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Atom feed is broken
Since updating to the current release of the ExpressionEngine CMS that runs this website, the Atom feed is broken. I’ve tried to fix it myself (no luck) and I’ve requested support from the vendor (no...
View ArticleMoving back to farces.com
I’m moving this website back to the farces.com domain later today or early next week. Actually, it never left, but I’m changing the Expression Engine settings to reference the farces.com domain instead...
View ArticleIntroducing the Qwest PPC-6700Q wiki and website changes
A few weeks ago my ancient mobile phone gave out and I bought a new one, a Qwest PPC-6700Q smartphone. As it turns out, it’s smarter than I am, so I’ve opened a wiki for it to track my notes. You’ll...
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University of Minnesota appointment
I have been offered, and have accepted, a continuous appointment as senior editor at the University of Minnesota’s new College of Design. My working title is ecommunications manager in the College of...
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So long Google AdSense, it’s been good to know ya
You’ll notice that I’ve removed the Google AdSense ads from all of the ARTS & FARCES websites. I did it for a variety of reasons: Last week I published two stories about serious problems with a...
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Back on the air
What I thought was a catastrophic hardware failure turned out to be a bad port on a switch. Last night it occurred to me that I had done a poor job of troubleshooting. Instead of investigating the...
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Atom feed deprecated
Back in the days of the RSS wars, it made sense — sort of — to provide both RSS 2.0 and Atom syndication feeds. Well, not really. Providing both XML formats has always been problematic from the users’...
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Recovering from a train wreck
Several days ago the server that runs this website failed catastrophically, taking its backup disk with it. I’ve mostly recovered the database, although the last two months of published entries are...
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A shaky recovery?
Houston, we may have at least partial recovery. While there are still some problems with the database, I think I’ve recovered the lost entries. Here’s how I did it; don’t try this at home: Ran a SQL...
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Full recovery; time for vacation
We have a full recovery thanks to the wonderful Expression Engine support folks. It was a simple incorrect entry in a single record in a single database table. It’s fixed now and everything appears to...
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Membership and comments disabled
Membership and comments have been disabled on this website. You’ll need membership login credentials to participate in the wiki; email me with a brief note and I’ll manually add your account. I’m doing...
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This time it goes up to 11
Here we go again. Major changes coming. This is the 11th major update to www.farces.com since February 1993. Hopefully you won’t notice anything different for a while. The back-end is all done and I’ve...
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This one goes up to 11 front-end finished
This is the 11th major update to www.farces.com since February 1993, and the most exhaustive. A complete new back-end was installed last month and since then I’ve been working on a completely new...
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Upgrade the 12th
Yes, yes another major ARTS & FARCES internet upgrade. This is the 12th major upgrade since February 1993 (and the first since July 2010). This time all of the upgrades are on the back-end, and if...
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Heads up: Major breakage now; even more on the way
I recently updated the software that runs the core of ARTS & FARCES internet to ExpressionEngine 2.6.0. Like every other major ExpressionEngine point release (this site’s been running...
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Here we go: Version the 13th
Yeppers, here we go again. Welcome to the 13th major revision of ARTS & FARCES internet since February 1993. Everything is changed and therefore broken. None of the old links work, sorry to say, so...
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Catastrophic hardware failure
Recently, I discovered that Other World Computing (OWC) was claiming they had a 16GB RAM upgrade for a mid-2010 Mac Mini Server. They guaranteed it would work so long as the Mac Mini Server had the...
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Giving comments another go
For years comments were enabled on this website (long before I migrated to WordPress) and everything just ran peachy. Of course there were a few stray spam comments every once in a rare while, but...
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Heads up: FeedBurner deprecated
Dick Costolo and his team launched FeedBurner, the RSS feed management tool, in 2004 and it was acquired by Google in 2007 who did nothing to enhance or improve it and deprecated the FeedBurner APIs in...
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Upgrades: Something always goes wrong
After being burned — repeatedly — by every major upgrade I’ve attempted, after all this time you’d think I’d learn not to be wooed by the bright shiny objects. Sit tight and wait for the first or...
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A net neutrality national day of action
ARTS & FARCES internet has never participated in any of the previous calls to action to communicate resistance against censorship, privacy invasion, or any of the other myriad attempts to put the...
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Adventures with the naked Mac Mini Server updated for Yosemite
There’s been little action around here lately because I’ve been spending the bulk of my available time revising, updating, and expanding the Adventures with the naked Mac Mini Server wiki. Previous...
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Trouble ahead: Transferring domain hosting
I’ve outlined how our domains ended up at Network Solutions in the “Configure external Domain Name Service (DNS)” section of the Adventures with the naked Mac Mini Server wiki. The tl;dr version: When...
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DocumentCloud/WP Rocket conflict
I’ve been working for the last 6.5+ hours trying to isolate why embedded DocumentCloud documents are not rendering properly on this website. The old Navis DocumentCloud plugin appeared to work fine,...
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Here we go again: Version the 14th
ARTS & FARCES has had a continual presence on the internet since February 1993. The last major revision to the website was in May 2013 when I made the transition from ExpressionEngine to WordPress...
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Upgrade alert: PHP 7.0
Since shortly after the first of the year, I’ve been trying — off and on — to install and configure PHP 7 on our development/staging server. In early May I started working more in earnest on this but...
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ARTS & FARCES internet version 14.1
Well alrighty then. I’ve made a few pretty big changes to ARTS & FARCES internet. At the beginning of July, I converted to HTTPS SSL/TLS authentication, data integrity, and encryption. I’m still...
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Trouble ahead, trouble behind
Trouble ahead, trouble behind And you know that notion just crossed my mind — “Casey Jones,” by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia tl;dr (“too long; didn’t read”) version: In July 2017, one of the hard...
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ARTS & FARCES internet version 15.0
“We’ve come a long way since we last shook hands Still got a long way to go We couldn’t see the flowers since we last shook hands Couldn’t see the flowers on account of the snow” – “Come A Long Way,”...
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ARTS & FARCES LLC version 15.5
Since the end of last year, I’ve made a lot of small incremental changes. Here are the highlights: Content changes/additions Updated and published the third edition of Adventures with the naked Mac...
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ARTS & FARCES LLC version 16.0: The Rolling Thunder upgrade
Since mid-July 2018, I’ve made a lot of incremental changes. Here are the highlights: Content changes/additions Updated and published the fourth edition of the Adventures with the naked Mac Mini Server...
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ARTS & FARCES version 16.5: Rolling Thunder upgrade phase two
It was a busy December and early January for the ARTS & FARCES website with a few more incremental content changes and some major infrastructure changes: Content changes/additions Continued work on...
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ARTS & FARCES version 17.0: Rolling Thunder upgrade phase three
Winter and early spring up here on the far edge are never easy, and this one was especially rough. Most days were relatively non-productive and, therefore understandably, extremely frustrating. Almost...
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ARTS & FARCES version 17.5
Winter’s coming up here on the far edge, and I’ve been spending almost all of my time either receiving hemodialysis treatment or post-stroke occupational, physical, and speech therapy. Nonetheless, the...
View ArticleARTS & FARCES version 17.6
I decided to keep track of the major things I do to keep the server between the ditches. It wasn’t pretty — wasn’t even homely — it was downright ugly. In some ways, it’s not as bad as it looks:...
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