soupnazi.org

I spent some time this evening attempting to get Till Krüss’ Downloads Pepper working so I could track my WordPress plugin downloads from within Mint.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to get it to track any downloads. After fixing some permissions issues, I was able to download the files in question by going directly through the wrapper that the pepper uses, but it still wasn’t working from the projects page. After searching Google for a while and finding no help, I was becoming extremely frustrated. Then, I remembered something…

I had configured Mint to not track my own visits.

As a test, I turned that setting off and tried again… and it worked! Since I didn’t come across this information anywhere in my search as something to check, and since I completely forgot I told Mint not to track my visits (it’s a checkbox in the Mint preferences), I wanted to make sure I documented it for myself and others. So, if you’re having problems with downloads displaying in Mint when using this pepper, make sure you’re not ignoring your own visits like I was :-)

So, I’ve gone back to WordPress a month and a half after abandoning it. What can I say, I’m indecisive :-) Actually, I switched back for two main reasons…

1. I wanted to turn comments back on.
2. I wanted to be able use an iPhone app to post if the mood struck.

That being the case, my options were either go back to WordPress or take the time to code up and implement a comment system and the MetaWeblog API; neither of which I have the time to do. So, I guess from that perspective, the choice was easy.

The theme I’m using is a resurrected and updated version of the theme I built back when I first switched to WordPress (late 2005-early 2006). I might end up changing things up slightly, but I’m pretty happy with the result of the update. If you end up poking around the site, I’d really appreciate it if you let me know if you find something broken (or even something you don’t think works like it should). I think I’ve squashed most of the bugs, but I’m sure there are still a few lurking about.

Welcome to the relaunched soupnazi.org! In addition to sporting a new design, the site is also sporting a completely new backend that I wrote from scratch. I ended up dumping WordPress though it wasn’t for any technical reason—it was purely because I wanted to do something new. I’ve been wanting and meaning to write more frequently for a long time, and I’m hoping this will kickstart that. If it doesn’t, at least it was worth trying.

A few notes:

If you’ve been here before, you might notice that I’ve started over with posts as well. It wasn’t worth it to me to import all of the old posts (many were relatively pointless). That said, I did go through my stats and add a handful of older articles that got decent traffic from search engines and other sites. If you happen to come across a link to an older article somewhere and decided you can’t live without it, let me know and I’ll either add it back to the site or send it to you.

Comments are gone—at least for now. In addition to the massive amounts of comment spam that I used to get (but nobody ever saw thanks to Akismet), most of the non-spam comments weren’t all that useful or could’ve just as easily been asked or stated via email. I may end up adding the functionality back at some point but, for now, they’re gone.

There are still a few kinks I’m working out, but mostly everything should be working properly. If you run into anything that looks like it may be a bug (display or otherwise), please let me know.