I just purged something in the neighborhood of 30,000 comments this afternoon. I started the process very prescriptively to avoid deleting any real comments but soon gave up when I found myself literally drowning in the sea of colossal waste. There were new comments being added as I was deleting them directly in the database.

In fact, there were so many comments that I could not even use the WordPress management interface. It continuously and utterly failed. It even gave excellent confirmation messages such as “X number of comments have been deleted” while nothing was actually being deleted. Nice.

Adieu. Navid.

First of all, I know what you’re thinking: why doesn’t Navid have a bookmark or favorites link to his own website if he frequents it so much? Or, why isn’t his blog his browser’s home page if that’s important to him? The truth is I really enjoy typing my name and having a shortcut to my website would truly defeat the purpose. In any regard, baffled with this mystical error, I logged into host’s control panel to see whether there was an outage reported. Nothing. The status reported that all sites were operational. I figured then, if those reports are to be trusted, the problem lay within my own site. I decided to open a ticket with the support personnel.

Now I think we’ve all heard and even have our own share of horrible customer support stories: rude operators, technicians without a clue, support engineers that just read troubleshooting manuals verbatim, and what not. To be fair though, there have been some stories about customer service going shockingly right but those few and far between. In fact, it’s so rare — that the linked article went to number one on both Digg and Reddit!

I submitted my trouble ticket and within 15 minutes, I got a reply. Not just an automated reply that my ticket was important and being worked on… but rather by a real life person. To truly understand the awesomeness of what occurred, I’ll include their reply:

The errors in your website were being caused because someone maliciously editing and appended to the .htaccess file in your account. This was possible because this file, along with many of the other files in your account, was world-writable. I have adjusted the permissions of all of the files in your account to remove this world-writable setting to ensure the security of your files. I have also removed the offending line from your .htaccess file which has rectified the errors you were experiencing with your web page. If you have any other questions please let us know.

Thank you.

David Runion
HostRocket Support

Let’s reiterate what just happened. They located the problem. They fixed the problem. They located the root cause. They fixed the root cause. All in 15 minutes! Now I don’t have to explain why I’ve been with HostRocket for more than six years. In fact, I’ve always been impressed with their customer support. But this, to me, was well beyond what I could and would have ever expected from a web hosting company. Things did go wrong (as they often do) — and here it was even my fault — but they addressed and resolved the issue apologetically. They were courteous, informative and prompt. There is nothing more I could have asked to make this situation any more pleasant. It goes without mention that I strongly recommend HostRocket for their support personnel alone. There are a hundreds of other hosts that beat HostRocket on prices and maybe even features. But this type of service commands the utmost customer loyalty. As long as I have a personal blog, I’ll be with HostRocket: thank you!

Adieu. Navid.

I’ve been hacked! I am not sure what the world has come to but, as most of my faithful readers should have noticed almost instantly, my notoriously witty and self-deprecating blog has been down for the past couple of days. The cause, my friends, was a hacker whom shall go unnamed because I fear the reprimand of a cyber retaliation by highly-skilled computer hackers on the interweb. Even if the hacker is only a fourteen year old Russian Serbian idiot savant from Kosovo. The world is changing. These intangible tubes that carry oogles and googles of electrons are giving way to a new generation of criminals that prey on innocent and charming bloggers like myself.

I knew I should have gone with a Windows host. Linux is like totally unsafe. I spent a couple of hours just cleaning up the thousands of junk phishing files which were uploaded to my web server and then changed my root password. I’m safe as a button again. Or so I think. dum dum dum.

Adieu. Navid.

I also added two new categories: Photography and Code. I don’t even own a camera… I guess that’s going to be the first step.

I know I am missing a lot of people, so please don’t hesitate to leave me your name and URL so I can add you to the list. Remember, I have a hefty page rank, I can propel you up the search engine charts.

Therefore, without further adieu, I present you the latest theme. I’d love to hear some feedback but do keep in mind that I am slowly rolling out more features and kneading out bugs while the code is in production. I felt the green was much more appropriate and the red/pink highlights give the website some character. I am finally happy with the way comments are turning out and I think the general flow of information has much improved. Maybe I can finally be one of the big hitters in the world of WordPress blogs. Actually, once you folks realize what I have in store for WP Lists 2.0 — I just might be.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

I am now experimenting with the blues again trying to get something elegant going. In addition, I am working on bringing back the stylesheet switcher so that each person can have their own theme. I am personally resenting the blue more and more… please help me out.

