Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Tag: blog

New URL: blog.slackware.nl

August 17, 2025 / / 15 Comments

Me

Hi all.
It was time to migrate my blog to a new server. The URL ‘alien.slackbook.org/blog/’ has changed to ‘blog.slackware.nl’.

For years, my hosting server has been https://harrier.slackbuilds.org/ – ever since I had to move away from the original host, the slackware.com server (Pat does not trust PHP code).
I am eternally grateful to the team of people (Robby Workman and friends) who purchased its hardware and have been maintaining it in a US datacenter for all that time. They gave me full root rights over my virtual machine. Also many thanks to Teklinks for offering colocation and bandwidth!
Check out harrier‘s frontpage to get an idea of all the Slackware community services are hosted on that iron.

But the QEMU VM which runs on harrier and which essentially hosted my blog, is still on Slackware 14.2. Over time I had to upgrade httpd, mariadb and php to keep the WordPress code happy, but now WordPress is again nagging me about not having PHP 8 and to be honest, Slackware 14.2 has not received security updates for two years now. I am not feeling comfortable with that.
I had a short chat with Robby and he indicated that there’s just too much to be done and too little time to do it. I fully understand that and I have not bothered him with my worries.

I decided to migrate the blog to a new Slackware -current host. I have done a few trial runs over the years; it is not trivial to move a WordPress blog to a new domain and at the same time to a new host. But I think I figured out the challenges and ironed out the kinks.

Also, this was a good opportunity to reconsider the hosting location. Harrier runs in a US datacenter. I am not at all happy with the racist and autocratic direction the US is taking under Trump and his MAGA cult. I’ve seen people being detained and/or sent back at airport border control checkpoints simply because they have written online posts that are unfavorable to Trump. Look at my previous posts here on the blog – I will not attempt to enter the US as long as Trump is its dictator. And therefore it makes sense to choose the European Union as the new location for my blog server.

Welcome to blog.slackware.nl! Please update your bookmarks.
I am creating a redirect for alien.slackbook.org/blog/ to get that forwarded to the new URL, but it never hurts to spread the word to your friends.

Cheers, Eric

I switched the blog’s theme

December 28, 2023 / / 16 Comments

A blog  is something personal, and theming it just right is a challenge. You’ll surely have noticed that the theme of Alien Pastures has been changed overnight.

This blog started out with a theme by Andreas Viklund (wp-andreas01) but that did not scale well on mobile devices, also it did weird stuff with user comments. I liked its visual quality a lot but the usability challenges were not fixable even by rummaging around in its code.
Eventually I replaced that with a new theme by Rajeeb Banstola (techism) but during my recent WordPress blog-code update I realized that this techism theme had not been updated for years, the author’s website has disappeared and the Freemius SDK from which that theme is created has a XSS vulnerability. Real shame because I thought it was beautiful, light, responsive and it fixed the user comment issues I mentioned previously.

So I have used my December holiday to look for another theme, experimenting with several, but I wanted to end with one that at a minimum allows me to have two columns: one for the articles and one as a sidebar with widgets showing all kinds of permanent info. Three columns was what I had with wp-andreas01 and techism, but I could live without one of the two sidebars.

I finally found a theme collection created by Anders Norén. On his page teman he showcases several that I find appealing, but after some experimenting I chose his Lovecraft and Hemingway themes over Baskerville. I kept the visual style of the new theme as close as possible to the old one (header image, top menu, sidebar widgets etc).
A note about the header image – that one has changed a few times over the years. I always use a picture I have taken myself and I rotate them on occasion.

At the bottom I was able to add three widgets that otherwise would have gone into a left sidebar. I think it’s cleaner now. Plus, one of these bottom widgets shows posts that have been most popular during recent weeks. That’s always interesting information to you (visitors), previously I would be the only one with that overview – it shows in the blog’s admin dashboard.

