all about a canadian guy living in canada

Hello Facebook!

This is directed to those of you who might only read these notes on Facebook. You may (or may not, which is more likely) be interested to know that I don’t write these on Facebook; they get pulled over from my blaugh at www.canspice.org.

If you’re at all interested in following along, I suggest subscribing to my RSS feed. What is RSS? It’s a standard way for websites (and other such technologies) to publish updates automatically, and software polls RSS feeds on a periodic basis to retrieve these updates. Using an aggregator (also referred to as an RSS reader or news reader), you can keep up-to-date with a number of websites at the same time without having to visit them individually. Personally, I use Vienna on OS X. Other OS X RSS readers include NetNewsWire and NewsFire. Web-based RSS readers include Google Reader, which allows you to access your RSS feeds from any Internet-connected computer.

So Facebook readers, you don’t need to follow along on Facebook, you can use a separate program and collect updates from all kinds of websites in one convenient location!

§548 · June 20, 2008 · Geek Stuff, Site News · Comments Off ·

Hello 2.5!

This might be the quickest blog software upgrade I’ve done. WordPress 2.5 was announced 12 days ago, and I’ve just upgraded to it. As always, the upgrade was painless, but if you notice anything strange, please let me know.

Edit: Fixed a problem with the Archives page.

[tags]upgrade, wordpress[/tags]

§526 · April 10, 2008 · Site News · 1 comment ·

RSS Feeds Now On FeedBurner

An administrative note to those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed: please switch over to use my new FeedBurner feed. Let me know how it works out — I’ll switch back to the standard WordPress feed if things go awry.

[tags]canspice, FeedBurner, RSS[/tags]

§478 · August 30, 2007 · Site News · Comments Off ·

Recent Downtime

If you weren’t able to get through to canspice.org yesterday, it’s because my hosting provider updated the operating system on the server. The upgrade went a little less smoothly than expected, but Geof plowed through the night and we were the sixth domain restored.

I want to take the opportunity to publicly thank Geof for all his efforts. Not many people would stay up until two in the morning to get stuff fixed, especially when they have to work the next day. Many thanks, Geof!

[tags]canspice, geof f morris, site news[/tags]

§459 · July 30, 2007 · Site News · 1 comment ·

Back To Snappy

If you’ve been visiting the front page of canspice.org recently, you might’ve noticed a bit of a slowdown. Or maybe more than a bit. Or maybe a complete failure to load. In any case, loading the front page should now be snappy. There’s some sort of problem over at last.fm, causing my “recently played” snippet at the top to take forever to load, causing the page to take forever to load. I’ve disabled that snippet, and now everything is back to its usual level of normalcy.

03 April 2007 update: Looks like last.fm fixed their shit, so I have renabled the fun musical information up at the top of the page.

[tags]music, php, canspice, last.fm, now playing[/tags]

§389 · April 2, 2007 · Site News · Comments Off · Tags:

Random improvements

Loyal readers of canspice.org might notice a small difference around here. I’ve made a small random improvement (Improvement? That’s currently up for debate. Maybe “change” is a better word…) to the site: a random background image for each post. They’re taken from an ever-growing batch of pictures I’ve taken over the last couple of years. A little PHP, a little CSS, and an hour later out pop random images. Enjoy!

§15 · December 5, 2004 · Site News · 3 comments ·

Hello World!

Hello again! You’ll probably have noticed that canspice.org was down for the better part of October. This is because of the popularity of an entry I made titled “Requiem For A Duck”. In the first two days of October I served out 6.31GB of traffic. The problem is that I was only allocated 1GB a month. I took the site down so I wouldn’t serve out more bits and bytes and get charged even more than what I’m anticipating (I think around $15).

You’ll notice a lack of functionality right now. That’s because I decided to move away from pMachine and go to WordPress. They’re both fairly similar, but WP seems to have a better community surrounding it. Because I’m just whipping this up fairly quickly, I haven’t enabled commenting or a sidebar or anything other than entries. If you don’t like it, tough. :-)

But wait, that’s not all! During the downtime I decided to move the site as well. Now it’s being hosted with the great help of Geof Morris. Thanks Geof!

§2 · October 23, 2004 · Site News · 1 comment ·

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