I considered the domain name for a few moments… thegeekyblog.com, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? (Of course, if this story had a happy ending, I would have linked to them there… OH, PLEASE don’t go to their site! They may end up profiting from your curiosity! I, personally, didn’t see any ads, but I’ve got my firewall on fairly high settings.) I thought perhaps this was just a fellow geeky blogger who thought I had something interesting to say. Further piquing my interest was that it was the “timemanagement” subdomain that pinged me. So I went to visit the site.

The article that pinged me had only two lines of text: one said, “Read the rest of this great post here” (and of course, flattery will get you everywhere), and the other happened to be a phrase very familiar to me, and so I thought that maybe this person had liked more than one of my articles and was making an offhand (underhanded?) reference to another one. Still, I had no alarm bells going off in my head. (What is that they say about hindsight again?)

I clicked around the site some more, and was a little puzzled that their articles didn’t all seem to be very focused on time management. Curious, I went to the ‘About’ page. It was the default WordPress wording! I went ahead and emailed admin@thegeekyblog.com to let him know that he really should have thought of changing the default About page before adding over 13000 blog entries… all Uncategorized… all seeming to merely quote and link to a bunch of different sites… and by this point, yes, something was starting to smell suspicious.

Hindsight, I say, HINDSIGHT!!!

Somehow, I thought to look at the bottom of the page, and I found a “disclaimer” link, to a page saying:

Please note, all content posted on this blog remains the property of its writer/s.

We did not and will not write any original content, all the content displayed has been pulled from public RSS feeds and is there to mearly spread my fellow bloggers work and provide a PageRank giving link back to the work.
If you object to me using any of the above methods to further the excellent information these, and many other bloggers create, please feel free to email me with your reasoning – admin@thegeekyblog.com

We are not here to steal content, this is mearly a social experiment.

Thanks for your time.
The Geek Blog Army

Are those bells of warning, I hear, or some kind of chorus of wonderment?! Could there possibly be people out there whose sole purpose is to help their fellow bloggers get some link love? Having never received link love, I couldn’t be sure, and I really wanted to believe that this was a Good Thing. People are mostly good, aren’t they?! (Or is it, most people are mostly good? Hmm….)

So I marked the trackback as “not spam”. And I (am so glad that I) proceeded to search for more news about this so-called “geekyblog”… and I found that someone else had taken issue with their disclaimer. Gaaack! Warm fuzzy feeling fading…

Long story short (or perhaps just because I see that I’ve spent over 500 words on the subject without getting to the point) I got victimized by link spam. Or something — the terminology is still vague in my head, but I’m pretty sure that splog and sping don’t apply here … maybe “spingback“? (Aww, I’m not the first to use the term!) Maybe I was just scraped. Ouch!

Anyways… I suppose I will chalk this one up as experience. I’ve ‘unapproved’ the comment, to be sure, and I figure I most likely won’t hear back from the admin at the site — unless he turns around and tries to sell it to me or something. Seriously, my diligent Googling actually helped me find out that the guy is trying to sell his blogfarm! And he had to cut the price because Google AdSense has cut him off. Ha, ha, haaahhhhh~!

Honestly, though, it sickens me that there is so much effort put forth to try and obtain money without having to earn it by providing something of value. At least it seems there’s checks and balances against these efforts!

As an example of the checks and balances, I had also found a discussion from someone concerned about the many scraped copies of one of his articles. In fact, there were so many, his actual original article was not even in the top ten Google search results. UGH! Thankfully, when I just did a quick search, I saw that his original article has since restored its rightful position at the top of the search results. What a relief!

Anyways, I just think it’s unfortunate that there is such a need to fight against these sorts of things. I intend to do what I can to join the battle, but I’ll probably stick mostly to being a cheerleader. Goooo, good guys!! :)

My first inspiration was to check CoolText, to see if they’re still around after all these years. Happily, they not only still exist, but they’ve vastly improved over the way they were back when I first encountered them — which could have been as early as 1999 or even ’98, so I suppose it’s only to be expected. What amazed me though was that I had no idea how awesome they’d be, and I’m not even done playing yet!!! But at first glance, nothing seemed to look quite like glass. I did find myself drawn to the glowing letter style though, and after much trial and error, I found a look I liked for the Qrystal.name logo:

As for the Beautiful Physics logo, I was still smitten with my glass idea, so I googled about a bit, eventually tweaking my search terms to include GIMP in my results. Aha! A tutorial! I cackled, and sat down to try it out… because, after all, the only way I could visualize how it would look as a logo would be to go through the steps myself!

I was fairly pleased with it, but I’d like to tweak it a bit before I use it. I’d like to see how it looks as thicker glass, and of course I also need to figure out what I’m doing with the word “beautiful”. I’m saving all steps though, and I’ll blog about any progress as I go! Yippee~!

Update (Nov 2010):  A REQUEST:  If any visitor here happens to know of a different tutorial, or better still, some kind of tool that does this automatically, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!  It would be very helpful to other visitors here too, because this little post brings at least one or two visitors to my blog every day, and I’m sad that I don’t really provide much help.  However, this means there are a lot of people looking for something that will do this, so I don’t think such a tool exists yet… but IF YOU BUILD IT, PEOPLE WILL DOWNLOAD IT!  So please, let me encourage you to build it! I think all you need to do is create an interface that goes through the steps of the tutorial above, so that it can be undone and tweaked and redone quickly so people can get the desired look.

