Despite all the dire warnings against it, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 without disabling any plugins. And it went fine! Whoo-hoo! Don’t try this at home, folks. I live on the wild side.
It didn’t work for my Chinese blog, though. I had Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, and the upgrade totally broke the blog. I had to go in through PHPmyAdmin to manually deactivate that one plugin to get the blog working again. Then after running the upgrade …
You know blogging is a real part of your identity when you stop blogging for a little while and people start e-mailing you asking if you’re OK. Thank you for the concern.
I was sick for a week, then went to Turkey for a week. The blog had to wait. It’s been a nice break.
Regular blogging to resume very soon.…
My web hosting provider, DreamHost, got hacked recently. In an e-mail to me, they wrote:
We have detected what appears to be the exploit of a number of accounts belonging to DreamHost customers, and it appears that your account was one of those affected.
We’re still working to determine how this occurred, but it appears that a 3rd party found a way to obtain the password information associated with approximately 3,500 separate FTP accounts and has used that information
…
I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3 lately. Since then, my RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, so I won’t have time to try to fix it until next week. I’m running the Feedburner plugin. Anyone know anything about this?
Gotta work all weekend, and then the May holiday starts on Tuesday. I am so looking forward to it…
Update: OK, I think I fixed the feed. Please let me know if I’m wrong.…
Wednesday my hard drive died. When I tried to boot my computer, I got this message:
OS not installed
Yikes! Luckily I had my Ultimate Boot CD, but even that is of little use when your system has decided that your main hard drive (the one with Windows installed on it) is no longer there.
That hard drive was only three months old, so the company I bought from will replace it free of charge, but they …
My web host, DreamHost, offers a really great one-click install feature through its control panel. Using it, you can install the latest version of WordPress ridiculously easily. Even better, you can upgrade any WordPress install with a simple click… as long as that WordPress installation was installed using the one-click install system.
So here’s my problem. I have recognized the awesomeness of the one-click install/upgrade system, but if I want to take advantage of it, I have no …
There was recently an earthquake in Taiwan which destroyed the key nodes in China’s trans-Pacific internet connection. As a result, most traffic between China and the US on the internet has slowed to a near-impossible crawl. Fortunately Google (and Gmail) still work.
This means I won’t be updating this blog much until it’s fixed. It means ChinesePod has quite a headache (our servers are in the US). It means it’s going to be a lot harder to get good material …
WARNING: geeky tech/webdesign stuff ahead!
I haven’t been satisfied with the Sinosplice homepage for a while. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do to make it better until I read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, a manual of website usability. Yesterday I finally got some time to implement a few changes I’ve been wanting to make. Now there is a new homepage.
Old homepage design:
please speak Mandarin
Some of you may have noticed that when I put up my new Tone Pair Drills I added a new Products section to this website along with it. I’ll introduce one of the items here from various fascinating sociopolitical angles.
The shirt says 请讲普通话 which means “please speak Mandarin” (rather than some other local dialect). The inspiration for this shirt can be seen at countless bus stops all over Shanghai: completely ineffectual “请讲普通话” propaganda. The Shanghainese continue …
It’s been a while since I’ve added significant non-blog content to Sinosplice, but I’ve just completed something that could be really useful to learners of Mandarin Chinese. That something is Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills.
I actually began this project all the way back in 2003. I put my ideas together into a rough form and some friends (including John B, Brendan, Greg, and Alf) helped me test them out. They gave me good positive …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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