The main difference is the four RSS feeds at the top of the blog, piping in content from my other blogs. I made the change to reflect the fact that Matters of Varying Insignificance is no longer the only blog occupying my attention. Some of the posts from my other blogs take just as much, if not more, time and effort to produce and are as or more substantial as the posts on this blog, so I want to place more emphasis on those. I hope the new design also does a better job of alerting visitors to new content on those other blogs.

In addition, I’ve decreased the number of recent posts on the home page, since my Google Analytics overlay consistently shows very few clicks for posts below a certain point on the home page. Based on that, I’ve shortened the page and moved up the tag cloud so visitors can more easily access posts filed under specific subjects. I’ve also added an archives page  for anyone who might want to a reverse chronological list of my posts.

Update 2010-12-28

I’ve now also updated the blog’s top banner and changed the link colors to better match the styles on my business site, john-zhu.com.

She was probably right. And then a day later, I went and did this:

So, here are the blogs I’ve got going right now:

• Matters of Varying Insignificance: Running since 2008 (though the early months of the blog were lost thanks to a hacked server), this is my first and still primary blog, where I write about anything and everything, but mostly journalism and travel since those are two of my main interests.
• WYSIWYG: A photo blog I started last year as my interest in photography grew. I update this sporadically, usually right after a trip where I take a few hundred pictures.
• JZ’s Posterous Potpourri: An odds & ends blog I started last month as a way to acquaint myself with Posterous. The platform quickly grew on me, and this blog has replaced the Odds & Ends section on Matters of Varying Insignificance, primarily because it’s ridiculously easy to post tidbits to Posterous.
• The Zhus: A blog I started a couple months ago when I decided to start working on a book about the extended family on my father’s side. I wanted to start the blog as a way to keep myself on track with the book. This actually started out as a Tumblr blog before I discovered Posterous, and again, I loved Posterous so much that I decided to move the blog to that platform instead, though the old Tumblr blog remains and still gets an auto update when I post to Posterous.
• Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah: The aforementioned cooking blog, which sprang to life from our fondness for cooking and eating.

So there you go, five blogs, and somehow, without spending every waking moment blogging, I manage to post to these sites pretty regularly, with the exception of WYSIWYG, where the posts come in spurts (by the way, the feeds for the other four blogs are all in the right sidebar of this blog).

For me, part of the reason for all this blogging is that it’s fun. But it’s also about exploring various platforms and learning more about the way information is distributed, discovered, and shared on the Web — an essential part of my work. I don’t know if my blogging efforts are fragmented to the point where it hurts each individual effort, but I do know that I’ve been learning something with each one. I started this blog two years ago to learn about blogging, and the experience has taught me a ton about the craft and about attracting readers, working with CMSes, designing WordPress sites, promoting your work, constructing my digital presence, and grooming some semblance of an online community.

Notice how my blog-creating pace picked up considerably after I discovered Posterous. I know I’m sounding like a shill for the company, but the platform really has impressed me with its ease of use. It’s so easy to post stuff that I don’t even have to think about it; just send a quick e-mail or click the bookmarklet in my browser and it’s done. Heck, it’s even easier than Twitter since you don’t need to sit there boiling everything down to 140 characters. That’s why I’ve written before that I think it’s going to be platforms like Posterous that will make blogging truly ubiquitous among the general population.

Now, somebody take my keyboard away before I start another blog!! (Hmm … I could do a blog about our pottery making …)

I started tinkering with Posterous and am really loving its simple and ridiculously easy-to-use interface. Its post-by-e-mail feature is so simple and yet offers much more functionality than the post-by-e-mail function in WordPress. You can even post to other sites — such as Flickr, Facebook, and other blogging platforms — via e-mail through Posterous (though I’m still trying to get it to work correctly with this blog). Even more impressively, you can pick and choose which platforms to autopost to just by combining specific e-mail addresses (i.e.: flickr+wordpress@posterous.com).

I have been aware of Posterous for a while but hadn’t started playing with it until recently. After all, I already have two blogs on WordPress and accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Tumblr (and probably a couple others I’m not remembering). The last thing I need is another blogging platform to maintain. But Posterous’ idiot-proof simplicity has won me over. Platforms such as WordPress have made blogging relatively easy for a sizable segment of the population, but I think it’s going to be something like Posterous that will make blogging ubiquitous by making it even simpler to use by making it possible to post more than basic text using just e-mail — a platform that almost everyone is familiar with.

I love my WordPress blogs and am not about to give up the power and control that platform offers, but I am looking for ways to incorporate Posterous into my online activities. Right now, I envision myself using Posterous mostly as a one-stop posting depot for my myriad other accounts when I’m traveling. I try to blog daily or close to that frequency when I’m on leisure trips, like I did when I went to China in 2008-09. However, I’m usually doing so much stuff every day during the trips that by the time I get back to the hotel room, I’m pretty tired and don’t want to spend a whole lot of time writing, toning a few pictures, waiting for them to upload to Flickr, and then insert them into my post — all on an older laptop with nowhere near the speed of my desktop. With Posterous, I can tone the pictures and write my post offline, then send everything in one e-mail and let Posterous autopost to multiple platforms for me. Also, Posterous would make it easy for me to quickly send in random things I come across using my phone and post them on my blog or Flickr account. I think I’ll try to use this workflow for my trip to Atlanta in a few months, and if it goes well, for my visit to England later in the year as well.