In fact, because I am learning to be very careful with my time, I quickly realized that I needed to streamline the blog management process if I am to make sure that I don’t spend excessive time fiddling with stuff. One potential time-sucker is the installing and updating of plugins (and wordpress itself, for that matter). With more than one blog under my command (muhaha, I still can’t help but think of it in Star Trekkish terms), it felt like those processes were more complicated than they needed to be. After all, I had two (going on three) blogs to update: “beautiful physics“, this one, and the new “green reasoning” blog I’ve been discussing building with my dad. Doubling my steps was bad enough; did I really want to start tripling it? Hell no.

So I started investigating how other people handled multiple blogs… and also brainstorming about what I would attempt in order to reduce maintenance time. The first idea I had was to use a single plugins directory for multiple blogs… so I googled ‘wordpress “symbolic links”‘, and thankfully, someone more suited to the task was way ahead of me on the idea. Woot! Anything I don’t have to do myself is great news, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, my newbishness slowed me down in implementing it. I learned a lot about the wordpress structure while working on it though, so I felt it was a worthwhile Saturday night nonetheless. (My husband in the next room was involved in almost-as-geeky persuits, so I don’t feel like a complete loser.. at least, not alone! :P) Sicker still, I feel like reliving the experience to write about it here… maybe I’m just hoping my steps and struggles will be helpful to someone.

For whatever reason, here’s an overview of my Saturday Night Adventure With Virtual Multiblogs:

PREP:

• browsed the comments at the Virtual Multiblog homepage;
• unzipped the files and read the readme/helpfile;
• decided to use my existing wordpress install as my main, and to clone it.
  • In hindsight, I’d say this was probably a bad move; I would suggest to others to export from an existing wordpress and re-import into a fresh install. I think I chose “the hard way” so I wouldn’t have to re-install latexrender, but it seems I may have to do that anyways.. but more on that later.

SETUP:

• followed the Advanced Setup instructions that came with Virtual Multiblog
• set up each domain to point to a different symbolic link to the existing wordpress install
• copied the database info into the copies of config/mb-config-sample.php (because I figure that each having its own database might be good, since they’re independent ideas on separate domains)
• followed the instructions too literally… I called wp-admin/install.php on this blog, which proceeded to add new tables to my existing database, freaking me out for a brief moment because I thought I overwrote my posts (I didn’t feel like learning how to restore from the backup that I was very glad I made!) For Blog #2, I ended up trying update.php instead of install.php, and it worked like a charm. Blog #3 was a new install anyways, so I used install.php.

TROUBLESHOOT:

• renamed the old tables to the new prefix and got rid of the newly made ones (not in that order of course)
• tried it out, and… parts worked! but my static pages failed, not even showing the themed error page.. and even worse, trying to log in to Site Admin gave me an error saying “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”
• tried logging out, and back in… still the error.
• searched the error… found out how to check whether I was set properly as administrator, which I was. I added the word “capabilities” to my search, since that was the table element where permission levels were referenced.
• found a blog letting me me know that I was on the right track, and told me that some table elements also needed to be renamed! aha!
• did that, tried logging in again, ……nope. Sought out more advice.
• tried a “repair” on the database… still nothing.
• decided to do a ‘forced update’:
  • commented out the meat of wp-includes/version.php
  • ran upgrade.php
  • uncommented out the ‘meat’
  • tried again to log in as admin…
  • … still got the permissions error. But at least now my static page errors were properly themed!
• Eventually, I found that one person had a problem because their wp-admin/login.php was not properly redirecting to index.php, and lo and behold, mine seemed to be doing that too. I manually added index.php to the URI, and voilà! A screen prompting me to run upgrade.php! And so I did!!! AND THEN—– EVERYTHING WORKED!!

TESTING:

• checked through my site as seen from the outside, and checked admin stuff too, including plugins…
• I found only a few issues:
  • my static pages are not behaving like pages… they seem to be stored as posts, and yet they can’t be found via a search.
  • latexrender isn’t quite working right on the clone-blog, but it works on the main one

CELEBRATING:

• victory dance, yippee! that’s all good enough for me!!!
• bedtime! :P it was almost 2am by this point… :)

And now, as I’m logging into my account preparing to post all this, I am greeted by the announcement that there is a new version of WordPress. My first reaction was to cry out, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!! but once that got giggled out of my system, I thanked my lucky stars that I get to check just how easy it is to upgrade, now that I have multiblogs. Here’s hoping that it will be as easy as I hope…!!!! :)

[tex]\int_{1}^{\sqrt[3]{3}}t^{2}dt\cdot\cos\frac{3\pi}{9}=\ln\sqrt[3]{e} [/tex]

(Hint: If you “speak math”, just say the expression out loud and it will fairly easily fall into the rhyming scheme of a typical limerick. If you don’t “speak math”, I’m sorry, there really isn’t anything for you here! At least, not until I provide a transcript of it… or someone else does, in the comments on this!)

(Edit: WordPress.org does not have the native handling of LaTeX that WordPress.com does, so I had to find a plugin to handle it instead.)