i kept hounding their tech support, though, on the limitedly viable premise what i was paying for certain services, so at this point, in conversations with one particularly-overpaid-for-his-lack-of-intelligence technician, attempts were made to convince me that referrer statistics had been running all along, even though there was a gross disparity between what Google Analytics reported and what their statistics didn’t report. finally, after three months, i told him about the noticeable difference between their statistics and Google’s, and surprise-surprise, i suddenly had full referrer statistics that have now been pumping to me for the past month. whee!

{don’t you just love the phrase ‘gross disparity’? i do. that’s why i used it.}

so, without further ado, i present to you the most recent ways in which people stumbled upon the otherwhirled via the search engines, duly qualified by two statistical systems, no less!

• “headless body found in topless club” ~ that’s funny, i always thought the paying clients might find head in a topless club. what a twisted world.
• “james briggs stratton” ~ i used to link to him, but he was getting awful right-wingy there for a while, then i glitched up my Google Reader while i was moving the site and never got him replaced. i think i was the only one clicking through to him, but here’s a link to Bats Left, Throws Right for you.
• “bear attacks” ~ bear attacks can cause panic attacks which can cause heart attacks. weird, ain’t it?
• “biguns” ~ i appeal to an awfully intellectual crowd.
• “condi rice ‘in her bath’” ~ heh. still a favorite of mine, but i didn’t do it. for those of you who just threw up in your mouths, you’re very welcome.
• “condoleezza rice nude” ~ fine. here you go, you sick bastards.
• “darkblack wordpress template” ~ this is funny on several levels. it’s an excuse to shamelessly link to darkblack again, though. that site should be in your blogrolls anyway.
• “freedom to petition” ~ yes, i’m all for that. where do i sign?
• “fuck-his-wife” ~ yes, i did. that’s how we got the Otherlings, after all.
• “http://www.otherwhirled.com” ~ well, no shit. the address bar is usually above the search bar on your Google homepage, moron. learn how to use your browser.
• “nonnie9999″ ~ well, that’s nice. go visit Hysterical Raisins and tell her i sent you.
• “perverts r us” ~ i still think this should be the official RNC slogan.
• “ron edmonds” ~ obviously doesn’t editorialize when he shoots.
• “skating trolls” ~ we had a logic-impaired, self-fellating, semi-professional keyboard masturbator bugging some fellow bloggers a while back. i paid him a modicum of attention, he mumbled something and slithered away. coward.
• “spice girls inflict their” ~ INFLICT THEIR WHAT!?!?! you just can’t leave a good search phrase like that hanging. i’m very disappointed.
• “touchdown jesus, photoshop” ~ obviously typed by a heathen, because “Jesus” wasn’t Capitalized. you are SO going to H-E-double-toothpicks, you non-capitalizing searcher! and i still want to know what happened to his feet.
• “what i want for christmas essay” ~ again with the lack of Capitalization. if all you got was coal in your stocking, it’s because Santa Claus technically represents the Holy Spirit, and you. have. pissed. Him. off. still, i thought it was a decent wish. a boy can dream, right?
• “young and tender” ~ actually, i think your searches for interns should be confined to the government web sites, Senator!

so, there you have it. the search engine shenanigans have been revived! now your lives are complete!

previous shenanigans:

• I
• II
• III
• IV

anyway, i guess since filing a support ticket during the middle of the holidays was a bad idea, i’ll just continue on here. there’s a lot of crap to do today, but i’ll try to get some good snarkery up later tonight. it would certainly be good stress-relief.

be careful out there, ‘mong the English (i don’t know why i just thought of that line from ‘The Witness’. i suppose i should actually take offense at it since i’m Scotts-Irish).

it was an early Christmas this year, thanks once again to the sisters’ conflicting work schedules. one of my brothers-in-law got half the family sick because of something he brought along with him after having gotten it from one of his kids. so our short, early Christmas rapidly became a care center for the stricken: my other brother-in-law, my son, and both of my parents-in-law. i knock on wood several times a day.

