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Stephanie Booth's online ramblings since summer 2000

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Category: CTTS News

About the website you’re reading.

Transcriptions des gribouillis manuscrits [en]

Pour les personnes qui attendaient de me lire sans devoir déchiffrer mon écriture à la main, les transcriptions (merci l’IA, faites avec Claude, pas contrôlées – donc signalez-moi si vous voyez des bizarreries) ont été ajouté aux photos de mes pages de cahier.

  • Des mots sur un carnet à Paris [en]

    Des mots sur un carnet à Paris [en]

    01.07.2026
  • Billet manuscrit, Paris toujours, un 4 juillet [en]

    04.07.2026
  • Making the Bees Walk in Line [en]

    11.07.2026
  • Who Vibecoded This Upgrade? [en]

    Who Vibecoded This Upgrade? [en]

    16.07.2026
  • Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles [en]

    Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles [en]

    18.07.2026
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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 22.07.202622.07.2026Format AsideCategories CTTS NewsTags ia, manuscriptLeave a comment on Transcriptions des gribouillis manuscrits [en]

25 Years of Blogging [en]

25 Years of Blogging [en]

This blog just turned 25 today. I’m at loss for words.

Random cat pic because… well, the internet is still made of cats, right?

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 13.07.202513.07.2025Categories CTTS NewsTags anniversary, blogging, ctts2 Comments on 25 Years of Blogging [en]

22 Years Ago [en]

[fr] Aujourd'hui mon blog fête ses 22 ans. Je venais de rentrer de mon année en Inde. Si l'âge d'or des blogs est derrière nous, je continue, dans mon petit coin du web, à tenter de garder vivant l'esprit de partage qui caractérise les blogueurs d'antan.

I actually remember the moment precisely. I was on my brother’s computer, in his room, fooling around online. I had been staying at his place since I got back from my year in India a few weeks earlier. I was still in a kind of reverse culture shock haze.

A few “Powered by Blogger” badges on the sites I was looking at tipped me over the edge. I headed over to blogger.com, signed up to figure out what it was, and added this “weblog” thing to my young website.

This blog has now been in activity for 22 years, and counting. It’s not the oldest weblog around (or even the oldest French-language weblog) but it’s clearly one of the survivors of that era.

I feels crazy to think I’ve been doing this for so long. There have been a few breaks. Twitter and Facebook have changed what I write and don’t write here. But I’ve always – and probably always will be – a blogger at heart.

What is it about?

Sharing. Hoping that others can get something out of what I’ve seen. Thinking out loud – for me, and for those who might read. Leaving a trace of what has been. Trying to have an influence on the world around me.

I feel sad that the golden years of blogging are behind us, that The Good Decade (h/t Shelley and Jeneane) is gone and will never come back, that this incredible epoch has slipped through our fingers for good. But I can keep on upholding the spirit of those times in my little corner of the web, for as long as I have words to give.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 13.07.2022Categories CTTS News3 Comments on 22 Years Ago [en]

20 ans [fr]

[en] Climb to the Stars turned 20! And I missed the date! All those years of blogging... Leave a comment to say hi and reminisce about how you discovered CTTS, if you're a reader!

20 ans que j’écris ici. Enfin, “ici”, parce qu’au début je n’avais pas de nom de domaine et le site avait un autre nom. Mais c’est le même site. Il a bougé, grandi, évolué au fil des années, mais tout est là, rien n’a été perdu en route (je crois), ma “maison en ligne” qui est devenue avec le temps une belle usine à gaz. Mais ce n’est pas grave.

En fait, le site a plus de 20 ans. C’est le blog qui vient de fêter ses 20 ans, sur la pointe des pieds, le 13 juillet, et évidemment, comme je suis douée pour les anniversaires, j’ai oublié.

Avec les années, les articles ont eu tendance à se rallonger et le rythme à se ralentir. Il y a des trous. Quelques-uns sont gros. Mais jamais je n’ai songé à “arrêter”, “fermer”… J’ai l’impression que j’aurai toujours des choses à dire, et que cet endroit est un bon endroit pour les dire.

Evidemment, je me suis fait happer par Facebook, comme tant de monde. Mais j’ai régulièrement retrouvé ici un espace un peu plus intime (étrangement, vu qu’on est sur le grand méchant internet public), moins réactif, plus posé.

