Tag: Blogging About Blogging

Editor’s note: This is the companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens/Number Five, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. For Number Five, click here.

Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)

To reiterate what I’m up to:

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

#3: That time my blog thought it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Back when this fiasco originally went down, I had shared some of it via the Point’s Instagram and Facebook pages, so this might sound familiar to some of you.

Over the summer, I had spent a couple of months putting the Point of the Story together before releasing it into the wild. One of the first things I needed to do was set the time zone for my server.

No problem! It was an easy decision to select Norfolk, thinking “Hey, perfect! That’s only a 3 hour drive from here!”

After that, the first order of business was to put up a “Coming Soon” page–replete even with a countdown timer–for anyone who tried to visit it before the Appointed Time Unto Which All Would Be Made Known.

And that Appointed Time, which all future historians will know by heart, was Thursday, August 29, 2019, precisely at 10 p.m. EDT.

When that day rolled around, and shortly before we went live, I had texted my good friend, known in these parts as “The Doctor,” and asked if he would test things out once the clock struck 10. You know, make sure all the links were functioning and that it wasn’t a general shit-show, etc., etc.

However, around that same time, when I tried going directly to a particular post from a different computer, I wasn’t seeing the “Coming Soon” screen as I had expected. So I pinged the good Doctor to check on it for me:

(Tries tweaking some settings, hoping to somehow get a different result…)

That last line there is an example of “careful what you wish for,” because that was one hope that was definitely fulfilled…apart from the Doctor’s testing, I don’t think I had a single visitor that first day. Womp-womp-womp!

Anyways, as you can tell, I had a prime suspect in mind as to what was causing my woes. Apparently I hadn’t caught on to the fact that the timezone menu was segregated by region:

So yeah, it turns out that there was another Norfolk–the Pacific kine, in fact. And apparently it’s living 16 hours in the future. No wonder the floodgates to the Point were opened early. The ----- thing is happily living its life under the delusion that it’s out in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.

So, one would think that since I had a number one suspect in mind as to what was causing me yet another time-traveling woe, that I would be able remedy the problem lickity-split and go on my way. Right?

Of course I popped on over to my WordPress dashboard and set my server time to New York City. I figuratively dusted off my hands and said to myself, “Welp! Mission Accomplished! I made quick work of that pesky problem!”

Yet, to my dismay, I kept suffering from premature blog-post-jaculation. Without fail over the next 2 weeks, instead of being published on Sunday morning at 7:15 am, my latest posts would go out to the public at 3:15 pm on Saturday–whether they were in final form or not.

For the sake of those who would come after me, I feel it is of utmost importance–albeit boring–that I reveal just what the hell was going on with my server time, and how I finally fixed that bastard for good.

Eventually, eventually, eventually, after much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I found the answer in the stupidest of places.

You see, there is very popular and powerful WordPress plugin called Jetpack that almost everyone uses. It’s got what every blogger/webmaster could ever need for basic site analytics, security, backups…and more!

Well, it turns out that for some reason, Jetpack also lets one set a server time, and who the ----- knows why it’s not automatically the same as what one sets in their WordPress dashboard.

In Summary, the wrong “common-sense” way to set your server time:

…and the correct elitist, No-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Want-Let-Me-Fix-That-For-You, way to set your server time:¹At least in the case where you’re using the otherwise useful Jetpack–made by the WordPress people themselves (hence why the setting is hiding at wordpress.com.

The point is beware of all the fancy “helpful” plugins you may be tempted to install. You never know which one of them asshats–ahem, I’m looking at you, Jetpack–might be a control freak, overriding your settings and then hiding the One True Setting in some obscure place.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

#1: That time I tried to solicit an erotic photographer on Facebook.

So far, the dumb predicaments that errant technology has put me in have been without much real-world consequence. However, there has been one glaring exception to that rule.

A while back I told a tale of attempting to land a Craigslist gig of debugging a treasure hunt, as recounted in Blog Like Nobody’s Reading.

For those of you have read it–and those of you who just now hopped on over there to read it–you may recall the bonus story I just could not resist including.

In it I shared the tragic tale of some poor chap who had a perpetual Craigslist ad in the Gigs section, who for the life of him could not find someone to take erotic photographs of him at the behest of his wife.

You know, nothing fancy, just something low-key and tasteful like this:

And since I know you’re all dying for an update on his status, I came across his ad AGAIN just a few days go, meaning that he has been critically under-erotically-photographed for at least 7 months now.

It’s somehow one of the saddest yet most hilarious things I’ve personally witnessed on Craigslist. So of course I couldn’t deprive the rest of the world of the chuckles to be found upon reflecting on his situation.

But as I’ve already well established, Karma is one bad-ass beach and pity anyone who should provoke her justice.