i am trying to pump out the blog transfer for the otherwhirled and synthaetica, but i have experienced a wordpress import problem that may ultimately require me to do the import directly from the database. in fact, i should probably just do that and scrub the support ticket. it’s been a while since i did something completely databasey, anyway.

and, for what it’s worth, i know this will eventually come up in searches for wordpress+'import & problem'which is by no means the point of this post. but in case that happens, i hope you read down to this to discover me saying “the wordpress import problem is probably somewhere in my php.ini, the default installation of which is an excellent example of too much information in the way of code-comments provided in the file.” because if it wouldn’t be such a butt-pain to read without all the comments, but my limited understanding of regular expressions keeps me from making that available in any sort of responsible, feasible time. besides which, i’m not really confident of the intrinsic, ongoing, and long-term benefit of seeing that file as just a bunch of settings with no explanations. heh. i’ll just have to sit down and read the whole damn thing one of these days, but….*yawn*….

anyway, we are back, except for #1 Daughter, who is continuing her annual stay with her grandparents, who always enjoy her company. she’ll be coming back on New Year’s Eve, i believe. and we are back, but will quite likely be moving—out of this house at a very likely minimum, and possibly even out of the state. it’s all rather hypothetical right now, but the bottom lines are fairly simple. the Spouse Unit is getting laid off where she works, and some of her best job opportunities could potentially lead us to “follow the money” to places as far apart as Santa Clara, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in Florida. Colorado Springs would be our preferred area if our current location isn’t an option, although Minneapolis would put us closer to the Spouse Unit’s sisters.

but even that aside, the other bottom line is the fact that even after putting a lot of money down on this house when we moved here, the inherent limitations on how much i can make when working almost entirely alone coupled with the fact that companies out here do not come even close to compensating intelligent, well-educated females for what they’re actually worth is forcing us to consider selling this house and moving into town. None of us want to do that, but since we put so much down on the house (which was actually a very good idea on the time, just one that was based primarily on the expectation that it’d take the Spouse Unit about six months to get hired. instead, it took almost 18. and then her layoff comes at the bottom of the bell curve of my business cycle (not many people get married in the winter, and soccer’s not a good game when it’s less than 40 degrees. cold-weather injuries are a bitch).

so, it looks very strongly like we’re moving. we just have to figure out how not to make it an entirely bad thing for #1 Son and #1 Daughter. the photo is from our current front porch just this morning. several retouch methods, obviously. predictably, with the prospect of moving looming over us, i will be more inclined to document the views for what little time i have remaining.

congratulations to my father, by the way. it took the VA until just this past Monday to finally award him 50% disability with back-pay. it should have been at least 75%, but now that he has finally been awarded something, the paperwork, while considerable, is much easier to file. i’m glad you finally got something out of them, Dad. hang in there!

happy holidays, all!!!

happy holidays, all!!!

i wouldn’t be able to answer “why” in so many words per se, but i very much like the theme work of milo317. Kyrian’s blog is using one, as is synthaetica.com and so will be the next version of shadowmoon.com. milo317 is a very prolific theme designer and has been very easy to work with in developing a custom theme for shadowmoon.com. she’s also an accomplished artist and graphic designer.

so, thanks milo317 for your themes, and especially for putting up with me!

if the feedburner feeds do not automatically revive themselves after i get the theme and plugins uploaded (i will also double-check it through feedburner), then if the few of you who subscribe to the feeds will let me know, i’d appreciate it. that seems to be all done correctly now, though.

i forgot that WordPress’s export/import process wouldn’t retain images. i’ll try to get the images back in. sadly, i didn’t do a very diligent job of ensuring that i kept images i uploaded to here all in one concise place. they’re probably not that big of a deal, but i’ll get that fixed a) if you ask to see one specifically, or b) if not having it up here just really bugs me.

i have to re-upload the one gallery i had up here and configure the gallery plugin. that can probably wait a bit, since you family members, according to my previous statistics, had pretty much looked at them all.

i’ve got to reconstitute my blogroll and tweak the sidebar as well, so for those of you who were on it, i apologize for the sudden lack of linkage. i’ll get that fixed next, while i’m batching out some client photos.

