Hosting arrangements for FARRFEED.COM are almost complete.

The all-new, whiz-bang, content-rich version of this blog will shortly be undergoing extensive testing on my very own staging server (actually a secret subdomain). I’ll be running the very latest version of WordPress with a heavily-customized premium theme, installed at root level this time inside its own domain — no more forwarding to JHFarr.com from GoDaddy. Don’t worry about the links, we’re gonna 301-redirect all over Creation here. Geek heaven!

As hinted at before, the new FarrFeed will be not only a blog but a digital potlatch: everything I’ve ever written, including the book, will eventually be accessible here for absolutely free. Once this is up and running, FotoFeed will be in line for conversion to a WordPress CMS. I seem to have discovered an ultimate secret of webmastery, and I’m very excited to put it all into action.

On what, you ask? On the NEW version of FarrFeed, that’s what!

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I have the good fortune to be corresponding with an Internet marketing consultant & SEO expert in Australia. He’s given me lots of homework, which I’ve been doing. (The dog doesn’t eat it after your hair turns gray, lemme tell ya.) I don’t know yet when we’ll get this thing off the ground, but the wait will be worth it.

In the meantime, I just updated FotoFeed. Go have a look!

That’s right. BIG changes. But to do it right is taking more time than I’d anticipated. So for the time being, posting will resume here as usual. You are so going to like the new site, however…

Massive re-organization underway here! In the meantime, enjoy a killer FotoFeed image today.

No, I haven’t been posting much.

In the first place, another one of those meta-reorganizations is taking place. I’ve bought additional software and will shortly launch a completely repurposed site that will feature not only a blog, but everything I’ve ever written. A tall order, but there will be many more reasons to visit. The decisions involved are brain-numbing, particularly when it comes to starting over vs. using the old domains, etc. In any event, stay tuned, and something will be happening soon.

On the bloggy side, this morning’s rant is over Snow Hysteria. Yesterday we in New Mexico were treated to a bombastic, histrionic, end-on-the-world WINTER STARM WARNING FOR HEAVY SNOW!!! Oh, it would be fierce: 10 inches all at once, ye gods! My wife got anxious, her studio landlady phoned with “snow procedures,” and I was generally pissed, because the ground isn’t frozen, not even remotely — and there’s only been one minor overnight freeze. No way in hell could there be heavy snow, but the weather service stuck to the warning, which is still in effect until tonight.

Around here what counts is the “snow line,” the atltitude level above which the precipitation falls as snow. Well, the weather bureau blew that estimate by 2,500 - 3,000 feet, which ought to get someone fired. According to this morning’s revised forecast, there might be a little snow on the mountaintops by the end of the day, which wouldn’t be anything but normal. How can there be a WINTER STORM WARNING FOR HEAVY SNOW if it’s only going to fall up where nobody lives? Right now all we have is some fog and a little spitty rain. Morons…

And then there’s Qwest, which finally acknowledged last night that no, the 118 kbps I was getting instead of 1.5 Mbps (one-tenth the usual speed!) means they have a problem. In fact, they told me there’d been “numerous reports” of customers assigned to the same server having substandard service, which begs the question of why they hadn’t taken any action before my call, but never mind: it’s a little better this morning, so I can post this, and Qwest has promised to fix the server within 48 hours.

So that’s what’s going on here. Feel free to jump in!

Too dark, pre-occupied, self-critical, and cranky to write much this week. That, and watching McCain disintegrate against the backdrop of the Great Unwinding is so engrossing and entertaining, who has time for anything else?

This is all just amazing. There IS a God, as the saying goes, and she’s winding up for the big pitch. What an astounding time to be alive.

So much going on, inside & outside. What to do? Website revamping in the air. Clients’ sites need attention. My life needs attention. America needs attention. Focus, Juan…

Since upgrading to WordPress 2.6, inline commenting has been broken. I’m working on it but have other obligations. Just use the regular commenting method for now, until I can get to it, and my apologies for the screw-up.

UPDATE: I just spent a loooong time manually upgrading WordPress again by deleting most files and selectively uploading the WordPress 2.6 components all over again. The miracle is that the site is still here, but the inline comments still don’t work. Somewhere among several thousand files is one that needs to be there and isn’t. Anyway, there’s a new feature that does work, and that’s that you can now edit your comments for up to 10 minutes after posting. The time limit is adjustable, so let me know if 10 minutes isn’t long enough. The default setting is five minutes, BTW.

I can’t believe I just did this…

Using the WordPress Automatic Update plugin (WPAU), I actually upgraded from WordPress 2.5 to 2.6 successfully. Not without a lot of hassle, but successfully.

The first thing that happened was that after the upgrade, I couldn’t log back in to my administrative dashboard. No way, no how. So I googled for an answer and learned that there’s a damn bug in the WPAU, and that the only way to log back in is to delete your browser cookies! AAAAGHH!!! Fortunately, Safari let me see a list of all the cookies — there were hundreds, at least — which meant that I could selectively delete the half-dozen or so that seemed to be related to the blog. Good Lord, it worked!

Once I was able to actually finish up and everything was running right, I promptly messed it up again by changing one little piece of the blog address in the “general settings” just to see what that would do — too smart by half, I am — which left me utterly unable to log in again to the dashboard… Things were so FUBAR, nothing worked, including a succession of new passwords I kept requesting and trying. Then I had an idea:

Since I’d already backed up the database earlier in the evening, I decided to log into the MySQL database server at my hosting service and import the previous database, which hopefully still retained the correct blog address setting. Big risk! But by that point, what did I have to lose? Well, what do you know, it worked. High geekery, chilluns, but I saved the site.

Then of course I had to request yet another new password to log in, and this time it worked, and after that I had to go back in and update everything I’d tweaked before I replaced the new database with the old one, which is why it’s now 3:00 a.m. But everything works! I think…

Don’t try this at home! Okay, I did, but I didn’t have a choice, and it was good for me to see I could actually fix it. There’s no better way to learn than to make as many mistakes in as short a time as possible, hoo boy. And that’s why you’re now viewing version 2.6 of this WordPress blog installation, which seems to be a good bit snappier.

And now, to bed.

UPDATE: Arrghh. It appears that upgrading to version 2.6 has broken the inline comments. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, the old-fashioned comments work just fine.

It must drive feed subscribers nuts when I delete posts, which I do quite often. Apparently the content is still out there for a while (12 hours?), even if I thought I’d disappeared it. And if you try to find it later, you get a 404 error!

But it is a shame that comments disappear with the posts. A new visitor to FarrFeed had said some truthful things that deserved a longer life than just a couple of hours, and I regret that. These things happen because no one should ever blog when insane, yet so many people do. Go figure.