Parfois, ces dernières années, je me suis retrouvée face à l’envie d’écrire, mais sans savoir quoi. Est-ce l’âge? Les mots qui, malgré tout, s’épuisent? Ou bien que certaines choses à dire, je ne veux pas les dire en public? Je ne suis jamais très sûre. Mais au final, je reviens. Encore et encore.

Je sais que 20 ans, vu d’ici, ça peut paraître préhistorique, pour un blog. Mais quand j’ai ouvert le mien, c’est bien parce que partout, sur tous ces “sites personnels” que je découvrais avec avidité (en anglais évidemment), il y avait ce petit badge “Powered by Blogger”. Je ne comprenais pas ce que c’était, donc j’ai essayé. Et voilà, sans le savoir vraiment, j’avais un blog.

Au bout d’un moment, j’ai tenté le français, découvert une poignée d’autre blogueurs francophones. A un moment donné, j’ai réalisé qu’il y avait d’autres blogueurs suisses! On a fait une rencontre, c’était dingue, on était quatre!

Je l’ai certainement déjà dit, mais je crois que si j’écris encore ici, c’est que j’écris beaucoup pour moi. Bien entendu que quand on écrit et partage c’est aussi pour les autres. Mais j’ai du plaisir à être lue – ça c’est à moi. Et surtout, j’ai du plaisir à mettre mes pensées en mot, et simplement à écrire. L’écriture a toujours été un moyen d’expression que j’aimais.

La rédaction, je n’aime pas. “Faire du contenu.” Ça m’ennuie profondément. Par contre les idées, les liens, les gens, les relations… ça c’est mon truc.

Je sais que certains et certaines parmi vous me lisent depuis très longtemps. Parfois vous apparaissez dans les commentaires, et je m’en réjouis. Et si vous lisez en silence, c’est OK aussi. Peut-être qu’on s’est rencontrés, peut-être que non. Peut-être que vous écrivez aussi, ou pas.

Si vous passez par ici, sur cet article, histoire de fêter un peu ces deux décennies et 4 jours (puisque je n’ai pas été fichue de faire cet article à la date juste!) laissez un petit mot pour dire bonjour. Si vous êtes “un lecteur” ou “une lectrice” et en avez envie, racontez comment vous avez découvert Climb to the Stars, et quand… si vous vous souvenez bien sûr. Ça me fera plaisir de vous “voir”!

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 17.07.2020Categories CTTS News, Just Blogging9 Comments on 20 ans [fr]

Server Migration [en]

[fr] Migration de serveur, depuis plus d'un an. C'est encore en cours, mais je recommence déjà à poster ici.

For over a year now I’ve been moving my site (sites, actually) to a new server. It’s always on the back burner (almost). At one point comment spam filtering on the old server stopped working, which kind of put me off blogging there (silly, isn’t it). Then 2014 became a difficult year (more about that soon).

Now I’ll stop putting brackets at the end of each sentence (or not).

Anyway, this is just a quick little note to say that my blogging fingers are itching, and have been for months. I’m going to start posting here already even though the .org domain still points to the old server. I need a place to write and be read. I have tons to say, as you can imagine, after the longest blogging hiatus in my history.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 17.01.201517.01.2015Categories CTTS NewsTags blogging, hiatus, linode, migration, server, site moveLeave a comment on Server Migration [en]

MailChimp, Email Subscriptions, Newsletter [en]

[fr] Du changement dans les abonnements par e-mail. Si vous receviez les articles de ce blog par e-mail, ça ne va pas changer, mais ça passera par MailChimp à l'avenir au lieu de Feedburner!

A few days ago Fred explained why he was moving e-mail subscriptions to his blog from Feedburner to MailChimp. To be honest, I’d been wanting to do this for a long time. I even had a draft campaign somewhere in dusty folder but I had never done anything with it, because I wasn’t really sure about the steps to take.

A friend of mine who does MailChimp stuff pointed me to this tutorial. It had a lot of details in that I didn’t need, but also many clear step-by-step instructions. I created groups so my subscribers can choose if they want to receive the newsletter, the blog posts, and/or the links posted to my delicious account. So, if you were receiving Climb to the Stars by e-mail, you will now be getting it through MailChimp, as well as the delicious links. They’ll be sent out in a separate newsletter though, to give subscribers more flexibility, so feel free to unsubscribe if you didn’t want them.

