Ree’s musings

Hi! It's been too long since I actually posted anything from inside Tabulas (those weird little title-only posts were from my cell phone), so I'm going to try sum up rather than cover everything.

I thought I would spend the summer being relatively lazy, roleplaying some online, catching up on various projects. That is so far from what actually happened that the two things are in different solar systems. What actually happened was I got signed on to provide part-time child care. And then more child care. And my out-of-town boyfriend moved back to his hometown, which is also where I live, so we saw each other often instead of just weekends.

All this happened before my choir director shanghaied (wait wait, "shanghaied" is how you actually spell that? Really? Well, if you say so, spellcheck - whoa what? "Shanghaied" is a word but "spellcheck" isn't? LOLWUT) - where was I? Ah. She shanghaied me into multiple things and since I have never, ever been mistakable for an organized person, my commitments quickly got away from me.

When I did get a spare moment online, I would stare at Tabulas' compose entry screen. I would go to the most recent entry on my friends page, click on that journal name, then click the feed icon in my browser. The feeds weren't updating since sometime in June (I see they're working now). And I would look at the Facebook "like" buttons all over Tabulas, wondering why it was more important to for me and other users to be able to "like" things on Facebook than to allow our own content to be syndicated into our Facebook Notes. I know that it must have been much easier to add the "like" button than to troubleshoot the reason the feeds weren't updated correctly, but it still cast a pall on my journal keeping.

So the feeds are fixed and here I am, but not before fixing up my Dreamwidth account and preparing to start fresh there. I don't know where that leaves me - if I should stick around Tabulas out of habit or loyalty, or if I should jump ship to Dreamwidth despite having some deep reservations about the way they do things there. Maybe I should journal GeoCities style, one static HTML page at a time. Or a pen and ink journal, scanned in as a gallery of indecipherable images!

I may end up crossposting via email: one copy to directly Dreamwidth, and another through Posterous to Tabulas. It's annoying to have to rejigger everything that way, but until Dreamwidth and Tabulas can crosspost from one to the other, it might be my best bet. Which means figuring out how to format email for both Dreamwith and Posterous. Awesome.

Ah well, if it were simple, I'd be less inclined to try it and I know it. Till later, good readers.

Tried to troubleshoot a DNS problem for someone else. Best I can figure, I can't fix and neither can they. The dev with the power to fix it knows about the problem. Knew five days ago. Still nothing. Not even "I'm still working on it." And the support docs on the subject are outdated enough to be perfectly useless.

Got bored. Went outside. Played mobile phone Tetris. Tried to update my blog (thereby updating my domain homepage, which updates whenever my blog RSS feed does). Blog updated, domain didn't. Blog updated but blog RSS feed did not. Tried editing entry and resaving. But the future RSS feed refused to change.

Got tetchy.

Think I'm all done internet today.

What's the deal, Tabulas? I know that some things don't crosspost to LJ, but what on Earth was in my last entry that borked the crosspost? I don't remember typing any multibyte characters.

Blargh. I'm genuinely glad Tabulas tells me that the crosspost failed. I'd rather know than think it went when it didn't. But in the last few months, LJ has choked on about half my crossposts. It's getting old. I don't have a clear enough idea of the problem to bring it up in LJ support. I don't think LJ gives a damn anyway, but if I knew the problem, I could at least bring it up at Dreamwidth. Probably they either have already fixed it or are interested in knowing the exact problem, to help them get it fixed. LJ, well, LJ just likes money.

I don't think the problem is on Tabulas' end, but I don't know where to ask for information about that, either. The forums are down (or at least not at the old URL), the wiki was never for one-to-one communication in the first place, Roy's not the owner anymore, I don't know who the new owner is or if they care....

Bah. Copy, open LJ tab, paste, post, find less vexing thing to do. Done.

Ah, it's this little guy: ♥ I forgot it was in there. I'd written the last paragraph first and then went back to build up to my point. That means the problem was a multibyte character, just as before, and I have an addiction to the stupid things. At least it's not some new problem.

I have discovered something fascinating.

My previous entry posted without problem, but stubbornly refused to crosspost to LiveJournal. I kept trying; no luck. I tried the only other service I had set up in Tabulas, DeadJournal; same result.

I wrote a concerned little note to Roy and a rather less cheerful one to my LJ page, explaining my problem. Then, I think, I went to bed or otherwise distracted myself.

Tonight, with nobody to babysit, I returned to my task. A new revelation dawned: perhaps the Song of the Cebú was to blame! Rather, its title, complete with accent. Some things just can't grasp UTF-8 encoding, which I think is what Tabulas uses.

So I removed the song title from my "Currently listening to" box and tried again to crosspost. Success! I hadn't actually expected that. After so many failures, I assumed the problem must be entirely out of my hands, but here we are.

Presumably this entry will not crosspost nicely either. Oh dear. I didn't think of that when starting out. Now that I know the issue, I can always edit the entry to omit the accent, crosspost, then replace the accent on all versions of the post. Tedious, certainly, but much better than a failure message.

Aha! Yes, more failure. Hilarious, now that I know the cause. My plan B worked nicely.