So I'm paying more attention to the DLTJ blog now, and one of the things I quickly noticed is that the Atom syndication feed was broken. Or, at least modern web clients would refuse to retrieve the feed. The problem turned out to be not with the feed file, but …

Well, we have reached the end of another arbitrary orbit around our small unregarded yellow sun¹, and this primitive ape-descended life form² is looking back on this blog's past twelve months. Not much to show for it -- this'll be just the third blog post this year.

And yet …

I came across Jen Simmon's call for a #newwwyear by way of Eric Meyer:

Ok, here’s the deal. Tweet your personal website plan with the hashtag #newwwyear (thanks @jamiemchale!):
1) When will you start?
2) What will you try to accomplish?
3) When is your deadline?

Improve an existing …

Someone out there on the internet is repeatedly hitting this blog's /xmlrpc.php service, probably looking to enumerate the user accounts on the blog as a precursor to a password scan (as described in Huge increase in WordPress xmlrpc.php POST requests at Sysadmins of the North). My access logs …

In a futile effort to fight link rot on DLTJ, I installed the Broken Link Checkerplugin by "White Shadow". I like the way it scans the entire content of this blog -- posts, pages, comments, etc. -- looking for pages linked from here that don't respond with an HTTP 200 "Ok …

Unlike previous upgrades, this left some functionality broken -- notably some of the links in the second block under the "about" heading to the left (if you are reading this from http://dltj.org/ itself). But, you know what? -- it's Friday afternoon and all of the important bits are working. I …

At least I hope that is the correct headline. I've been having some problems with this installation of WordPress lately -- in particular, I could no longer activate or deactivate plugins -- and the only solution offered in the WordPress codex was to start with a fresh installation of WordPress. Now you …

Last night DLTJ was upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As far as I can tell, everything is working okay, but please let me know in the comments or the comment form if something doesn't seem right. There were two tricky parts to the upgrade. (Well, three really, if you count …

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I'm outlining these four techniques in a report I'm editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on …

I don't think this has been widely announced, but while waiting for an update to Gentoo's portage entry for WordPress to cover the latest security and bug fixes, I discovered in the comments of a bug in Gentoo's bugzilla database that they are making no effort to support WordPress …

DLTJ was upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 tonight. Everything looks good so far; please let me know if you disagree...

Well, something is still going wrong on dltj.org — despite previous performance tuning efforts, I'm still running into cases where machine performance grinds to a halt. In debugging it a bit further, I've found that the root cause is an apache httpd process which wants to consume nearly all of …

dltj.org runs on a relatively tiny box — a Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. I'm running a Gentoo Linux distribution, so I actually have a prayer of getting useful work out of the machine (it server is actually a recycled Windows desktop), but the performance just wasn't great. As …

Up until about an hour ago, Technorati refused to update its database of postings to DLTJ, and having reached the 31-day point of no updates I was starting to wonder what to do about it. I came up with two theories for which I put in fixes to the configuration …

For others that may find it useful, I've made two modifications to the FreePress Recent Coments plugin on DLTJ: one to strip out quoted material when using the Quoter plugin and a second to suppress pingback entries that result from links to material within the blog.

Code from the first …

Okay -- let's try this again. The first time around didn't go so well, so I went back to the basics and started with a new theme: what is running on DLTJ now is a modestly modified version of Barthelme version 1.2.2 by Scott Allan Wallick. The modifications include …

Overnight I made several changes to the layout and rendering of pages on DLTJ -- both in its web presentation and in its RSS presentation. The changes were really driven by the fact that my tags were not getting picked up in Technorati because the Wordpress UltimateTagWarrior plugin was not including …