The Construct

Quite a number of people have commented about the barrage of pessimistic status messages on my Twitter/Facebook page. A few make jokes about it. A few even expressed concern about it.

Just before the break, I got to talk to a friend of mine from the department and she brought the idea of being “nega.” Pondered whether it’s psychological or something brought about a few examples including myself. Well, I told her I’ll be writing a post about it and I guess it’s only now that I’ve gotten around to it.

Anyway, my simple explanation (perhaps, my defense on my seeming negativity) is that 2009 has been a very bad year for me. Having a daily routine that has almost zero human contact, I use my status updates to vent lest I die from an embolism due to emotional constipation. I don’t have the luxury of after-work rants over beer.

I’m not looking for anyone to understand or even sympathize. I’m sure no one shares the same situation I’m in for him to understand anyway. It’s all a matter of getting it out of my system.

So some people have grown to hate me for it but isn’t there a “Hide” button (and the “Unfollow” button)? God knows, how many people in my contact list are hidden in my list all because of the application requests and invitations. But do I consider them any less of a friend for doing so? No.

Status messages are like graffiti on a blank white wall. Scribble “Kilroy was here” (or “Jhun Jhun labs Bhaby”) and it will polarize opinions. Some would prefer the white wall blank. Some would prefer something more artistic. Some people will get the joke.

But if you’re going to judge a person (whom you have added or approved as a “friend” I might add) based on what you find written on a social network site without even taking a minute or two to ask him or her personally, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” then there lies the problem.

Just last week, I decided to click on that link on my WordPress dashboard that tells me there’s a new version out and I can upgrade it if I want to.

Upgrading WordPress has been seamless ever since they integrated that auto-updater function so I just decided to click it and upgrade my installation to WP 2.9.

After a few days, I realized that I was not receiving any of the automated backups that I configured to be sent to my e-mail everyday.

First, I thought it was a conflict with one of the plug-ins. Noticed that my XML-Sitemap plug-in was in perpertual re-build mode. Rebuilt my sitemap and still the cron job wasn’t working. Then I eventually reverted to the modern day Ernie Baron – Google – for some answers. Found out it was really a bug with 2.9 among others.

Here’s how to fix them.

I really don’t schedule posts but if you happen to use the scheduler, and running on 2.9, you better apply the bug fix or your post won’t get posted as they should.

I hear 2.9.1′s already in beta so I think we can all expect that upgrade to come out.

As an advocate of eLearning, I’ve been trying to maximize the use of technology for teaching. Since, I’m not that active in the academic circle recently, as a service, I decided to put up an online forum for us in the business of language studies and research and that was the English Studies Forum.

Despite the meager membership (mostly BAES seniors from our department), it served its purpose of idea and resource sharing. Too bad, even such an innocent effort can be knocked out by web baddies. The site suffered from a hidden iframe injection attack three days ago and Google and Firefox decided to flag the site as a malware site.

It was my first time to encounter such a problem and since I’m only have a wee bit of savvy when it comes to these things, I had to research about the matter. Found out that quite a lot of SMF, WordPress and Joomla sites have been affected by this malware and most “expert” opinion say that this is primarily a hosting problem.

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My first attempt at “pro” blogging (as in trying to make money with blogging) isn’t with this website or with Bloggy Network. It’s with this blog – Sugoi Stuff. It was December of 2006 when I proposed the idea to a couple of friends of mine from back in college. Being the anime heads that we were, we decided on putting up a Philippines-Japan blogzine.

As with many virginal attempts, it had been quite the disappointment. We started with much vigor, even sponsoring a couple of events, but eventually, real work got in the way and Stugoi Stuff took the back seat. There were a couple of attempts to finally get it back on track but it proved to be tough to squeeze in posting on the blog when all of us needed to do work that actually pays.

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This blog has over five hundred posts already – a collection of my more than five years in the blogosphere. I’ve grown quite content with its low-profile as it’s not really my intention to publicize nor monetize this.

Ever since I applied the premium WPUnlimited theme, however, my blog suddenly got some pretty good traffic from search engines mostly because of the out of the box search engine optimization that it provided.

I never really minded that until I swapped out the theme to Compositio. I like the design way better than WPUnlimited. Even though WPUnlimited is customizable, I just don’t have enough talent to make it look this awesome. Because of the swap, I lost all SEO functionalities and to what horror. My blog traffic from search engines has been quartered!

Just as an experiment, I toyed with SEO on this blog. Since Composition doesn’t have WPUnlimited’s superb SEO, I opted to slap on SEO Title Tag and Platinum SEO plug-ins. Combined, they pretty much cover the functionalities I needed.

I just finished customizing titles and slugs of various posts. I know I’m sacrificing the already-indexed pages by changing these details but what the heck. Let’s see how this changes things.