Luna Tail

I’ve been looking for a CMS / Wiki / Forums for my Utah Dogs site for a zillion years. Well, I finally found a wiki that has it all. TikiWiki. And I am liking it so far!

I’ve always preferred MediaWiki, the same software that WikiPedia is based on. But it can be confusing, or so it seemed when I installed it before. This has a good Admin Center with tons and tons of options. Too many, for sure, but I’m learning how they all work. This isn’t really a review, but I am liking TikiWiki.

The only downside is it doesn’t have an importer for SMF… Simple Machines Forums, so I have to muddle through making my own. I have the users imported, but the posts are tripping me up. I’m working on it. I got one forum imported… to find out that there’s no replies to the posts imported! Gah!

Well, I changed the URL anyway because I’m sick of Simple Machines Forums. I mean it’s a nice software and all, but I want a Wiki, in the remote and distant hope that others will update pages as well as me. I just can’t do it all alone… I try, really I do. But if everyone who signs in can update the pages, that’ll be awesome!

I’m actually tired of all the work it takes to rip the dog videos I have off the mini discs that my video camera burns, arranging them with Roxio all fancy like, and then burning them to a regular big sized DVD. And so I’ve attempted, in the past, to just do a disc to disc copy. However, the destination disc gave me an error saying it was not the right type.

Well.. the mini discs are DVD-R or DVD-RW. I don’t think I’ve seen DVD+R discs. So I figure maybe I need the destination DVD to be DVD-R as well? I’m trying it again now, and I hope it works, because it’s just so easy to do a disc to disc copy and be done with it.

Hrmph.

Edit.. well, I think it worked! I’m going to have to play with it more and see what happens.

Yes.. I have a VPS. It stands for Virtual Private Server. I do enjoy it, I like having ultimate control… it’s like having my own server in my house, that hosts my web sites, however I really hate those dreaded “Contact your system administrator” errors… because dangit, I am the system administrator!

My VPS is through Steadcom and I love them, they always help me out even though it’s an unmanaged account. Meaning I have to manage it all myself. I have set up Linux servers in the past… a couple of times at home, and reset them up due to hardware crashes, so I have a basic idea. However… I am, by no means, a Linux expert and I have to look up every little detail on the web to figure things out. Usually I’m able to figure them out without asking too many questions.

Emails from the server have been bouncing back to me. Finally, after trying a zillion things, I found this web page about HostNames and that finally worked. However… when I reboot the server, the settings go away and the email doesn’t work again. Bah.

So next I have to figure out how to make the settings stick. But that is for another day. I really used to have more fun figuring things out on computers… but now I just want them to work. But I want them cheap, too, and cheap usually means I do things myself. I’m more interested in how dogs work.. and want to do more with the dogs!

The errors I was getting, in the returned email, were:
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.2
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 501 Syntax error in parameters or arguments

and in my mail log (sendmail):
My unqualified host name (name) unknown; sleeping for retry
unable to qualify my own domain name (name) — using short name

It appears the domain name must be fully qualified… like www.lunatail.com You can’t just have lunatail in there. Hrmph!

I’m off to agility this weekend, have a good Memorial day, I’ll try to post more later!

Been watching a show this evening on the History Channel (okay yeah I’m a woman.. sometimes I watch the History Channel!), Modern Marvels, about Nikola Tesla. I’ve always wanted to know more about him, as his story fascinates me. This show, also, fascinates me.

The point that I found most interesting is that Thomas Edison.. who we all grew up learning was the inventor of the light bulb and a major player in the distribution of electricity, actually may have stolen his ideas from Tesla. That was not suggested in the show, but I’ve heard the rumors. Tesla came to America and began employment with Thomas Edison. Edison told Tesla that he would pay Tesla $50,000 for his work and his patents (this is my interpretation, so forgive me if I get it wrong) and Edison did not pay him. So Tesla quit and went and dug ditches for a year.

Afterward Tesla had the opportunity to light up the World’s Fair with his Alternating Current. But he was not allowed to use Edison’s light bulb, because Edison had it patented. So Tesla had to invent a new bulb and do it in six months. Well, he succeeded and powered the whole World’s Fair. He was pretty amazing.

He had a bunch of patents and we, pretty much, a genius. He is becoming better known now, but when I was younger I hardly heard about him. Only when I worked at the Hansen Planetarium here in Salt Lake, and hung out with the astronomers, and learned of the Tesla Coil. They had one at the Planetarium and it was pretty impressive to watch.

So, credit where credit is due, Tesla was the major player in powering our world. And it should be commonly known. Slap Edison for not paying him what he promised!

I recently posted a comment on another blog and found out about Disqus, which is a commenting system you can sign up for and then apply a plugin to your wordpress blog.

I think I really like it. It’s like a community of commenters. the only thing I don’t like is that when I reply to comments, the commenter is not emailed directly about my reply unless they are a member of Disqus themselves. If they are not… if they are unverified, it’s called, then they don’t get a reply email.

Hopefully this will change soon. I have this commenting system on this blog, and my other blog, Tip Tail, to try it out.

My Disqus Profile is, I think, viewable by anyone. If you have problems with this commenting system please, please let me know. You don’t have to be registered with Disqus to comment, but if you do register you can claim all your comments and participate. It’s fun!

I am catching back up in sleep and energy after my trip to Colorado… it’s amazing how tiring a 10 hour drive can be. And, I’ve still gained some weight… ugh! So back to the Eat To Live plan I am going. I lost more weight eating like that than anything else. And being healthy means for life insurance no medical exam is needed.. or we can hope!

I was browsing the web today and found a site that said you can make money selling pictures online. You upload them to the companies’ websites, and when they sell it, you get a portion of the sales.