While I was at it, I also sent out a regular newsletter to my 120 or so subscribers. MailChimp must’ve improved its user experience a lot since I first tried using it, because I found the process very pleasant and easy. Who knows, it might be less than 2 years before I send out the next newsletter! Don’t hesitate to sign up for the newsletter, the blog posts, or the delicious links.

My only gripe so far is that although I have found a handy newsletter subscription widget as well as the “official” MailChimp plugin for WordPress there is no way to have a simple widget that subscribes people directly to one of the three newsletters (for example, the blog posts). People either have to use the complete form at the bottom of this page or use the simpler form on the right but then have to go and edit their subscription preferences to subscribe to the right newsletter. Wish that could be a little easier to manage — I’m sure I’m not the only blogger out there who has a newsletter and blog subscriptions and wants to keep people in the same list.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 01.04.2013Categories CTTS NewsTags e-mail, feedburner, mailchimp, newsletterLeave a comment on MailChimp, Email Subscriptions, Newsletter [en]

Blogrolling [en]

[fr] CTTS a vécu la plus grande partie de sa vie sans blogroll. Fastidieuse à maintenir, paresse, etc. Il est temps de changer ça: les blogazines et blogs-marketing ayant pris le dessus dans l'esprit des gens quand on dit "blog", je désire mettre en avant ceux et celles qui font et ont fait mon monde. Certains bloguent depuis plus de dix ans, certains moins, mais tous ont en commun de bloguer par passion avant de bloguer pour le profit. Une invitation à se rappeler que le blog dit "personnel" a encore de beaux jours devant lui, une fois remis de la gueule de bois marketeuse qui nous pend au nez.

Look down the right column of this blog. (Yes, you need to be on the actual web page to do this.) Scroll down a bit. Further.

Do you see it?

When I started blogging, there weren’t that many bloggers around. Well, there were many, but not as many as today. There were a handful I started to read and like, and I listed them in my sidebar like everybody was doing. (At one point we learned that it was called a “blogroll”.)

Very quickly, though, my blogroll started failing me. I couldn’t put everybody in there. I also realised that once somebody was in the blogroll, it was very hard to remove them. So when I changed the design of my site to design #3 way back when (don’t ask, I’ve lost count) I just scrapped the blogroll.

Everybody had one. It didn’t really matter if I didn’t: the paths through the blogs were well-trodden.

Years have gone by, and Climb to the Stars, for most if its history, has never had a blogroll. But it’s time for that to change.

This last year or so has been coloured by my increasing frustration about what blogging has become. Blogs have now become synonymous with blogazines and blogging-by-numbers (thanks for the expression, Adam), which leads some to say that the blog is dead (are you kidding), while still others actually don’t have the slightest clue about what blogging as a medium really is.

So, I need a blogroll, you see. A blogroll to celebrate the long-lived geeky personal blog. Yes, personal and professional mix. But these are the blogs which are written for love before they are written for profit.

My blogroll will forever be incomplete, imperfect, missing people, and with the odd superfluous “what’s that one doing in there?” link. Doesn’t matter.

It’s an invitation. An invitation to discover blogs that revolve around a name, not a brand. Blogs that have been around for a couple of years or more than 10.

Blogs, and bloggers.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 05.05.2011Categories Blogging, CTTS NewsTags blog, Blogroll1 Comment on Blogrolling [en]

Indian Stuff Properly Online [en]

[fr] Enfin, le journal de mon année en Inde il y a dix ans est à nouveau correctement accessible. Il était temps!

Climb to the Stars has grown into a huge sprawling mess over the last 10+ years. That’s life, I guess. Did you know that one of the reasons I became an active online citizen was that I was going to spend a year abroad in India, when I was a student?

During its first year of life, Climb to the Stars (which didn’t go by that name yet) was mainly the repository of my travel notes. I remember the day when I added a kind of stats thingy and discovered that I had 2-4 people visiting my site each day. Champagne!

Anyway, time has passed, and at one point, a lot of my old material missed the migration to WordPress and stayed stuck in an old version of my site (some shady subdomain you don’t want to know, particularly since the last server move killed off the old code that held it together).

