ctts – Climb to the Stars

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.

What Are Your Favourite Climb to the Stars Articles? [en]

In less than a week, Climb to the Stars is going to turn 10. That’s quite a ripe old age for a blog! On that occasion, I’d like to give you the occasion to let other readers know what your favourite (and most shareworthy) Climb to the Stars articles are.

I’ll create a post with all your recommendations and publish it on the 13th.

So, amongst the 2339 published posts (including this one) on this blog, which are the three (or two, or one) that you would like to make other people read — or which left the biggest mark for you? Use the form below to tell me. You can also add a paragraph at the end to explain your choice, and I’ll publish it too, alongside your recommendations (and leave your blog URL so I can link back to you!)

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Thanks for helping CTTS have a nice blogversary!

WordPress 3.0 Installed [en]

Painless. That’s how I like my upgrades. This blog now runs WordPress 3.0, and if I were rewriting Basic Bilingual (which I’m not, for the moment: if it ain’t broke…) I would most certainly take advantage of the custom post types or simply custom taxonomies to do so.

I’m looking at moving away from FeedBurner so if you’re subscribed to the feedburner feed, you might want to head over the http://climbtothestars.org/feed/ instead. I’m still looking for a good plugin to give me feed stats (or send them over to Google Analytics, is that possible?) inside WordPress. I’m trying FeedStats right now but it’s too early to say if it does what I want.

I’ll also be seperating out my del.icio.us links from the Climb to the Stars feed (again, is there a plugin that would also me to turn http://delicious.com/steph into a daily feed rather than per item?)

For those of you who receive these articles by e-mail (I know you’re there, yes!), you will shortly be migrated over to MailChimp — but don’t worry, it should be transparent and painless for you.

The Good Idea That's Not Working [en]

[fr] Proposer à mes lecteurs de voter sur les sujets qu'ils aimeraient que je traite ne semble pas fonctionner pour moi. En rendant ma liste d'idées publique, je l'ai en quelque sorte stérilisée -- je m'en suis dépossédée. Et je blogue mieux de façon un peu impulsive qu'en suivant un programme.

Two months ago I stumbled upon Scott Berkun’s blog and thought his Reader’s Choice series was a really great idea. (I’m reading his book “The Myths of Innovation” right now, by the way, and highly recommend you do so too.)

I decided to give it a try myself, and quickly created a slinkset account for CTTS which I pre-populated with my long list of blogging ideas, which had until then been sitting in a note in Evernote (I’m still in love with it, by the way). The idea was that I would pick the most popular topic twice a month and blog about it, which I have done twice so far.

So obviously, this isn’t really working for me. The fact I mismanaged my commitments for May and June (which means my calendar is bursting at the seams) clearly doesn’t help me keep the schedule, but I’ve noticed another side-effect: moving my “blogging ideas” out of evernote and into slinkset has actually killed that list for me. I think it’s made it scary. How come? I can think of a few reasons:

the list is now in big bold text
it’s not as easy to edit: each idea now feels like a commitment, rather than a quickly-jotted-down note
it’s public, so I self-censor (not much, but I do a little)
ideas are rated, so suddenly I feel that I’m blogging more for others and less for myself (blogging mainly for oneself is, in my opinion, one of the keys to a successful and long-lasting blogging career)
I’m supposed to pick the more popular idea twice a month, so I don’t feel free to explore the other less popular ones in the meantime.

So, all in all, I’m not sure making that list public was a great move for my blogging. Also, I think that pre-populating the slinkset list (an attempted “improvement — hah! — on Scott’s original idea) was the best way to kill community-generated contributions. (Plus, of course, my readership is somewhat more modest than Scott’s.)

Where do I go from now? I like the idea that readers of this blog can suggest ideas and vote on them. On the other hand, I’m aware that CTTS readers form a “following” rather than a “community”, and I think this kind of system is more suited to communities than followings.

I think I need to put my blogging ideas back in Evernote to reclaim them. I’ve always blogged best when I do it on impulse rather than schedule (I get an itch, which then becomes an urge to blog about this or that).

Do you have any thoughts on all this? I’d love to hear them.

Digital Spring Cleaning [en]

[fr] Nouveau design pour Digital Crumble, et quelques nettoyages de printemps pour Climb to the Stars (notez l'allègement du menu de navigation et des barres latérales, et l'apparition d'un gros pied de page truffé de liens et d'infos.

I’ve played about a bit with Climb to the Stars and Digital Crumble. It’s nice to dip one’s hands in a little HTML, CSS and PHP every now and again.

So, what have we got?

Digital Crumble has a brand new design. Whiter than the last one, but with enough pink to make me happy. (I customized it just a little.)

