Posts Tagged ‘blogs’

I'm an automatic uploader. Can't help it. When I see that there's a new version available, I nab it without thinking, that's just how on-the-edge and kinda stupid I am.

And WordPress, the blogging software I use for my sites, is excellent in that regard. It wasn't terrible to upload before, just time-consuming, and ever since an automatic updater was developed it was ridiculously easy to keep those little version numbers current. Just hit the button, click OK a bunch of times, and you're golden.

This morning they launched v2.8. And I clicked. And suddenly the post editor fizzed out and just showed me little red lines where the timeless prose used to be. And I had a momentary freakout, because, as I said, all my sites are WP-driven.

Fortunately the support forums – which are now lighting up like an upgraded Christmas tree – supplied some suggestions. I deactivated all my plugins, manually deleted and uploaded \wp-admin and \wp-includes, and then reactivated everything one by one. (The Social Media page plugin is still broken, by the way) But judging from the other posts in the support forum, I may have gotten off lucky. So before you upgrade your own blogs, go skim the forum and make sure you're ready, and be sure to upgrade manually.

Or just wait for 2.8.0.1 or whatever to come along.

Acclaimed storyteller Neil Gaiman is known, among other things, for posting regular and generous blog entries that allow his readers into his life and his ongoing projects. In a new Premiere interview, he explained why he does it:

But I like it! I mean, it's fun. It's weird, I had this conversation with somebody this morning, an interviewer… who was asking me the similar question but upside down 'cause he was asking why I hadn't gone for sort of literary respectability and why I, like you were saying the acclaim and all of that kind of stuff and the awards, if I just stopped messing around in movies and doing comics I could be … I could be taken really seriously like Salman Rushdie or whatever, and I'm thinking, "Why?"…. And the truth is I'm saying "Look, Salman Rushdie is a friend of mine, and I got an email from him [saying] how much he and his son liked the Stardust movie." I like high culture and low culture, I like keeping in touch with the world.

Also: more on the "Coraline" movie, on the "Dr. Strange" movie, and the 20th anniversary of Sandman.