A Pilgrim’s Digression

After nearly five years, I figure it’s time to change the look of my blog.  For one thing, the Rubric theme I used for most of those years was not upgradeable except via manual coding.  It did not support Widgets or Java, and frankly, I was anxious to add some eye candy, such as menus that fade in as you mouse over.

The theme I chose isn’t exceptionally pretty; it’s called iNove, and it’s just functional.  I like functionality.  All I need is for something to work.

Anyway, we’ll see how it wears after a few weeks.  At the very least, the “Random Post” widget in the sidebar should provide some fun reading when I’m bored.

This was a new one to me, and I feel like I ought to tell folks about it because it almost fooled me. I received an email today purporting to be from the IRS. It was not flagged as spam. The email address was given as do-not-reply@irs.gov. It used a realistic IRS header graphic, and for all intents and purposes looked real.

Here’s what it said:

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $109.30. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here [link removed]

Regards, Internal Revenue Service

After suppressing my first impulse to cheer that I was actually getting money back, I began to be suspicious. It seems a bit late in the year to get something from the IRS. But the amount was so small–$109.30–that it sounded legitimate.

I moused over the link, and it appeared as simply an IP address with a long string of special characters. I read the email carefully. Then I saw it: the name masking the email address was spelled incorrectly. How did these brilliant spammers, who otherwise probably would have got me to click the link, spell the name of the agency?

Internal Revenuse Service.

Turns out this one has been caught by Snopes, too.

The vast majority of the time, I get along quite well in my life as a Cybernaut. I don’t know that we are really called Cybernauts–we people who live the vast majority of our lives through an Internet connection–but it is a word I like to use to describe myself. I sometimes feel like I exist more as a virtual creation than as a physical being.

Plus, Cybernaut brings back memories of my pre-Internet existence. When I was a toddler in the mid-seventies, pre-Star Wars, there was a line of toys called Micronauts that I enjoyed playing with. But since I don’t want to think of anything about myself as “micro,” I think Cybernaut works just as well while suggesting the same thing: a person who is part machine, part human flesh, who explores a largely electronic world (the Microverse in the language of the Micronaut comic books).

As I say, these explorations are usually quite pleasurable and unstressful, until I hit a road block, such as I did today: the forgotten password.

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Today’s post is kind of a catch-all in which I discuss a number of things that have no real coherency, except as they relate to blogging. March is of course the anniversary month for my blog, and the past days and weeks, I have been taking a look back, fixing some display issues with old blog posts, checking links in my blogroll (and catching up with some folks), and making note of notable posts from the archives that newcomers to my blog might like to read.

I’d like to list those posts here, but first, whatever happened to…

As the Apple Turns

This was a clever and entertaining site for Mac enthusiasts for many years, throughout the late nineties and into the early years of this century. I would consider it a blog, though it came into existence before the era of blogging. Then, suddenly, it stopped being updated.

At the time, I thought perhaps the creator was redesigning the look of it to conform with the new Mac OS X interface. But no, nothing changed. The site stopped being upgraded, frozen forever on October 12, 2005 at 5:03 AM.

Presumably someone is still paying the hosting bill. Where art thou, AtAT? Until I hear from you, I am removing you from my blogroll.

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This post is just an fyi: I am upgrading my blogging software from WordPress 2.0 to 2.1. I am hoping it won’t break my theme, but if you notice any funkiness about my site, it’s probably because the upgrade went terribly wrong.

WordPress 2.1 has some great new features, and I am looking forward to getting some blogging done with it. It has a Post Autosave feature, which will come in very handy for me. I’ve lost many, many posts due to accidental navigation away from the page and browser crashes.

2.1 also has a tabbed editor for easy switching between the WYSIWYG editor and the code editor. Hopefully, I won’t have to spend as much time in the code as in the past, though. 2.1 supposedly fixes many of the HTML bugs that forced me to visit the code editor after publishing a post and seeing how it was displaying.

I also rather like this feature, though I am not sure yet whether I will use it:

“New search engine privacy option allows you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.”

I’ve become more aware of my own privacy needs lately, due to this blog being associated with my real-life name. The names of people from my past that I’d prefer never to hear from again were turning up in my email inbox. As a result, I’ve had to lower my profile by removing any mention of my real name from the site, and I’ve changed the names of real people I have mentioned in blog posts.

I know it’s naive, but I write this blog thinking I am speaking to a select group of friends, but in fact I have more visitors than I know about, many of whom I’d rather not hear from.

Upgrade Update: the upgrade went fairly smoothly, except for a database error I am getting in my sidebar.  I suspect the problem is with some customization of the code in my theme.  I seem to remember tinkering with the code to display my Blogroll links in a different order than was customary.  But it’s been a couple years now.  I’ll figure it out eventually.

By the way, i really like the new features.  I am still not sure whether I will go “private” or not, though.  Despite the risks, it seems antithetical to the purpose of a blog to make it inaccessible to Google and other search engines.  Any opinions on the subject from my readers?

My previous post was not meant as a farewell to blogging, but more as a farewell to my writing of fiction, as well as a farewell to my carefully preened, but naive ambition to write serious works that will be taken seriously by serious people.