As for Climb to the Stars, the sad state of my sidebars had been bringing me down for months, so I finally decided to do something about it. I found a tutorial for adding a fat footer to Thesis and tried it out. I have to say that one thing I like about the Thesis theme I’m using here is the number of tutorials lying around to make just about any customization you can think of.

So, a lot of stuff that used to clutter up the sidebars is now in the fat footer at the bottom of each page.

While I was at it, I decided to have only one sidebar instead of two, and cleaned up the navigation bar at the top (most of the extra stuff is now in the footer). I also found a tutorial for moving the search form into the site header (and out of the sidebar!)

I had to fiddle around with both tutorials (mainly the CSS) until I got something I liked. I hope you’ll like it too!

What Should I Blog About? Have Your Say [en]

[fr] Une expérience: faites des suggestions et votez sur les prochains sujets que vous aimeriez que j'aborde dans ce blog! Anglais et français, bien entendu. 🙂

This is an experiment, utterly and totally ripped off from what Scott Berkun is doing on his blog with his Reader’s Choice series.

As many of you know, my problem is not finding ideas to write about. My problem is that I have too many. I have a long list of blog post ideas in Evernote which I dip in every now and again when I feel like blogging and don’t have an immediate idea (which is not that often, to be honest — not the “feel like blogging” bit, the “don’t have an idea” one).

So, here’s the deal. I’ve opened a Slinkset site called What do you want to read about next on CTTS? — I’ve started populating it with my blog post ideas. I would like to invite you to vote on the topics and add your own suggestions. You don’t even have to sign up, it’s really easy!

A couple of times a month, I’ll make sure I blog about the most popular topic. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works 🙂

2009 Has Been a Good Year For Me [en]

[fr] Bonne année! Le cru 2009 a été excellent, je me réjouis de goûter 2010!

2009 has been a very good year for me. I expect 2010 to continue in the same direction, and be even better.

With that, I will soon have written my first post for 2010, and am therefore freed of the worry to say something meaningful to start the blogging year (which will mark the 10th anniversary of this blog, by the way) — be it about what 2009 meant for me, the world, or worse, what the last decade was about.

10 years ago exactly, I was in India, and that seems like yesterday and a long long long time ago.

Your normal programme here on CTTS will resume shortly. Happy New Year everybody!

More Musings on My Blogging [en]

I’ve been a blogger for the better part of my adult life. At 34 this summer, I’ll have spent 9 years of my life writing in this blog (which started its life as Tara Star’s Weblog) — and you can add to that an extra year of online publication experience before I discovered Blogger.

I have never really tried to accomplish much with my blog: it’s really mainly a place for me to dump stuff in written form, reaching a certain number of people who happen to read it every now and again. Though I do try to “think of the reader” to some extent when I write, it’s probably obvious to most of you that I have not put a huge amount of effort into tailoring my blog to make it as successful as possible (define “successful”, while you’re at it).

In that respect, I’m a bit of an anti-ProBlogger. Not that I have anything against Darren at all — he seems to be doing good stuff, but… well, I guess I just can’t be bothered.

The result, I’ll admit, is that CTTS is not exactly very reader-friendly: long periods with nothing, then spurts of posts during a week or two, huge long unreadable essays, and don’t get me started on categories and cross-post navigation in general. It also doesn’t do the best job it could of showcasing my writing and expertise (as my most valuable or important stuff is drowned amongst the over 2000 posts).

So, in a way, despite the modest success CTTS has attracted over the years, I tend to consider myself a Bad Blogger. Not that I don’t know how to do it (I do it for my clients pretty well)… but I wouldn’t say I’m a role-model 😉

All this to tell you that I’ve realised, again, that the less you blog… the less you blog. Specially when you have a tendency to write long-winded essay-like posts that take days (or at least a full whole day) to write. Blogging, for me, used to be about jotting down quick tidbits, Tumblr-like, and I keep having to drag myself back into that here on CTTS, because otherwise I just remain stuck not writing posts about Big Ideas and Serious Research. When I do things, I like to do things well. It’s a disease some call perfectionism, and it gets in the way of doing things — I’m mostly cured but I relapse regularly.

When I don’t blog, it’s not that I’ve run out of things to say. It’s usually that I have so many things to say I don’t have the time to do it properly. So I don’t. Because maybe a part of me would like to be a Good Blogger, writing well-researched and well-built posts, and Getting It Right.

Once again, then: back to the messy writing you’re used to see around here. Oh, and if you have suggestions for 20 or so categories in which to sort my posts… I’m listening.

Tag: ctts

2009 Has Been a Good Year For Me [en]

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