if you’re wondering, i changed hosting to bluehost.com, one of the most reputable national hosting systems available. i found very few negative reviews, and their price is literally a fraction of what i’m being charged from my local host. i do think i should make it clear, however (and not just because they might be reading this), that i greatly appreciate my local provider (see the footer of the otherwhirled for details). i have learned a lot from them and have appreciated the efforts of especially one individual there (Isaac). the bottom line here is, frankly money. money, and the fact that support, while effective, is often rather slow. bluehost’s system is so comprehensive that in many ways the need for active, personal support is moot. i was able to get dawnne.com transferred and running, setup with email, ftp, and statistics, over here without talking to anyone. and the few questions i had before signing up were answered within 30 minutes in person, via telephone, in response to questions from a guy who pretended like he couldn’t read a website, no less. very impressive.

enough about that. moving on….

well, i’ve got to do some work for a bit.

i don’t know what i was thinking. wait, yes i do. i was thinking that keeping the money in our community was a better thing. and it typically is. and i am a big proponent of keeping the money in the local community. so doing this bugs me on several levels. however, when it comes down to the fact that for the hosting of six domains, i am being charged $150/month, when i could just be paying $6.95/month (for better service, greater configurability, and higher bandwidth, no less)…well, it’s time to move.

so, that’s what’s going to happen. i have already semi-successfully moved dawnne.com. i say “semi-successfully” only because i have to re-upload a couple of galleries and a few images (stuff that didn’t make it via the WordPress export/import utility), and because someone in the WordPress development group thinks we like to have to hand-enter our blogrolls if we ever pick up and move. that aside, moving over to BlueHost was not only a complete no-brainer in financial terms, but was also done in less than 12 hours, although DNS propagation outside North America may take longer. and goodness knows i have a bazillion readers from overseas on my personal blog. har-de-har-har.

did i mention it was BlueHost? it’s BlueHost. shameless plug from a woefully shameless man.

so, like, over the next few days, i will be moving everything. the hardest part of this is going to be moving the blogroll. because i like to serve the click-through method (the supposed reason why blogrolls exist), i will have to add some of the more recent additions into my google reader so i can do the export thingy from that to the wordpress blogroll. i’m going to take my time on that, however, as i am more focused on getting some client stuff done before Christmas. just be advised, you’ll see temporary burps not only in the website, but in the feeds, and when the website comes back up, it won’t be perfect from the get-go.

i just said “get-go”. yes, i was raised in Texas. carry on.

i do want to say that i deeply appreciate the services of my local provider (see the current footer). this is primarily a money issue. sure, as with any other small-business host, service sometimes isn’t what i would ideally want it to be. but i have learned quite a bit from them, just as i have hopefully helped them learn about WordPress hosting as well. they are good people, and i do somewhat regret bailing on them. but, like i said, at $6.95 a month, i can simply choose not to eat out ONCE each month and i draw even, or better. pfft. what was i thinking….

ironically, this comes immediately after making the comments plugin gravatar-compliant. if you haven’t setup a gravatar on your email address, why not? well, the reason why commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com doesn’t have one is because apparently they can’t handle email addy’s with [dots]. that aside, it’s a fine way to make your comments across your favorite blogs—all of whom should be supporting the gravatar project—more consistent, so peeps can recognize you and see how cool you are.

actually, it’s nothing really major this time, other than the fact that i have belatedly discovered a hosting service that runs circles around what i’m currently getting, and literally at a fraction of the cost.

as a result, you will quite likely see some service bumps/oddities in the following domains:

1. dawnne.com
2. selanie.com (my daughter’s site)
3. shadowmoon.com
4. shadowart.com
5. synthaetica.com
6. fairweathertempest.com (my brother’s site)
7. otherwhirled.com

bumps will come intermittently. i’ll try to have things up and running on them properly. those of you who have access to your own sites (er…that’d be Daughter the First and Not-So-Little Brother), i will use the original information i used to setup your stuff when i move things over. any questions, just ask.

~d~