Update (1/5)

Well, I deactivated some plugins and that seemed to do the trick so far (knock on wood). I’m guessing it’s one of these plugins creating database connections that won’t close, but I don’t know which. In any case, the error messages are gone.

Watch out. Courtney got me a Flip Ultra HD video camera for Christmas. I’ve been playing with it during our holiday trip up North, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. The camera turns on very quickly. Just hit the power button and you’re ready to aim and shoot in about two seconds. The microphone on the front of the camera does ok picking up the voice of the person holding the camera and whoever you point it at, but if you point it away from the speaker, you’ll have a hard time hearing him/her, and it doesn’t do well at all when there’s a howling wind blowing. The picture quality looks good on the camera, but appears a bit choppy on the computer screen. However, once you upload it to YouTube, it’s fine, and that’s all I really wanted this camera for anyway. I love the small size and light weight, as it slips easily into the front pocket of my DSLR bag, so I can carry it around with my photo camera while traveling and quickly switch to shooting some video without having lug another bag around.

Now that I have a new toy, I’ve started a YouTube channel specifically for clips I post to this blog. I think it’s going to be mostly travel clips, starting with the one below, which I shot with the Flip while our plane was descending into a snow-covered Philadelphia. The channel might also feature various clips I stumble upon on YouTube. Keep in mind that I’ve just started playing around with videography, so I’m in the constantly learning and highly experimental stage, and you get to suffer through the results.

Note to self: Next time, try upgrade on test site first.

In any case, with these problems fixed, the urgency in seeking a new Web-hosting company has subsided to a degree. I still have six months left on the current contract with Globat, and now I’m inclined to wait until the end of the contract to make a decision. How Globat performs in that time will determine whether I switch or not.

If the blog seems like it’s been acting a bit strange the last couple days, that’s because it was. Warning: Long rant begins below.

I’ve had my site hosted by Globat for a couple years now. My biggest complaints about the company was that it sends me these sneaky automatic upgrade offers that you have to opt out of. Aside from that and a relatively few outages, I was generally satisfied with them. A month or so ago, they notified me that they are now under new management and that they will be migrating my site to a new platform.

That migration happened Sunday night/Monday morning, and since then, it looks like every plugin on my blog that requires an outgoing connection has stopped working. Most notably, Akismet simply stopped catching spam comments. I checked my Akismet configuration panel and saw the following message:

The key below was previously validated but a connection to akismet.com can not be established at this time. Please check your server configuration.

When I re-input my API key, I got this message:

The key you entered could not be verified because a connection to akismet.com could not be established. Please check your server configuration.

In addition, my WordPress Stats stopped displaying results in the Top Posts, Top Searches, and Most Active fields in the dashboard, and not coincidentally, the widget that displays the most popular posts in my sidebar, which draws its data from WordPress Stats, was now empty. Furthermore, my Del.icio.us widget is now giving me a “no bookmarks available” message.

So I did some Googling on the Akismet problem, and everything I found pretty much said the same thing:

Check your host allows Akismet to use port 80.
Also check that they allow Akismet to connect to rest.akismet.com.

So I filed a tech support ticket with Globat around midday Monday, explained my problem, and gave them a link to the WordPress.org forum thread above that addresses the issue. They wrote back that evening with:

Akismet feature is supported on our platform. While you download the Akismet plug-in from the WordPress Web site, they will provide you with API key. You have to make sure that you have entered the API key while installing and activating the Akismet plug-in in the plugins menu inside of WordPress Administrative Panel.

Umm, ok. Thanks, but that doesn’t really address my problem. So I wrote back, explained the issue again, and provided a screenshot of the error message I was getting in the Akismet configuration panel, as well as an excerpt from Akismet’s Web site on the issue, which basically says, again, to check that the hosting server allows outgoing connections.

Globat responded with:

Thank you for getting back with us.

We have not blocked the API keys. It will work on our platform. If the API key is not working, you need to contact your vendor of the WordPress application. Once you enter the API key the Akismet plug-in is activating in your WordPress.

Now it’s starting to feel like I’m talking to a wall here. Besides, I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the problem doesn’t lie with the Akismet plugin itself. After all, if Akismet just broke, I think more than a few blogs would have been affected by this and there would some Internet chatter about it. Of course there wasn’t. Besides, the issues with the other plugins requiring outgoing connections, as well as the fact that this problem occurred right after a platform migration, seem to corroborate my suspicion that it’s an issue with a server setting.

Deciding that exchanging e-mails just wasn’t cutting it, I hopped on Globat’s live chat yesterday to sort out this mess. I explained the problems again to a tech support agent, and the first response I got was:

We have not blocked the API keys. It will work on our platform. If the API key is not working, you need to contact your vendor of the WordPress application. Once you enter the API key the Akismet plug-in is activating in your WordPress.