Things started to go sideways for me when I first had the idea to even include this beautiful vignette. Originally, in an early draft of the post, I had rudely interrupted myself in the middle of the main story and dropped it right in there. You know, train-wreck-of-thought/stream-of-consciousness and all that jazz.

And of course I had to include the critical piece of evidence, a screenshot of the ad. Again, to be clear, this is NOT my ad, NOT my words, NOT my marriage that is hinging on some tasteful male erotica:

Although later I would move that story to a bonus addendum at the end of the post, I had set the post up to be published while it was still in its first draft form, in case I didn’t have the chance to go back and revise it before my self-imposed deadline. So at the time, this screenshot was the first picture in the post, a detail that would come back to haunt my lily-white ass later on.

A neat feature on WordPress is that you can connect your social media accounts–Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.–and have an announcement go out on those platforms concurrently with your blog post when you have it scheduled to be published at a certain time (as I regularly do):

Automation sure is great, isn’t it? Thanks, Technology! Because of you, I don’t have to wake up at 7:15 on Sunday mornings and hop frantically from WordPress to Facebook to Twitter just to blast out my latest liturgical³I’m pretty certain that that does not mean what I’m trying to make it mean, but just don’t have it in me to do 5 second of internet research. offering.

If I recall correctly, I stayed up until around 3 in the morning the Saturday night/Sunday morning before Blog Like Nobody’s Reading was set to be published, indubitably trying to get it ready to be unveiled to the world, as is par for the course around here.

And thanks to all the publishing bells and whistles WordPress offers, I could get some much needed rest and sleep in late, knowing that all would be shared at the appointed time without any need for further human intervention.

It wasn’t until around noon that Sunday before I decided to check in on my Facebook post to see if was getting much action from my followers.

To my dismay, this is what I found being planted in their Facebook feeds:

Did ever express to you my insistence that context matters matters matters? If not: click here or here.

And now how meta is it that we have ourselves a real-live example of its importance, in the flesh!

Not only did stupid WordPress/Facebook decide to grab the first image from the first draft, but it decided to nicely crop it such that, even if you happened to notice the link and preview at the bottom of the picture, it sure looks like I’m straight-up pleading with everyone I know on Facebook to please, please, PLEASE, oh please take some nudie pics of me.

After this, this will be the image of me burned forever in their minds:

*Face-palm-emoji*

Although, I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed that no one took me up on my offer…

Anyways, as you can imagine, I immediately tried to edit it and change the picture, but you wouldn’t believe how unimaginably impossible that was. After 30 bonus minutes of that inaccurate solicitation continuing to pepper people’s Facebook feeds, I finally had to give up and just delete it, and post a new one altogether.

The lesson I learned here is trust nobody: if you want to embarrass yourself right, you’re going to have to do it yourself.

And that is also why you always see some poorly cut-and-pasted image with my Big Lip logo plastered on it accompanying ever ----- post I publish. No matter how tangentially related to the story, I always make some picture to be set as my Featured Image (another WordPress setting–I’ll spare you the screenshot for now), that way I know exactly what will be showing up in people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

After all, I have a meticulously manicured public image to maintain…

Content created on: 4/6/10/11 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday/Friday/Saturday)

Editor’s note: This is a companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens & But I Still Love Technology-The Other Odds, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. The Other Odds will be forthcoming in a few short days.

Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)

To reiterate what I’m up to:

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

#5: That time I accidentally warped the fabric of space and time.

Shortly after debuting the Point in late August 2019, I was chatting up one of my friends, “Sonny B.,” whom I was hoping to include in an upcoming post, Shotgun Wedding, set to be published September 15th.

To my delight, she had been binging my content, and after she told me what all she had read, I pointed out that the only post she had missed was Bum Sandwich, which was the next-to-most-recent post of mine.

However, she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about…

Now, I don’t have a screenshot to demonstrate this, but I’ll recreate the issue just for y’all.

Let’s just say you type in thepointofthestory.com directly, and go to our homepage. When things are amiss, instead of getting the latest post (“The Evens” post), you see a very judgmental ----- Clark¹Did “D1ck” just get censored?!? I bet it just got censored, didn’t it. ----- this ham-fisted Censorship plugin! instead:

Here, I’ll zoom in so you can actually see it:

As you can see, January 5th, 2020 is clearly “more recent” than December 29 or 31, 2019.

Apparently, I had managed to break the fundamental linearity of time as we experience it…

Part of the reason this was particularly frustrating is that potentially my new posts would never show up on the home page, leading most visitors to believe that I’ve stopped posting–and in turn losing critical new readers! (No one wants to read a stale blog, right?)

Anyways, no matter how much I tried tweaking the publishing date, unpublishing/republishing, etc. I could not get the most recent post to show up.