Adieu. Navid.

1. Color Scheme: Adam Polselli predicts that purple is the new pink. And I agree with him but I gave my hand at trying to compose a masculine purple themed color scheme and well, it simply didn’t work. I may revisit purple soon but in the meantime I took Adam’s other advice and gave the “desaturates” a try. Tell me if you like it.
2. Readability & Line Spacing: I am a very verbose fellow and reading my entries with the default line-text is almost nauseating. I have vertically spaced out the lines and lightened the text to create a much easier reading environment. I still don’t expect any of you to actually read what I write, but this way I can continue to pretend you care.
3. Contrast & Background: I have put an emphasis on attempting to create a much more open and lighter presence. The old dark gray background did not seem to go over very well. Again, lighter colors and more open space has been the key.
4. Search Functionality: I have not only enabled searching but I have also added a new search template to the theme. Maybe I will throw LiveSearch in down the road. We’ll see.
5. Categories: I added a lot of new categories to help organize the ever growing collection of entries. Originally, the sidebar only displayed the parent categories.
6. Banner Design: I still think the top header looks plain as an all white background but its going to stay that way until I (or my cousin Arshia) find something better.
7. Color Scheme: I have also added little minor touches of color here and there to spruce things up. I am really liking the new design but then again, I could be totally alone in this category.

Your comments are always well received especially when they pertain to the websites’ readability, accessibility and just plain old good looks. Let me know what you think and if you feel this is a step into the right direction.

Note: If you still see the blue banner with Audrey’s picture in the header, please refresh.

Adieu. Navid.

I was about to shit a brick — all that hard work, all that tweaking and perfection — down the mother fucking drain. I fortunately found the latest copy I had (which was still relatively new but did not include all of yesterdays changes) but given the circumstances it was better than anything else I could find. I uploaded that version and noted the revisions necessary. However, when I came to re-implement those changes I noticed that I had actually opened the original file and it was still sitting there in my TextPad. As most computer science majors and computer literate folks know, you can do whatever you want to a file — but if its already open in an non-locking application the contents remain intact. I quickly copy and pasted the code over and I just had to make two minor changes to the stylesheet and I was back in business.

Damn, that was a close call. Moral of the story: start backing up my shit.

Adieu. Navid.

In any regard, for the time being, I had to unfortunately take Audrey’s pretty face off. But she’ll be back. I promise. It’s funny actually because I have been away for only five days yet it feels like I have been cheating and lying to you for years now. Oh dear website, how I love you so.

[Note: If you're still seeing the old black/orange color scheme, it probably means that your browser has decided to cache the website. Simply clear your cache and voila.]

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

In any regard, I’m calling out to all my faithful readers (yes, I’m talking to you three) to leave me some feedback about what works, what doesn’t, what you like and what you utterly despise. But please, be gentle, this website is my livelihood. Just kidding (no, I’m not).

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

OK, so I admit things are a little screwed up right now but I just don’t have the time to sort them out. I’m waiting on the WordPress development team to come through with some sort of miracle stable release, but that doesn’t appear to be coming anytime yet. I do, however, love a lot of the new features and I can’t wait to use them once they become more stable.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Adieu. Navid.

Why WordPress? I did some research before switching especially because I am very picky when it comes to things like this. You probably knew that because who else would be so inclined and distraught over a choice of CMS Software other than myself? Anyhow, WordPress appeared to offer the most interesting (well liked) features over the others which I checked out (they include Blogger and MoveableType). So there you have it. I’m part of the WordPress family.

It took the entire morning but I was able to migrate over all my entries (preserving the dates) over to WordPress. I did this manually because I didn’t care to write another one-time script. I might develop a script to migrate over all the old comments because as it stands, all the new entries don’t have any of the old comments anymore . I know it sucks, but I’m working on it!

If you “were” a regular, nothing really is going to look different because I also ported over my old stylesheets to the new WordPress template (which I rewrote from scratch to minimize the affects of stylesheet changes necessary). I threw together a new logo (which probably sucks) but I’ll tend to that after I am done finishing the rest of the website. Stay tuned.

Adieu. Navid.