Kat Dancing

I meant to write over the weekend. I really did. But instead I was sidetracked by my own peculiar version of cat-vacuuming, which means y'all have a new random generator to play with.

I present to you The Character Etch-A-Sketch.

Why did I feel the need to make a random description generator? Well, basically:

a) I was tired of all my minor characters showing up with a description of "sort of medium-ish with brown hair", and

b) I grew up in a little town populated almost entirely by Scotch, Irish, and German settlers who'd been inbreeding like crazy for a century or two, which means despite my travels I have trouble coming up with a variety of physical appearances, and

c) No one can scour the feline quite as thoroughly as I can.

I hope it's of use to someone but me. Feel free to comment on it in this thread.

Since I've had some time today, I went through and did some maintanence on the blog. Most of it is pretty subtle -- the search form not only works but appears on all pages, and you can look at my nifty "To Be Read" list or browse the blog by category -- but the big change, and the one I wanted to actually post about, is in the comments.

I have been getting somewhere between ten and forty spam comments a day. This, mind you, is the successful spam count, the ones that get through my triple layer of spam protection. I'm not sure what two of the plugins are catching, since they don't log, but my blacklist is logging several hundred spam attempts per day. Combine that with the at least 1200 hits from referrer spam last month, and I have not just a serious annoyance but a serious bandwidth problem, to the tune of 10% over my limit. For a nearly all-text website, that's impressive.

I have no idea what's fueling these morons. Given that all comments are "nofollow" links and don't help them at all in the search engines, and that my stats are likewise private and no help, it's a singularly futile irritation. But hey, there's no understanding fuckheads.

The upshot of this is that y'all will now have to answer a simple question before commenting to the blog. The questions are supposed to be really, really simple, but then, I wrote them and I have a weird idea of simple. If you have trouble with one for any reason, let me know.

Sorry, guys. I realize it's annoying to have an extra field to fill out in comments, but it's even more annoying to spend a good half-hour every day cleaning links to Viagra dealers, online casinos, and fine purveyors of "toon porn" out of your blog. Believe me, is it ever.

(Originally posted on June 22nd. Ironically, the only data loss that happened when my server went down again was this post. Lovely sense of humor the universe has.)

Why I love my webhosting company, in two easy emails. Note the timestamps.


To: support@infinityws.com
Subject: [MB User] Tech Support Question
From: "K. Feete"
Cc: kfeete@theculture.org
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 10:31:21 -0400

-----------------------------------------------------------

I'm writing because my website (katfeete.net) has disappeared.

I first noticed this on Sunday, when the domain didn't even exist; however, the Infinity homepage was also down, so I assumed it was a known problem that you were working on.

As of yesterday I get the cPanel "there is no website configured at this address" screen, and my public_html folder seems to have disappeared entirely from the FTP server.

Do you know when the site will be back up, and how much (if any) of my data was lost?


From: Infinity Web Services
Subject: Re: [MB User] Tech Support Question
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 10:32:47 -0400
To: "K. Feete"

-----------------------------------------------------------

Hi Kat,

I'm going to look into this.

We do have backups up to 1 month ago on your data, you may want to go
into cpanel quickly and download a backup before we attempt a restore.


Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Mike


--------------

I got a variety of interesting error messages through the day that suggested they were working on the problem. By 11 last night, my site was back. Total data loss: 0.

Go Infinity. Seriously, these guys have the best tech support and the best service record I've ever seen. If you're looking for somewhere to host your site, I recommend them.

In other news....

Revision Progress: 221 pages (of 337)
Changes: There's been a lot of these since I last posted, even though I took the weekend off. Threw out most of the suspect conversation and replaced it with more personal stuff, plus background on telepaths, though the conversation is just blocked out, not fully written. Removed one of the conversationalists and a minor plot thread from the next scene, making it feel less OMG full, and added a chunk of personal stuff between Joey and India instead; also ramped down the tension between them since it felt artificial.

The next two scenes required only line edits. I think. We're entering into the second half of the book and those two scenes were written essentially in one day each, at top speed, very intense and very fluid. And they're turning out hard to revise because I get so caught up in them I forget to read critically. Hopefully this is a sign of good writing and not me being blinded by my own prose.

Up Next: The next scene features a conflict that's absolutely essential to the plot. Unfortunately, said conflict is triggered by the plot thread I deleted earlier. I've got a bit of salvage I want to stick in its place, but doing so gracefully may be tricky.

Livejournal feed is, well, live. And anyone who was subscribed to it just got a buttload of my postings. My apologies.

You may notice a slight change in this page.

Well, it's the RSS thing, you see. I beat my head against it for a while and finally decided that the easiest way to work it was going to be to install a new blog.

Ahem.

Well, you had to be there to follow the logic, I guess.

Anyway, Nucleus surpassed all my expectations, in that it actually did what it said. It actually did import my entire blog from Blogger, all 124 entries, with no loss of data and minimal hassle, although I was posting from 1969 for a while there. In my experience, software that actually does what it claims to is unprecidented. Okay, so it said it would import my YACCs comments too and it lied about that, but I'll forgive it.

And the interface is bloody beautiful, a joy to work with, especially after Blogger, and stunningly customizable without being too intolerably confusing. And it's free. If you're looking to set up a blog, I highly recommend it.

Oh, and for the original point of things, yes, I do have a working, full-text RSS feed now. It won't show up on livejournal for a bit though, since the support people are the ones who have to change it. But mission accomplished.

*goes off to play with more settings*

For livejournal folks: I've finally figured out how to syndicate my blog onto livejournal via RSS feed, and have done so. The feed name is kat_feed. I did not think up this name. Blame Dan.

Unfortunately, it's only posting article headers right now. This is annoying. I'm looking into ways to fix it that don't involve large sums of money.

If you've got a paid account on LJ, please add this feed so that the points cost thingy gets driven down enough for those who *don't* have a paid account to syndicate me.

In other news... spent yesterday in Toronto, meeting yet more cool people and getting expensive chocolates bought for me and watching Return of the King. Yes, again. I think it was better the second time. Have now developed a fascination with the beacon fires (which I thought were pretty cool the first time through too) and am battling, not very successfully, urges to write yet another short story. I shouldn't. I know I won't finish it. Dammit!