Wow. Thanks for copying and pasting the exact same answer I got the night before. Do you guys have a database of stock replies that you just turn to for particular issues? At this point, I was getting pretty grouchy, and I’m generally not the type to berate some poor soul in tech support or customer service. In this case, however, I was getting very annoyed by the fact that nobody seems to actually be reading/listening to what I’m trying to tell them. At the end of the chat session, the agent reopened the ticket so that a “specialist” would look at it.

So I check the ticket history a bit later in the day, and I saw this update:

John Zhu contacted us saying that he is unable to view the WordPress blog www.john-zhu.com/blog/ . He use Akismet to catch spam comments on the blog. He told: ‘I notice that after the migration, the Akismet plugin is no longer able to connect to Akismet.com, which cripples its ability to catch new spam. Upon searching the WordPress support forums, I’ve found the following: “Check your host allows Akismet to use port 80.
Also check that they allow Akismet to connect to rest.akismet.com ” . Do we support Akismet plugin? Please assist the customer.

Of course, I had said nothing about not being able to view my blog. Great listening skills there, Globat tech support. So I added an update to the ticket to correct that and explain, yet again, what exactly my problem was.

So around 9:30 p.m. last night, I noticed that I was getting an “error connecting to database” message when I tried to access my blog. I figured that’s a sign that Globat is looking at the issue. Ok, fine, no problem. A couple hours later, I saw that the connection had been re-established, but it was pointing to the wrong database. Instead of pointing to the database for this blog, it was pointed at the database for a test site that I use to try out new features before implementing them on the blog (so if you visited my blog around 11:30 p.m. last night, this is why things looked messed up). I thought that perhaps it was part of their diagnostic process and that they were still working on it. So I just left it alone overnight.

This morning, I received this e-mail from a Globat tech support agent:

I’m sorry for the inconvenience this might have caused you.
I have corrected connection string in ‘wp-config.php’ file under /blog directory and it works. Please check the website now at ‘http://www.john-zhu.com/blog/’

I checked, and of course, the blog was still pointed at the wrong database. So I went in and fixed the path in the wp-config.php file to bring the blog back up. After that, I logged in to see if any of the problems had been fixed. Not surprisingly, they have not. In addition, I had lost one blog post I made yesterday, and the post I made on Monday, about the Goathouse Cat Refuge, had reverted to a draft version. In short, it looks like they simply restored my site to what it was on Monday.

So now, I am pretty incensed. It’s not even because Globat tech support can’t fix the problem, but that they seem to not even be listening. Or if they are listening, they are obviously having ridiculous comprehension issues, otherwise it won’t take three days for them to understand what the problem is. Or if they do comprehend what I’m trying to tell them, then they are either unable or unwilling to fix the issue and are simply giving me the runaround. Of course, neither of those possibilities reflect well on a company.

Hey, I know just about every tech company outsources its tech support and customer service overseas these days, but good god, at least find some competent people overseas, and don’t jerk your customer around.

As for the blog, I’ve got it back up and running for now, with the cat refuge post restored (yesterday’s post isn’t worth restoring). I found a substitute for Akismet, and as for the other plugins that require outgoing connections, I can live without them for now while I find a new hosting service. Globat, you’ve reaped what you sowed. I can tolerate your sneaky automatic upgrade offers and occasional brief downtime, but not the sheer ineptitude your tech support has displayed.

Yup, I’ve got a new theme up. It’s a tweaked version of the Mimbo theme. Don’t worry. The blog still delivers all the stuff you come here for, in all their varying insignificance.

A few reasons for the theme change:

• The old, straight-down layout was getting a bit confining. I want to find better ways to highlight the content that people come to the site for.
• The magazine-style site layout is much more graphical and provides more visual entry points.
• The new theme uses thumbnails, and what self-respecting designer doesn’t like thumbnails?

I’m still tweaking the new theme to get the best combination of aesthetics and functionality. So some stuff might vary a bit from day to day, but the main layout should remain pretty much the same.

And just testing the media functions, so here’s the WordPress video on what else is new in 2.7:

If you actually visit this site on a semi-regular basis, you might’ve noticed that it had been out of action since late last week. My blog suffered pretty much a catastrophic hack. After spending a day e-mailing back and forth with the tech support guys at my Web hosting service, I came to the conclusion that it’s much easier to start over. It’s not like I had too much that was truly valuable anyway. In any case, I’m happy to be back up and running. Not being able to blog these past few days meant that I missed the chance to write several posts, including a fantasy football one that would’ve been titled “Hell Hath No Fury Like DeAngelo Williams Scorned” (about how I cut the Panthers running back in one league only to play against him in another and watch him score three, THREE, touchdowns to pound my team).

The good news is that the one item of relative value I had written — the “How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist” series — will be restored. I managed to fish the posts out of Google’s cache (see, it’s good for something other than digging into the age of Chinese gymnasts). I’ll be restoring those posts in the coming days, and I will try to make them conform to the old URLs so that incoming links won’t be broken. I might also put in a new theme while I’m at it. So changes are on the way. Sorry for the downtime. Hopefully this will be the last of it.