I am evil and I gloat and am catty
Feb. 24th, 2011 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
botiasI was volunteer webmistress for a local org for a number of years. A few months ago they let me know, kindly, that my services were no longer needed as they had a shiny new volunteer who had promised them all kinds of goodies. They even gave me a free year's membership as a golden handshake and it was all good. A more closely involved volunteer was good move for them as I was only peripherally involved with the organization any longer.
The shiny new volunteer has been lame. I am evil, for I am gloating. The new guy ditched ALL of the old (custom) code and replaced it with a WordPress site. That's fine except that the spiffy new web person (he's a pro you know) apparently doesn't know diddly about .htaccess files and 301 redirects because he jettisoned all of the organization's excellent search engine rankings along with the old page addresses. Also, the one-size-fits-all template has lots o' unnecessary HTML and a tiny bit of actual content. This is bad for rankings. Please allow me this gloating. I bought a house in Sept. 2005 which shows you how unworthy I am to criticize anyone for not being all-knowing, yet it may also illustrate how much I am in need of free entertainment.
This was all called to my attention today because the new webmaster's wife (?) emailed me. It seems that some very old info on our server, that used to be buried in the rankings, is showing up as the top ranked page now that most of my old pages have dropped off and the new ones have failed to take their place. She was expecting that the new site would rise to the top once we got rid of this old data.
I made it inaccessible right away, but explained that this would only increase the rankings of the new pages by one and suggested doing some forwarding.
In other news, I am enjoying The Scarlet Pimpernel. It's not like 'wow' everyone go out and read it, but it's nice classic fluff that I probably would have liked even more as an early adolescent.
I planted four varieties of poppies around the first of February and all of them have sprouted. So far so good! And the agrostemma I planted in November looks very happy. I planted it way too densely in my inexperience and have been shifting little plants to other spots around the garden. They don't care for this, pouting even when I take a big root ball with them, but a good rain seems to restore their good humor. However I have been too chicken to plant the fancy seeds I bought and spoke about. This must change! Odds of germination are certainly better in my inexperienced hands than leaving them in their little envelopes. Mostly I've worked on my tenant's yard lately, planting some landscaping shrubs that should provide them some privacy in a few years and also provide birds with berries and habitat, and there's also a blueberry bush and a native huckleberry in the mix that might provide some fruit to people.
I spent the last of a gift windfall on four 'Sunshine Blue' blueberry bushes for my own yard. These are just spectacularly lovely to me as foliage plants. They are evergreen and right now the cold has made the leaves purple/rose/bronze. They are blue-green the rest of the year with lots of tasty berries. I hired a 'gardening coach' with money from selling a book on animation that had turned hard-to-find and valuable since I bought it, and she gave me some interesting suggestions and has inspired me to create more 'year round interest' i.e. the blueberry bushes. I also added another artichoke at her suggestion which are very cheap bareroot right now and are really neat looking in the winter/early spring when other stuff is dormant.
Now it's time to go to the beach I think. I heard a rumor that it's snowing on the coast about 45 minutes drive to the north and that's a once-in-a-decade-if-that phenom around here.
The shiny new volunteer has been lame. I am evil, for I am gloating. The new guy ditched ALL of the old (custom) code and replaced it with a WordPress site. That's fine except that the spiffy new web person (he's a pro you know) apparently doesn't know diddly about .htaccess files and 301 redirects because he jettisoned all of the organization's excellent search engine rankings along with the old page addresses. Also, the one-size-fits-all template has lots o' unnecessary HTML and a tiny bit of actual content. This is bad for rankings. Please allow me this gloating. I bought a house in Sept. 2005 which shows you how unworthy I am to criticize anyone for not being all-knowing, yet it may also illustrate how much I am in need of free entertainment.
This was all called to my attention today because the new webmaster's wife (?) emailed me. It seems that some very old info on our server, that used to be buried in the rankings, is showing up as the top ranked page now that most of my old pages have dropped off and the new ones have failed to take their place. She was expecting that the new site would rise to the top once we got rid of this old data.
I made it inaccessible right away, but explained that this would only increase the rankings of the new pages by one and suggested doing some forwarding.
In other news, I am enjoying The Scarlet Pimpernel. It's not like 'wow' everyone go out and read it, but it's nice classic fluff that I probably would have liked even more as an early adolescent.
I planted four varieties of poppies around the first of February and all of them have sprouted. So far so good! And the agrostemma I planted in November looks very happy. I planted it way too densely in my inexperience and have been shifting little plants to other spots around the garden. They don't care for this, pouting even when I take a big root ball with them, but a good rain seems to restore their good humor. However I have been too chicken to plant the fancy seeds I bought and spoke about. This must change! Odds of germination are certainly better in my inexperienced hands than leaving them in their little envelopes. Mostly I've worked on my tenant's yard lately, planting some landscaping shrubs that should provide them some privacy in a few years and also provide birds with berries and habitat, and there's also a blueberry bush and a native huckleberry in the mix that might provide some fruit to people.
I spent the last of a gift windfall on four 'Sunshine Blue' blueberry bushes for my own yard. These are just spectacularly lovely to me as foliage plants. They are evergreen and right now the cold has made the leaves purple/rose/bronze. They are blue-green the rest of the year with lots of tasty berries. I hired a 'gardening coach' with money from selling a book on animation that had turned hard-to-find and valuable since I bought it, and she gave me some interesting suggestions and has inspired me to create more 'year round interest' i.e. the blueberry bushes. I also added another artichoke at her suggestion which are very cheap bareroot right now and are really neat looking in the winter/early spring when other stuff is dormant.
Now it's time to go to the beach I think. I heard a rumor that it's snowing on the coast about 45 minutes drive to the north and that's a once-in-a-decade-if-that phenom around here.