So I signed up for three of them. One of them rejected all my pictures right off the bat. *cry* But that’s okay. Here is one picture of the agility trial (yeah I know it’s a dog, but most of my pictures are dogs!). I didn’t submit this one, but I think it’s one of the better ones. However, the focus, I think, is on the tire, not on the dog herself. And I’m not sure how to get the focus perfectly on the dog. I focus on the tire and then when the dog jumps through I click. If I have the camera on continual focus, it’s not fast enough (I don’t think) to adjust the focus and click on the dog. But I’ll have to play with it a bit.

My photos were rejected because the focus was not right on the dog. So… I live and learn. I signed up for a photo community, My Shutter Space, and hopefully my profile will be approved and I can read up on some good action shot tips! I love taking pictures, and I love making money… so I do want to put the two together!

I’m thinking of taking a photography class locally… but I don’t have time now with it busy dog sport season. Maybe in the summer I can fit something in.

This is one of the places I joined… still waiting to see if they approve any of my photos:

One of my pet peeves is when a system is supposed to be better, and yet it’s just more frustrating to use! For me there are two systems right now that I am not at all happy with that I use on a regular basis.

Well, one I use on a regular basis, anyway. That’s Wordpress 2.5. Dangit! I’m finally getting used to it, but there still are some things I don’t like. Especially the widgets. You can’t move them from sidebar to sidebar, you have to delete them and then recreated them. So who thought that was a good idea? Ugh. I don’t know, but that guy should seriously be reprimanded.

And then there is Social Spark. I am not liking how the navagation in it is, at all. The sort sucks, it either looses the sort or looses the filter, which is ridiculous. And how come you can’t save your sort or selection criteria? Not being able to see which blogs qualify for which opportunities. And what is the deal with having to wait for opps in a Queue? Who came up with that idea? That guy, also, should be reprimanded!

I guess I’m on a rant today. Oh well. I’m not happy with these systems even though they are supposed to be better than before. But, I guess, these are new ‘features’… here at work when we find something we don’t like in a program, we call it a ‘feature’!

A while ago I posted about how I’d outgrown Thunderbird and needed a new email client. I found The Bat! and tried it out. Well, I purchased a copy because I liked it so much.

Thunderbird was just too slow for the amount of emails i was getting. It would be deathly slow to just read an email when I had a whole bunch of them… I’m not really sure how many, but I’m sure it was about the same as I have in The Bat!

The Bat! allows me to have an inbox per account, and so I have five. Some are from my VPS to catch server emails. Currently my main email account, which is actually hosted by Google Tools now and catches 3 email addresses, has 83 emails in the inbox, 69 in the sent box, and 96 split into various subfolders. And there is no noticable slowing in reading, deleting, or organizing emails.

And that’s just one account. In my VPS email I have 157 emails stored, in one account, 61 in another, and 5 in the third. I’m not even going to add all those numbers up but you get the idea. Would Thunderbird be able to handle those numbers? I don’t think so.

It’s fast, and clean, and I love the layout. I also love the templates you can set up. So if I want to send emails from an account, I can set up a template that will be used for every sent email. This includes a signature, where the courser starts, and a greeting, if any.

Yup, I’m sold on The Bat! If you are looking for an email client that can handle the abuse, I would highly recommend it!

So did Google change it’s policies and go back to ranking blogs that do paid posts? I wonder… because low and behold, this morning, like magic, all of my sites have page rank.

I gave up caring… but I will admit, I do make a bit more money when I have page rank. Not that I blog just for money, because honestly I don’t. I love to blog. But the money does help my dog habit for sure!

Tip Tail actually did have PR for a while, the last month or so. Now it’s a 2. It was a 3… so that’s a bummer.
Luna Tail, this blog, has a 2.
Tatum Tot has a 2 (it is not monetized).
Pixie Tail has a 2.
And Tail Pix, my photo blog, has a 3.

So interesting… we’ll have to see if these numbers stay around for a bit. You just never know with Google.

Though I’m not quite sure yet. I think I get OpenID… just like finally I get del.icio.us. Here is my OpenID page if you care to see:

So with OpenID… it has to be a URL / domain name. I guess… you can use your own domain name. If you don’t have a domain, you can sign into one of the companies (like ClaimID) and they give you a pseudo domain name that is your OpenID.

I think I was thinking OpenID is more than it is. I was thinking it was a social type network thing… and I guess it can be, but it’s not really, yet.

What is it, you may ask? OpenID is an ID you can use to log into websites that support it. When you post to a blogger/blogspot blog, it will give you the option of using your OpenID as one of your logins (if the blogger has set it up this way). But.. as far as I can tell, you have to use one of the publicly hosted OpenID sites to host the OpenID. ClaimID is one of them. Then… when you log in using your OpenID, the login page checks… err, checks something, not sure what, to confirm your OpenID and log you in.

What does it check? What does it know what to check? The geeky side of me wants to know!

I was thinking OpenID was a website in and of itself. Well it is, but you can’t get an OpenID from the OpenID website! Or at least I don’t think so. You get one through ClaimID or sites like it, such as MyOpenID. How does ClaimID talk to OpenID? No idea. Maybe someone will come along and clear this up.

I was thinking OpenID was a website where you could enter your information, link to other people with OpenIDs, and have a good old time. But… it is not. However, ClaimID seems to be, though it’s limited. You can claim your websites, and you can have contacts that have other ClaimIDs. I have one.. Johann The Dog. So if you have a ClaimID OpenID, I hope you’ll consider being my friend… my ClaimID is very lonely!

I need some home theater furniture to sit in while I figure this all out. OpenId really should be easier to understand than this! Or, sometimes, I’m just a bit slow.