CTTS News – Climb to the Stars

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.

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”!

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.

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.

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.

Searching For a New Theme For Climb to the Stars [en]

[fr] Version courte: je cherche un nouveau thème pour Climb to the Stars.

These last few days I noticed things were going sour between Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and Chris Pearson (Thesis) over licensing issues. I don’t write much code, and licensing looks like a big jungle to me, but things heating up did made me recall a few things I’d vaguely seen fly by over the last years about WordPress themes having to be GPL and Thesis not being GPL.

Anyway, I read Twitter streams from both Matt and Chris the other day and decided I was going to stay away from the topic.

I’ve used WordPress for years and know (and appreciate) Matt personally, and I’ve been happy so far with Thesis, which I paid a developper license for way back when during the launch.

I had a small issue early 2009 around the change of terms in the developper license (which went from allowing unlimited use to unlimited use on one’s own sites) but a quick e-mail with Chris cleared things up and he assured me that I could stick with the terms of the license as they were when I signed up. So, no beef. I’ve also regularly recommended Thesis around me.

A bit by chance this morning, I saw Philip Oakley‘s tweet about an interview he’d done with Matt on this topic. In the introduction text, he recommended that we first listen to this debate between Matt and Chris, moderated by Andrew Warner. I loaded it onto my iPhone, turned up the sound, and hopped on my exercise bike for my daily half-hour of sweaty indoor pedaling (TMI? ;-)).

I’d like to state that I started listening to the interview with no preconceived idea of who may be “right” or “wrong” over the issue (knowing, too, that I have in the past disagreed with a stand or two of Matt’s). I was hoping to learn a bit more about the rational arguments on both sides.

Ten minutes in, I felt like leaving the room (I couldn’t, remember, I was stuck pedaling on my indoor bike). At least, if I had been the one talking with Chris, I would have stopped trying to reason with him. Twenty minutes later, I got off my bike, turned off the podcast, and decided I’d had enough.

I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of conversation mechanics, and if this one was going nowhere, it’s pretty clear to me that it was largely Chris’s doing. I was appalled at how emotional (vs. rational) his responses were. At how he systematically didn’t respond to questions asked, falling back on “they’re out to get me” and “it’s my creation so I have a right to control it” arguments. This honestly didn’t give me the impression that Chris fully understood the licensing issue at hand, and that this was mainly about “me, me, me, my stuff, my work, me” (a vibe I had already got and didn’t like from his sites and marketing communication, the hyperbolic “I’m the best“, but I didn’t think it would translate that strongly into actual conversation.)

So, as you can guess — and whether the licensing issue actually stands or not — I’m looking for a new theme for Climb to the Stars. I think the one thing I really like about the Thesis layout is the multimedia box upper right, where I can randomly showcase my photos. I’m sure there are other themes out there doing that, or plugins.

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