So, here we go. Even if it’s old writing, it deserves a place here. Head over to my logbook (also available on a single page) and the India index that I’ll try to freshen up a bit over the next months.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 05.05.2011Categories CTTS News, IndiaTags india, Logbook, travel notesLeave a comment on Indian Stuff Properly Online [en]

CTTS Upgraded, Jetpacked, and Roboted [en]

[fr] Mise à jour de WordPress. Installation de Jetpack et de Robots Meta. Comme toujours, faites signe en cas de comportement inhabituel du site!

Sorry for the neologisms in the title. I’ve upgraded CTTS to WordPress 3.1 (you should do it too if you haven’t done it yet, lest you fall prey to hackers as I did earlier this year). While I was at it, I also installed Jetpack, the plugin that brings to WordPress.org blogs goodness from WordPress.com.

I use WordPress.com for almost all my projects, and all my clients. For most of the people I work with, it’s just not worth the hassle to have to deal with upgrades, technical issues, and potential hackings. For CTTS, however, I do depend on plugins like Basic Bilingual which are not (yet?!) a part of the WordPress.com offering. Also, I admit the geek in me likes having her own installation and code to tinker with.

Finally, I installed the Robots Meta plugin. You know me, I’m always a bit wary of the fancy SEO stuff (specially as many people who write about it seem completely obsessed with it, rather than obsessing on doing and saying interesting things). I’m really unimpressed with all the panic over duplicate content for example, especially as it didn’t seem to sound like a huge issue in blogs when I heard Matt Cutts giving us SEO tips in 2007 — I happily cross-post a lot of my writing “elsewhere” back here and I don’t think I’ve suffered unreasonably from it.

Anyway: lately, I’ve read a few analytics/SEO articles that seemed sensible to me and I’m starting to take a tiny (tiny!) bit of interest in the subject.

I’ve been using the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for some time now, and hanging out in my Google Webmaster Central — particularly since my hacking incident.

Also, it was brought to my attention today that there are old articles lying around on CTTS which are ranked very highly for certain searches even though they are really not that relevant anymore. Though I’m loathe to remove them altogether, I could very well remove them from search engine listings — and the Robots Meta plugin allows me to do just that.

So, I’ve taken the plunge and am now only allowing search engines to index my home page (of course) and single article pages, blocking them from date, category and tag archives as well as comment feeds.

We’ll see what happens — I’m a bit worried I may have gone overboard and I wonder what the consequences of those settings can be to other crawlers like BackType and IceRocket. If you have any intel to give me on that topic, I’m happy to take it. I feel a bit like I’ve been giving orders to my robot blocker without really understanding all the consequences.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 23.03.2011Categories CTTS News, WordpressTags blocking, google, jetpack, plugin, robots, robots meta, seo, upgrade, Wordpress1 Comment on CTTS Upgraded, Jetpacked, and Roboted [en]

New, Shiny, and Hopefully Spam-Free Server [en]

[fr] Nouveau serveur. Sans spam, avec un peu de chance.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in a kind of blog-limbo. After thinking I had rooted out my spammers, I had the bad surprise to find my pages spam-riddled again a few days later (after having proudly demonstrated to my SAWI students the consequences of being hacked). Long story short, we found a cute little remote shell in PHP and removed it from the server, discovered that PhpMyAdmin was compromised (I know, no rude comments please), but had a hard time finding out exactly where the spam itself was hidden (all the obvious stuff listed in various “get rid of pharma hack” and “what to do when your WordPress install gets hacked” blog posts yielded nothing).

This whole “being hacked” thing was starting to feel unpleasantly like a flea infestation: you think you’re rid of them, but here they are again!

After many hours of digging, we decided it was not worth losing more time as a server move was in the works anyway. If you’re reading this post, you’re accessing Climb to the Stars from the shiny new spam-free server, yay! Needless to say security has been tightened up and we will be monitoring it closely for any suspicious activity.

Expect normal blogging to resume at some point.

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Author Stephanie BoothPosted on 20.02.2011Categories CTTS News, WordpressTags ctts, hacked, server, WordpressLeave a comment on New, Shiny, and Hopefully Spam-Free Server [en]

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Welcome!

Stephanie Booth

Climb to the Stars is Stephanie Booth's personal site. Blog powered since summer 2000. Follow her on Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, Threads and Instagram. Maybe Tumblr, Flickr. And yes, still on Facebook.

Unless stated otherwise (a handful of transcripts), everything on this blog is completely human-written, typos and all.

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Blogs to read

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  • Anthropic payment woes – resolved
  • Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You
  • SOS mites alimentaires: vive les bocaux!
  • WordCamp 2007: Lorelle VanFossen, Kicking Ass Content Connections
  • Net-awareness
  • The Zeigarnik Effect and Open Loops
  • As a teenager, she wonders when
  • She had learned to live with the pain
  • Le chat, animal si pratique, mais qui s'ennuie "à dormir" dans nos maisons
  • Rendre visibles ses articles de blog, c'est galère
  • Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You22.07.2026
    I was planning to write another blog post. I may still write it – or not. But as I opened my computer, I had a pile of open tabs. I’d clicked on a bunch of articles of Daniel Miessler’s blog for possible further reading. Daniel is the guy behind LifeOS (previously PAI), a personal AI framework … Continue reading "Thoughts on Letting AI Write For You"
  • Transcriptions des gribouillis manuscrits22.07.2026
    Pour les personnes qui attendaient de me lire sans devoir déchiffrer mon écriture à la main, les transcriptions (merci l’IA, faites avec Claude, pas contrôlées – donc signalez-moi si vous voyez des bizarreries) ont été ajouté aux photos de mes pages de cahier.
  • Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles18.07.2026
    Transcription IA non-vérifiée (22.07.2026): Lausanne, 18 juillet 2026, 20h40 C’est clairement moins pratique de tenir en équilibre sur ses genoux un plateau et un cahier qu’un ordinateur portable. Mais bon : le soir après le souper, cuisine rangée, sur le canapé du balcon avec Juju qui dort à côté, ça commence à prendre la forme … Continue reading "Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles"
  • Refuser les titres et aller à des concerts17.07.2026
    Ah, les titres! Ces derniers temps, prise d’une inspiration subite, j’ai fait quelques exercices d’écriture à la main. Promis, je demanderai à une IA de me les retranscrire pour que vous ne soyez pas obligés de zoomer sur les photos de mes ratures sur votre smartphone. C’est une expérience intéressante, d’autant plus que je résiste … Continue reading "Refuser les titres et aller à des concerts"
  • Who Vibecoded This Upgrade?16.07.2026
    Unverified AI transcript (22.07.2026): Lausanne, 16th July 2026, 21:10 I’m on the balcony, Juju by my side. He’s not afraid of the storm, after all his years outside. He’s more afraid of people, moving objects, loose cloth and phone lights in the dark. It’s nice that the temperature is bearable again. It rained yesterday evening. … Continue reading "Who Vibecoded This Upgrade?"
  1. Daniel on Anthropic payment woes – resolved21.07.2026

    It's completely wild that I need to come to a BLOG POST to find answers to payment issues on a…

  2. Docthib on Pas toujours dans les vieilles casseroles19.07.2026

    Super intéressant ! Merci de partager, ce que tu écris résone beaucoup en moi (par d'autres chemins que l'IGB /…

  3. Lyonel Kaufmann on Balcon méditatif au chalet16.06.2026

    Chère Stéph', Ton texte m'a saisit par les tripes et par mon âme. Je t'entends. A l'écoute. C'est peu. Alors…

  4. Stephanie Booth on MySpace supprime les profils de 29'000 "délinquants sexuels"19.05.2026

    Se faire engueuler dans les comms de son blog avec quasi 20 ans de retard 👌

  5. imright on MySpace supprime les profils de 29'000 "délinquants sexuels"19.05.2026

    "choses aussi anodines que: relations homosexuelles, nudisme, uriner dans un lieu public, faire l’amour dans un lieu public, etc. "…

Some podcasts

  • Mystery Show
  • On the Media
  • Savage Lovecast
  • Freakonomics Radio
  • Invisibilia
  • Serial
  • Death, Sex & Money
  • Planet Money
  • Love + Radio
  • Radiolab
  • Reply All
  • Startup
  • 99% Invisible
  • This American Life
  • The Moth
  • Snap Judgment
  • Limetown
  • TED Radio Hour
  • Note to Self
  • Sur les Docks [fr]

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