Well, I spent at least a good two weeks of Googling “WordPress posts out of order” and other similar searches to absolutely no avail. I could not find any evidence at all of anyone else in the rather-large WordPress community (millions+) ever having this problem.

Seriously?!? Not one other person had had this egregious problem?

Over and over, all the posts said the same thing: get your dates straight, and all should be copacetic, as this, and this alone, determines “post order.”

As you can (maybe) see in the screenshot of my Posts dashboard, The Evens have the correct date and everything, yet will still show up in the wrong chronological order…arggghhhh! This Universe doesn’t make any ----- sense any more.

I even bravely forged my way into the underlying code, and the function that was mis-fuck-tioning (translated simply into lay-terms) was simply “get next post” or “get previous post.” There was nowhere where the stupid thing could be breaking especially just for little ol’ me…could there?

One evening, when I was staring blankly at this dashboard in daze of hopelessness and despair, I noticed something tiny yet oh-so-slightly off:

It may not seem like much, but that’s my cursor showing up as a 4-directional arrow instead of your regular old pointer arrow.

Suspecting that this was a clue to this ridiculous madness, I clicked on the trouble-making post, and sure as shit, found that I could drag it and freely re-order the posts in such a manner.

I dragged that little bastard to the top of the list where it should be if it were chronological (i.e. FIRST), reloaded my homepage, and held my breath:

HUZZAH! Problem solved! Insanity averted!

But one mystery remained: why was nothing of the sort ever mentioned when I went in search of an answer on Google?

Well, it was on account of a perfect storm of being too clever for my own good coupled with my naiveté when it came to how WordPress functioned.

Long story short,²Who are we kidding, that ship sailed LONG ago. when I was trying to figure out how to make The Complete First Season binge-able from oldest to newest, I had installed a plugin that gives the blogger a bit more control over the order of posts, Simple Custom Post Order. What I didn’t realize is that most people using WordPress don’t have this god-like power to arbitrarily re-order their posts willy-nilly, i.e. the ability to click ‘n’ drag is not normal behavior.

Thinking that publishing them at the appropriate times would make the posts appear in the appropriate order, I was unaware that–under these new rules that I accidentally set up just for me–I needed to drag the newest post to the top of the list.

In summary, it was something of an unforced error due to having given way too much power someone way under-qualified to handle it responsibly.

Interestingly enough, my calendar-rearranging issues was obfuscated by another confounding screw-up. Later in that same conversation with Sonny B., she kept referring to the post which included her–which I had not published or otherwise shared with her.

I was simultaneously confused and impressed by her clairvoyant abilities to read a future post:

It turns out you can’t always blame the machine for bouts of unwanted technological tomfoolery.

Sometimes, there’s just a dipshit behind the wheel who can’t read a calendar…

Content created on: 4/6 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday)

Although we’re officially into the new year, and the time for countdowns is behind us, there was one last Top 5 list that I wanted to share.

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And–spoiler alert–that is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

J.K. Kidding! Before I present it to you, further ado is in order.

I promise that this is indeed a Top 5 list. However, since apparently I have zero ability to keep things short and simple, I decided to break it up into two posts out of respect for the Dear Reader’s time.

This week I present to you The Evens (#4 & #2)–be looking for The Odds (#5, #3, & #1) next week!

#4. That time I pretended I could time-travel.

No, I’m not talking about the time I took artistic liberties with a personal narrative in A Degenerate Family Christmas. This really happened–sadly much more boring, though.

You may have noticed at the end of many of my posts a time-stamp indicating when I actually created the content. For example:

Content created on: 23 October 2019 (Wednesday)

WordPress has many handy bits of code to make it much easier to efficiently build websites, one of them being “Reusable” blocks as seen here:

So of course I thought this would be perfect for always dropping the content’s creation date at the end of my blog, with the same formatting, etc. and only changing the date(s) as appropriate.

Every time I created a new post, I would add the “Content_creation_tag” block at the end and change the dates. Easy-peasy, done and done! Right?

It wasn’t until late October and after publishing 4 months worth of posts that I noticed something odd in an older post:

So…I guess a future me somehow wrote the post on the 23rd and sent it 3 days back in time to be published on the 20th? Wow. Sometimes I even impress myself.

But it turns out that’s only the beginning of my time-travel skillz:

BOOM! I can send information back at least 10 days in time. Ironclad proof, right here, ladies & gentlemen!

Upon closer inspection, it appears this is a skill I only developed exclusively for the month of October:

Poop. I really thought I had something special going there.

I’m J.K. Kidding of course–I don’t really believe I was able to manipulate the laws of physics so stupendously.

What it looks like is that my usage of the Reusable block–and ergo, these shenanigans–only started in the beginning of October. Though I could have sworn that I had been using them much longer than that…I’m starting to feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Obviously what was happening was that every time I updated that block with the creation date of a new post, it would retroactively update the older instances in the previous posts with that same date.

The bad news is the original dates were lost in the process (not that it matters that much), and I’ve been way to swamped with more important things to try to go back and correct this one stupid little detail.

The good news is that in putting together this post I discovered that Google’s all-seeing eye still remembers those posts as they were in their heydays:

But wait…

Arrrgggg. ----- this shit. I know for a fact that that is not accurate information for that post (which when visited, of course, says 23 October).

For the record, I’m basically live-blogging my research here, so you’re getting to see my sanity ----- with by technology in real time–again.

I give up.

This whole “content created” baloney is soooo asinine. I’m done wasting your time and mine on it.

Moving on, then…

#2: That time I tried to censor the contracted form of the F-bomb.

All y’all long-time readers of the Point know that swearing and the self-censoring thereof is a central theme around here.¹See, for example: The Alpine Stranger and/or Hello, Mother F*ckers! For the sake of expediency, I have been using a WordPress “Censorship” plugin that will take a list of black-listed potty words, and then any time they show up in a post or comment, those words are replaced with dashes (i.e. something like “- – – -” will show up in place of the world-famous f-bomb).

In theory, this approach would allow me to change how the blog is censored in the future–or to turn it off all together–without having to edit every ----- post I’ve ever written. Also, it let’s me cuss to my heart’s content when writing, while minimizing the number of minor strokes my dearest mother experiences when reading my handiwork. Everybody wins, right?

Anyways, the Censorship plugin doesn’t quite always do its job. There is one particular off-the-rails example that I need to show you, because the absurdity only happens behind the scenes.

I believe it was when putting together A Pound Casual Asshat that I felt particularly compelled to write:

If all that seems like an atypically optimistic outlook coming from yours truly, then I applaud your keen sense of What the Fuck’s Up (emphasis added).

A Pound Casual Asshat (2019)

As of this writing, you should be able to see an uncensored version of the f-bomb.²There is an off chance that I’ve implemented my own censorship plugin by the time you’re reading this, in which case it may be properly censored.

And before that, included in my original batch of posts, was A Most Excellent Life Lesson, in which I employed the classic possessive form of the f-bomb:

Oh, for fuck’s sake people…CONTEXT! (again, emphasis added)

A Most Excellent Life Lesson (2019)

Well, interestingly enough, for the life of me, I could not get Censorship to detect and censor “fuck’s”.

Mom, I feel like you deserve to know how valiantly and bravely I wrestled the machine to try to protect you.

For those of you with a bit of coding/computer science background, you may know that the humble apostrophe–aka a single quote–is often a special character which is interpreted as signifying the beginning or end of some exactly quoted text, as opposed to be taken literally as an apostrophe that should appear in the text.

In most cases, special characters can be made literal–as I needed in this situation–by putting a so-called “escape character” before it. This is typically a backslash (“\”).

So when Censorship didn’t bleep out “fuck’s” after I had add it to the blacklist, I tried escaping the apostrophe, and thus typed into the software as “fuck\’s” (without the double quotes).

When that didn’t work, I added several variations, hoping to empirically find something that would work and spare my poor mother’s eyes of beholding the horror of “fuck’s.”

Well, something in the Censorship code tells it re-process all the potty words every time one is added. Each time it does this, it tries to be smart and add an escape character in front of any special characters it finds.

Guess what? The backslash is also a special character–it is the escape character, after all. Pretty ----- special, I would say.

The best part is that it has no way to know which backslashes it had automatically inserted the last time a word was added to the list. Therefore, each time it doubles (at least) the number of ----- backslashes it thinks it needs to look for.

Let me just show you how ----- out-of-hand it has gotten–just consider the fact that I had to take two screenshots and then turn them on their sides just to present the following to you in any comprehensible manner:

That’s 256 backslashes in the longest instance, for those of you keeping score at home.

I’m pretty sure if I add just a few more words to this list, that that initial instance of “fuck’s” will break my entire website…

Actually, according to my math, if I add 12 words, that “fuck’s” alone will be 1 MB, and 10 more words after that it will be 1 GB.³Uncompressed–this particular type of information can be compressed with almost infinite efficiency. Another 10 words and the Censorship code running on the server hosting this website will attempt to compare a 1 TB (1000 GB) string against every word of every post it loads. OOF, Le OOF.

In America, you censor “fuck’s,” but in Soviet Russia⁴I wrote whole post on this topic: In Soviet Russia. Read it today! the Censor ----- you.

Wait, wait, that’s not how the joke is supposed to go…

…but in Soviet Russia “fuck’s” censors you.

Screw it–they’re both accurate descriptions.

My inner Yakov Smirnoff going off on a tangent

Don’t forgot to tune in next week as we hit #5, #3, and, of course, #1!

Content created on: 3/4 January 2020 (Friday/Saturday)