
43. 11-23 The World’s Most Infamous Murders, Roger Boar & Nigel Blundell
44. 12-3 The Coffin Quilt, Ann Rinaldi
45. 12-5 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
46. 12-11 Halinka, Mirjam Pressler, translator Elizabeth D. Crawford
47. 12-21 An Acquaintance with Darkness, Ann Rinaldi
48. 12-27 So Much to Tell You, John Marsden
49. 12-29 The Cure, Sonia Levitin
50. 12-31 The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka