AWShine Hack is an upcoming hackathon put on by AWS through their “Amazon Women Shine” and “AWS Startup Community” groups. It’s going to be held on September 5-6 in Sydney (and September 19-20 in Melbourne). While the hackathon is open to all, priority will be giving to women entrepreneurs and developers. Pretty cool! I’m participating as a Business Mentor for the Sydney event and I’ll be handing out some Canva swag on the day. You should register now!
On top of this fascinating article having some awesome pictures, I would like to point out that “homunculus” is one of my favourite words.
They are pretty strange-looking, and it’s entirely intentional.
Source: Why babies in medieval paintings look like ugly old men
A happy belated FIFTEENTH(!) blog-birthday to Matt at Scrubbles! His blog is one that I’ve read, well, pretty much ever day for a decade and a half now. I’ve got “Mama Cat” on my bookshelf and several LitKids prints on my wall. After years of only knowing him through his blog, it was great to finally meet Matt (and Christopher!) when we drove through Phoenix in April of last year.
You may not know, but Matt actually created the web-goddess logo for me (a barter deal for a custom knitted scarf). His anniversary reminded me that my own milestone must be coming up soon. The oldest post at this site is actually from September 7, 2000, but it was originally from a separate blog that I started for alumnae of my college dorm. The first personal blog post I wrote was on January 7, 2001, which was hosted at web-goddess.co.uk since I was still living in London then. (Wow. Some Internet marketroid has got the domain now. At least it isn’t porn, I guess.) And hey, my first first mention of Scrubbles was on January 31, 2001…
Gosh, I feel old.
We’ve only ever had IKEA couches. Originally it was because we were still essentially students, unable to afford anything better. Then it was because we got cats who – despite every effort to dissuade them – love to shred furniture. I’ve had people tell me with straight faces that they spent thousands of dollars on their sofas, and I just shake my head and think Whaaaaat?!
A few years ago we got a two-seater Karlstad in Isunda Gray, which was fine except it wasn’t quite long enough for yours truly to sleep on. One day the Snook told me a colleague was selling a three-seater version in the same colour. We ended up buying it, intending on selling the old one… but somehow it just stayed. We arranged them like a pseudo-sectional, though we rarely sat on the small one. I was never quite happy with them though. This year I discovered two things: 1) it’s pretty easy to hack a Karlstad to look like a mid-century sofa; and 2) I really, really love my sister’s sofa with chaise. So I talked the Snook into selling the three-seater and getting a chaise unit for the two-seater, along with custom legs and a new cover.
I bought my custom tapered legs from Uncle Bob’s Workshop. (Note: We decided to only get 7 legs rather than 8. When you add the chaise unit to Karlstad, theoretically you end up with two legs RIGHT NEXT to each other in one corner, and we decided that was stupid. We reckoned rightly that you didn’t need the extra one on the chaise.) They arrived and they were beautiful. Then I ordered a range of fabric samples from Comfort Works, and we decided that the Herringbone Bark was our preferred choice. However, rather than rush to IKEA to buy a new chaise unit, I decided to wait and see if they went on sale (or someone was selling one on Gumtree). After all, we weren’t in any rush.
Then last weekend I asked the Snook to list the old three-seater on Gumtree. He went to the IKEA site to look up the current asking price. “Dude,” he said, in that tone that means Something Is Up. “It’s not on the site. I think it’s been discontinued.” WHAT?! Yes, the Karlstad has been discontinued entirely. D’OH! Suddenly the whole plan was at risk. I started messaging everyone selling a Karlstad + chaise on Gumtree, but they were all taken. Things looked dicey.
THEN! The Snook discovered someone selling a Karlstad + chaise who’d messed up and not put it in the Home & Garden category. I messaged her and to my delight it was still available. Coincidentally, someone messaged me at the same time wanting to buy both of our old couches. So it was going to work out! The only hitch was that we had to collect the new couch on Wednesday, but the old couches weren’t being picked up until Sunday. So we had several days with three sofas in our living room.
Anyway, here’s the end result.
New Karlstad with chaise, Parker coffee table, and Fler rocking chair
The new couch came with a reasonably decent dark grey cover, but I still think we’ll replace with the lighter grey one from Comfort Works. (The dark grey is covered in Amy cat’s hair already.) In front of it is our recently acquired vintage Parker coffee table, and that’s my Fler rocking chair on the side. And you can’t see it in that photo, but we swapped out those horrible legs for the beautiful tapered ones. So now at last things are starting to take shape! Just need to order the new cover and study up on how to tuft cushions…
Tapered mid-century legs from Uncle Bob’s workshop
Last week, I was going to upload some photos from the recent Girl Geeks event at Canva to my blog when I noticed a strange folder in my FTP directory called “PDFs.” Crap. Yep, my site had been hacked again. It was filled with PDFs for Viagra and all kinds of crap. (What the hell is even the point of that?!) This happened a few months ago and I worked with my host to lock it down, but obviously the exploit is still there. We’re not sure if it’s my code (which is pretty simple, really, mostly just writing and reading text from DB) or whether the shared server has been compromised. But it was just too much. I gave up, took the whole site down, and put up a holding page. I was through.
The next day I was having coffee with my friend John Allsopp, who asked me about it. (There were some rage tweets.) I told him I was mulling options. “Why don’t you use WordPress?” he said. What?! I’d never used WordPress before. For someone who’d written their own CMS, it seemed like cheating. And didn’t it get hacked all the time anyway? (Not that my CMS was doing much better.) He was like, “Look, I’m old school too but some stuff is just too much work.” So I started thinking about it, and then this weekend I took the plunge.
And here we are! I had a lot of fun figuring out how to import 13,000+ blog posts and 25,000+ comments. But I got there. The Snook helped me out with mod_rewrite so all my old post URLs should hopefully resolve to the new locations. Today I sorted out the theme, added some extra pages, and started categorising and tagging. (My CMS never had fancy things like that.) I got Instagram and Twitter auto-posts set up. I also moved over the sock monkey tutorial, as it was the most popular thing on the old site. I’ve still got heaps to do – all of my old photo pages are currently 404ing, for a start – but so far I like this. (Oh! And I’m on a new host too. I saw several people on MetaFilter recommending A Small Orange, so I figured I might as well make a clean break. RDF will remain on the old site until I can port it over.)
Comments are back on (for the time being). Any WordPress old-timers have any advice for me? Especially around hardening this thing. I’ve already implemented several security measures, but feel free to hit me with recommendations if you’ve got ’em. I was this sucker LOCKED DOWN.
I published this tutorial back in 2004, and it’s been pretty popular! I’ve now ported it over to my new site. You’re welcome to link to it, but please don’t reproduce without my permission.