I am still undecided whether Hemingway or Lovecraft will make it as my final choice. Hemingway theme shows the number of comments to each article and it’s visually somewhat more condensed. Lovecraft on the other hand is aesthetically more pleasing to my eye.

I hope you like and appreciate the change and the new interface does not pose any difficulty writing and posting your comments. Feel free to comment below of course!

Cheers, Eric

Alien Pastures is moving soon

November 18, 2017 / / 14 Comments

The URL for my blog is going to change.

I need to have full control over my content. At this moment I do not own the server my blog is running on, and I do not own the domain.
To prevent running into weird situations down the road – for whatever reasons – the blog will move from its current location to https://blog.alienbase.nl/ soon.
I will of course configure an automatic redirect from the current to the new URL to ease the transition.

The current url (blog.slackware.nl) may not be available forever after the migration, so it is best is if you already bookmark the new URL – a placeholder page is waiting there.

If your browser complains about not trusting the CaCert organization then follow the steps outlined in a previous article “adding CaCert root certificates to your Slackware” to silence these warnings.

New SQLite driver for the blog

January 2, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Ever since this blog’s inception I have used a plugin called “PDO for WordPress” which allowed me to have a SQLite (file-based) database instead of the default MySQL database used by WordPress.

There are a couple of bugs in PDO for WordPress that I was getting tired of, and perhaps some of the people writing comments have been annoyed too, when their post failed to show up on the blog. Most notorious bug was that any text containing the two characters ) and ‘ immediately after eachother would silently be discarded by the driver… the only way to get your precious text back was to hit your browser’s “Back” button and try to find out what was wrong with the text.

The PDO for WordPress plugin has not been maintained for a while, mostly because the development pace of the WordPress code was faster than the PDO for WordPress author could manage. Some of the bugs were addressed with patches, but these were never incorporated into a new release.

I was finally so irritated with this that I was going to attempt to apply these patches to my own blog. Luckily, I did my research properly and I ran into a new plugin that can replace the old PDO for WordPress plugin: it is called “SQLite Integration“. This plugin uses PDO just like the old one.

Remember, PDO stands for PHP Data Objects. Quoting the PHP manual: “PDO provides a data-access abstraction layer, which means that, regardless of which database you’re using, you use the same functions to issue queries and fetch data. PDO does not provide a database abstraction; it doesn’t rewrite SQL or emulate missing features“. This is what allows the use of a different database than MySQL and at the same time is the cause of the bugs in my blog – there are incompatibilities in the way WordPress creates SQL queries (targeted at MySQL syntax which does not always work for SQLite).

Interesting enough, the discussion among the WordPress developers about the possible use of PDO has been revived now that the  mysql_* functions are officially deprecated in PHP 5.4.

This new SQLite Integration plugin will work with versions of WordPress starting with 3.3. My blog is at the latest 3.8 release so that is OK.  Thus I proceeded to do the installation of the plugin and re-configuration of the blog, following the instructions (I always RTFM before applying irreversible changes – and make a full backup too 😉

As you can see, the blog is still here. I have not checked whether the text entry bugs have gone now, but at least I am running on a well-maintained database driver again.

Eric

Covert spam

August 7, 2009 / / 2 Comments

I run this blog without the illusion that it will make me any money. But I know there are many people trying to make a good amount of cash by maintaining a “popular” blog. What defines popular? Having a lot of “backlinks” i.e. other sites refferring to (linking to) your blog is a measure of how popular you are. Being popular creates income – a small percentage of visitors are likely to click through on advertisements on your site. The more visitors you get, the bigger the cash flow.

It seems that it is becoming more fashionable for other bloggers to actively work on increasing their own blog’s  popularity. How they do that? Simple: by visiting other blogs and leaving a comment there which contains a link to their own blog… thus creating these highly desired backlinks themselves.

I have found several of these comments on my own blog, and I will delete such postings if if I think they were only added here to generate income for that other web site. I hate doing this, but hey, come on!

Eric

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