Recently in Karlo.Org Category

My single-serving web site, IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com was featured in the New York Times Blog this morning.

Alternate side of the street parking, which was introduced by the city in 1952 to facilitate street cleaning, is one of the more burdensome rituals of New York City life…

So how to keep track of the state of the parking regulations, especially since so many of the holidays are set by a lunar calendar, and thus vary each year?

I've upgraded the site (I'm terrible about upgrading the CMS, generally.) If you're looking to use any of the new commenting features associated with version 4.24, they should work now or be working shortly. Let me know if you run into any problems.

Just a quick housekeeping note for those of you who read this blog via RSS feeds. As part of transitioning over from the old Feedburner feeds to the new "Google Feedburner" feeds, I've had to change the URL for the feeds (don't ask me why they are forcing everyone to do that - it doesn't make much sense to me.) As part of that, I've added in some redriects on some of the old RSS feed addresses to channel all users to the new, single URL being supported by Google (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/karlo) ... this should not, but may, cause some minor issues for folks. If you're having problems, try resubscribing... if that doesn't fix it, please let me know via a comment on this post. Thanks.

I've finally gotten around to the long-overdue task of properly linking to the sprawling reaches of my little Web 2.0 empire from the main page on Karlo.Org. From now on, if you're looking for my Flickr page, or my Facebook profile, or whatever, you can find it in the link of lists on the Karlo.Org home page. If you run into any problem using the new links, let me know -- they seem to work for me, but some services can be a little funny about profile links (I'm looking at you, Facebook.)

One of the big issues for blogs these days is that most authors also generate a lot of online activity away from their weblog (this wasn't true in the pre-Facebook/Flickr/YouTube days). A great option I've found for Moveable Type users is Action Streams, which I'm using to power the "Elsewhere" section at the right side of my home page. The items aren't posted into the weblog, however, as per my old "link for date" posts from de.licio.us. At first I considered that a shortcoming (I wouldn't mind Twitter comments showing up in my blog) but for the moment I'm in favor of it, as I've realized that the combined activity on other sites would overwhelm the edited content in the weblog.

One problem I'm starting to encounter is that when you use meta-social sites like FriendFeed, which aggregate activity from the social sites, you can start seeing some circularities in your feeds... my FriendFeed feed follows my twitter and Facebook profiiles, but it's also able to post events into my Facebook profile via a plugin, and... uh... problems start to arise.

As you can probably tell if you've visited this page any time in the past few years, there's some major changes going on right now. After much frustration around my old host (including today being unable to download a copy of my files there due to the server being so slow), I've surrendered to the inevitable and moved to a new company, LivingDot.

The move has a number of downsides (at the moment, any links to within the old site are broken and I haven't decided if I'm going to change the link format to address that.) But in general, the move is a huge improvement and should result a lot of good things happening here.

In terms of the photoblog that used to front Karlo.Org, I'll be getting that content over on this site at some point soon. Going forward, the site will likely mix written and photographic content -- I originally switched to the photos-only format because work limited my ability to write online, but that restriction is now lifted so I'm moving back to a more varied format.

I've finally brought things into the modern age with an upgrade to Moveable Type 4.1 for the server. It may take a bit work out the bugs.

Due to what I can (at best) describe as a total debacle at my current hosting company, I've had to restore the site from a backup done at the beginning of 2006. Unfortunately that means a good number of lost posts here on the weblog, which I'll try to pull out of archive.org or something later this week as possible, plus the loss of the photo posts put up since the beginning of the year.

The first step was to get the site back up; that took four days of back and forth with my hosting service. Now that it's taken care of I'll be able to both post some new photos that are in the hopper and also work to restore lost content.

Just a few minor notes on recent changes around here -- I've turned off comments for all but the most recent posts on this log. Having open comments on older entries was just leaving the door open to a constant barrage of comment spam. Comments and trackbacks are on for recent photos in the main page, and will be turned on for posts in here when relevant.

Well, I know it's been quiet for a long time -- unfortunately there was a whole sequence of issues that kept me from updating, including a crashed hard drive on my desktop computer as well as problems resulting from not having updated MoveableType to the latest version. All of that's resolved now, so there should be more updates both here and on the photolog. Thanks for visiting.

(You'll also notice some changes around the comment system. MT 3.2 is an improvement, generally, on the old comment filtering, so I'm allowing comments somewhat more frequently.)