In no way am I abandoning my blog. I am writing more irregularly these days primarily because I’d rather be playing World of Warcraft in my free time; but I will still post here as frequently as once a week or so.

Thanks to my friend David for an interesting quiz he pointed me to (I am home today with a sick child, so I have time for quizzes). By asking some difficult questions, it tells you what kind of Christian apologist you are.

Here are my results. As I told David, I have no idea what a fideist is. It sounds like it’s from the Latin “fido,” so that means I must be a faithful dog lover. Seriously, though, I think this time the results of the quiz are pretty right on the mark. I do tend to be an anti-rationalist when it comes to Christianity. The absurdity of belief in Christ is the attraction, to me.

You scored as Fideist. You are a fideist! You love to read Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth. Knowing God is a personal thing, so you believe that the best case for Christianity is made on a subjective level. Fideist 63% Classical Apologist 43% Evidentialist 30% Reformed/Presuppositional Apologist 7% Atheist 7%

What kind of apologist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

There is an article on blogging at “Opinion Journal”, the online op-ed page for the Wall Street Journal. Titled Disinhibition Nation, the author, Daniel Henninger, contends that the Internet is breeding a generation of social misfits who not only do not learn acceptable social behavior, but find among other anonymous bloggers justification and respect for their anti-social behavior.

As well as citing the recent case of a wanna-be cannibal who also happened to be a blogger, Henninger points to the extreme language used in comments on political blogs. Curiously, as examples of this “intense” language, he only quotes the cursing common on Democratic/Liberal blogs.

After reading his article, I have to believe that on Conservative blogs, everyone calmly drinks virtual tea and whispers quietly in proper English about their beloved fellow patriots in the Democratic party. Meanwhile, a soft cuckoo clock chimes in the background.

And of course, no comments are allowed on Henninger’s article. Believe me, I looked; I’ve become quite used to scrolling to the bottom of an article and voicing my opinion. When the comment box isn’t there, I feel slighted.

Speaking for myself, I was a social misfit long before the Internet. I haven’t found myself less inhibited by my blog. So far, I have not experienced any urges to cannibalism. And although I may occasionally mutter a “fuck” or some other curse, when Republicans irritate me, I don’t think my language is exceptionally intense. I realize full well, I am not the norm. I wouldn’t be a misfit, otherwise.

But if silence is the alternative to a raucous, obscene, offensive, and completely open forum for discourse, I’ll take obscenity. I know those who believe social discourse should be controlled will disagree, but to me, the great thing about the Internet is that even cannibals can have a blog. Even fools can express an opinion and be roundly laughed at. Those who can’t reason can utter curses instead. And even social misfits can feel that someone cares, and for a little while, the loneliness dissipates.

This month marks the three year anniversary of my blog. I’ve been debating whether the moment is worth commenting on. In some ways, I’m of the opinion that anniversaries are only important every five years. On the other hand, blogs rarely last five years, and I don’t know if my blog will last five years, so maybe I should make the most of a three year anniversary of my blogging.

I began writing in March 2003, over at Blogger, as a direct response to the Iraq War. When I made the move to our sodsbrood domain, I imported my blogger posts so that all my writing would be available at this one site.

The few times I’ve gone back to read what I wrote in March and April 2003, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that I didn’t say anything too ridiculously stupid. Of course, there was my prediction on April 21, 2003, that “if the founding premise of the war (weapons of mass destruction) turns out to have been a lie, God help George Bush in 2004.”

We all know how that prediction turned out.

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More for my own benefit than anything else, I want to list the revisions I’ve made to my blog theme over the past couple evenings.  Feel free to ignore this post entirely.

When I switched to WordPress back in the Fall, I was extremely grateful to find that someone had updated the “Rubric” theme I had been using in B2Evolution for WordPress 1.5.  When I upgraded again to WordPress 2–maybe even before then–I began to notice that my theme was different than all the other themes.  It lacked a number of files: specifically, header.php, footer.php, arc-con.php, page.php, sidebar.php, searchform.php, 404.php.

After doing a little reading, I learned that a theme should properly have all of these files, each one to be called by a “get” PHP function in the main index.php file.  My theme included the sidebar, footer, header, and assorted other elements in the index.php itself.

So beginning two nights ago, I began breaking down my index.php file into its component parts.  I used another theme as a guide as to what files my theme should have, and what they should contain.

Once finished, I also did some editing of the content of each file.  Now that I had a footer.php file, I could put stuff in it.  I added a disclaimer and a sitemeter.  I removed the calander from the sidebar, seeing it as extraneous.  I adjusted the positioning of my sidebar to make it even with the content box.

I created an archive page.  I hope to make it a little more dynamic using one of the archive plugins I’ve seen on other sites.

I added code to my index.php file to include a link for “previous entries” and “next entries” at the bottom of each page, and at the bottom of search results.  The lack of these links was a major flaw in the original design, allowing people only to see the first ten posts in any search list.

I’ve just about given up on finding a theme I like better than this one, and I am going to content myself with making it work the way I want it to.  So thank you Hadley Wickham and Tom Raftery, wherever you are.  I feel like I’ve been able to indirectly learn a lot about PHP from both of you, and in the bargain I’ve made this theme uniquely mine.