I was looking over old threads in the Ode forum and this one introduced me to Carme from Google Web Fonts.

I went to Google Web Fonts, searched for Carme and followed the instructions, calling an additional stylesheet (from Google) into my Ode theme and then calling the Carme in the Logic theme's own CSS.

I like it. It looks better on my Linux (Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3) desktop than it does on Windows 8 right now, so I'm not sure I'll stick with it. But for now I will.

It's funny. I was thinking about the last time one of my domains expired and whether or not I changed the contact e-mail address to something I actually check so such a thing (an expired domain, that is) wouldn't happen again.

But I didn't (change the contact e-mail address). And it did (the domain expired).

I renewed the domain, and a couple of others, one of which was set to expire a few days from now.

The domain on which this site lives is pretty much all the way back. Chances are DNS will work and you'll get the site, but it could be a day or so until some DNS servers catch up.

The moral of the story: Keep an eye on your domains.

• Make sure your contact e-mail addresses are up-to-date (and maybe filter that mail so you'll stand a better chance of finding it)

• Make a list of your domains, their expiration dates and where and how to renew them. Keep this in a list with the other important information about your web site.

• Make a habit of doing some web-site maintenance. Go through your site(s) and:

  1. Make sure all services you're offering are actually working

  2. Get rid of files and directories you no longer need

  3. Do regular backups and keep a backup archive (yearly, monthly, weekly ...)

  4. Check on any applications (like WordPress) that require a software update/upgrade.

  5. Watch for things like expiring domains.

Do you have any other webmasterly maintenance chores that belong on a list like this?

The next day: Google's DNS finally caught up, and I can see the site from my laptop that uses those DNS servers.

The more I see Rob Reed's new version of Ode's default Logic theme, the more I like it. I'm thinking of giving it a tryout on this site.

Ode is magical, all right. Click here to see all 110 posts in the blog on a single HTML page.

Or see all 110 posts on a single page as RSS.

In order to figure out exactly how to use the shared SSL certificate that Hostgator provides to non-static-IP users of its shared-hosting service to get an https:// connection, begin here to figure out the right URL (it's different than your usual one).

I've been trying to make this work on the Ode site in my account for months without success. My problem was that I could only get the SSL to "stick" in the "root" portions of the file hierarchy where my Ode site lives, not deeper in the directories where I access Ode -- both normally and with EditEdit.

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong: Hostgator's shared SSL doesn't work with .htaccess redirects (which I use on this Ode site).

Read the rest of this post

I've traditionally used stand-alone FTP clients like FileZilla and gFTP to interact with the servers I use.

Only recently have I decided to start using the GNOME Nautilus file manager's FTP/SFTP capabilities to manage the content in some of my servers.

Including my Ode server (a shared hosting account). Rather than write up text files in my favorite editor, save them, then start up FileZilla and transfer those files into the proper Ode documents folder, I've been using the file manager as my "window into Ode."

(For the record, I'm running the Debian Squeeze distribution of GNU/Linux with the default GNOME 2 desktop.)

You know about Ode, don't you? If not, start here.

Read the rest of this post

I'm in the process of moving the entries from my old Debian blog running on FlatPress to this blog running on Ode.

I'm slowly moving the entries, and once I finish and get them to all show up at http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/linux/debian/, I'll shut down the old Debian blog.

Read the rest of this post

I don't have any kind of traffic counter on this site. I could look in awstats on the server. Except that I don't.

This is in contrast with my Debian blog, where every post lists the number of views. And my Daily News blog(s), all of which use Omniture to slice/dice the readership any number of ways.

I have no idea how many are reading these entries. And I'm OK with that.

I haven't been doing much of any writing lately. Most of it has to do with being overloaded with the rest of my work. It's only going to get busier next week when 1/2 of my staff goes on vacation.

The other reason I've been writing less is that I've committed, in my mind anyway, to do less of this kind of writing and more of other kinds.

It's easier to do this.

Let me turn my attention to Ode for a moment.

Read the rest of this post

This file was created with Notepad++. How does it look in RSS view?

Encoding setting is "Encode in UTF-8 without BOM."