Category Archives: Blogkeeping

On the old version of this blog, each item had a little obvious permalink that you could copy and use to link to the item in question or send the link to someone else. We still have that even if it isn't as obvious. It's incorporated into the subject line. See up above where it says "A Much-Asked Question?" That's the link to this item.

Last night around 11:20, I posted a message here wishing Abe Vigoda a happy 91st birthday. I guess something about Abe upsets WordPress software because the system went kablooey and though I posted it once, that item wound up appearing about 200 times on this site before I got in and stopped things.

In doing repair work, I seem to have wiped out most of yesterday's postings…or maybe Abe did. Or something. Anyway, they were suddenly gone. I had some but not all of them backed-up and I've restored those, not necessarily in the right sequence. If anyone out there has a capture of this webpage for yesterday or some sort of download into an RSS reader, could you drop me a line and send me what you have? (I'm sure Abe screwed up some RSS feeds.) Thanks. And I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour, either. I'm going to bed now…

On my old website, I used to have a section called "Great Los Angeles Restaurants That Ain't There No More." It was all about great Los Angeles restaurants that ain't…well, you get the concept. I listed many, wrote about my experiences at them and featured visuals whenever I had visuals to feature.

That section ain't there no more…but fret not. It has been reborn as a new site, Old Los Angeles Restaurants (The Kind That Ain't There No More). This site is new and improved and I will be adding more and more old Los Angeles restaurants to it in the coming months. There are new listings and I've rewritten and added newly-acquired images to the old ones.

Unlike the old feature, this new website invites reader participation. The old feature drew some of the most hateful e-mails I've ever seen. When I post a political opinion here, as moderate and polite as I am in most of my views, I still get nasty messages from folks who are convinced that the world is doomed because the guy who writes Groo doesn't think Ron Paul is the savior of mankind. That's nothing compared to the mail you get if you write about old L.A. restaurants and omit (because you never went there or maybe even heard of it) the best local hamburger stand of the sixties. So from now on, I have a simple reply to those folks: If I didn't cover your favorite dining establishment, write up something and send it to me to post. We also invite comments and memories from those who remember the places I do write about.

If you didn't live in or around Los Angeles, this new site may be of zero interest to you. I'm not sure I'd care about a blog about old diners in Boise, Idaho. But if you still salivate at the mere mention of C.C. Brown's ice cream sundaes or Pizza Prince pizza…have I got a website for you!

Here's the latest on the ill health of this site. As you may recall, a hacker secretly installed two other sites within mine last November — one which sold counterfeit designer purses and one which sold little pills that make one's johnson less flexible. The all-knowing, all-seeing spider-people of Google delisted my site because from their point-o'-view, all that stuff was on my blog.

I purged the site of it all…which took a while as some of it was embedded deep within other files. I kept thinking I'd found it all, then I'd discover it elsewhere. As of last week, enough of it was out that one wing of Google relisted me. On parts of Google though, I still remain a site that sells medications to combat erectile dysfunction. This is largely because other sites infected with the same computer hacks still have links to the viagra-vending pages I removed from this site. There seems to be nothing I can do about that except to wait for those dead links to go away.

Meanwhile, my last problem (I hope my last) was with Google Reader, which many folks use to read this site. My Google Reader "feed" was full of spam so Google Reader would not read all that I post here. Where said spam was coming from was a mystery but after an investigation worthy of Ellery Queen, I found it and nuked it and now I think Google Reader will work.

I believe the hacker got into my site because I was then running a very old version of Movable Type. The MT people had long since stopped updating and supporting that version so as new security holes turned up in it, they were not patched or closed. I had not upgraded Movable Type because I was too busy, I didn't like the new pricing structure and I'd decided that I wanted to dump Movable Type anyway and switch to WordPress when I had the time. Everything that went wrong here seems to have been implanted before I did switch over to WordPress on New Year's Eve even though I didn't discover it all until after the change.

The management of this blog (i.e., me) apologizes for any inconvenience…and the fact that some systems still see the ghosts of the penis pill pages on Google and block access here. That should go away. Thanks also to those who wrote to offer suggestions and sympathy, especially Glenn Hauman.

Folks who try to read this site via Google Reader are still encountering problems doing so as new entries I post here are not accessible there. In case anyone cares, here's what the problem is…

I had, you might recall, a spam/virus/mess here. Someone broke into my site last year and unbeknownst to me, installed two "hidden" websites in its bowels. One sold drugs to make one's sexual organs firmer. The other sold bogus Prada and Louis Vuitton purses. I was unaware either was present but Google's "spiders" crawled this site, found them and decided newsfromme.com was a vendor of such illegalities. We were dropped from that all-powerful search engine.

I cleansed the site of the blight and installed new software and safeguards. I believe this site is spam-free…and parts of the vast Google empire concur and have relisted it. But other parts of Google haven't updated so they think the boner pill ads are still here when they aren't and won't let Google Reader read me. A fine friend named Glenn Hauman and I are attempting to solve this. Until we do, the problem will persist. If it persists for longer than four hours, call your doctor.

I am informed by a couple of folks that the RSS feed for this site is not working properly, at least not in Google Reader. I would ask my tech-savvy webmaster to get right on this except that my webmaster is me and I ain't so tech-savvy about RSS feeds and syndication and other stuff like that. I've fiddled with a few of them over the years before deciding that it was more organic and proper to just go to each site I like individually and read them on their premises.

Before I start trying to educate myself enough to fix this problem, I thought I'd ask: Is there anyone reading this who knows RSS and knows WordPress and can advise me what to do? For that matter, is there some other kind of syndication feed I should be offering here?

My e-mail suggests many of you are interested in my struggles with blogging software. The most recent problem has been with a program I was using to post messages to the old version of this blog. As you might imagine, I sometimes compose a message here and then don't post it. I switched my posting program over to post on the new newsfromme and it has recently been deciding to post my old, never-posted messages here. It put up an obit for someone who'd died a year ago. I took that down and, I thought, fixed things so it wouldn't happen again. It happened again. I took that one down and it put up the one about In-N-Out Burger moving into Texas. That one's a year old but it's still more-or-less valid so I left it up.

I'm pretty sure I've fixed it so it won't happen again. But if you see a message here where I fearlessly predict Arnold Schwarzenegger will never be governor of California, you'll know the reason.

Following the redesign and restart of this site, we've done makeovers on two of our other crannies on the web. When my pal Earl Kress passed away last September, I quickly put up a site about him at www.earlkress.com. It served its purpose but now that I've had the time to do something nicer at that address, it's now had a full makeover. Go take a look and read about a great guy that a lot of us miss a lot.

Also, I've given www.oldtvtickets.com a facelift and also, after a long period of neglect, begun posting new entries over there. The premise is pretty simple: I post a ticket to the taping, filming or live performance of a TV show (or occasionally, a radio program) and try to tell you a little something about the show. If that sounds like it could be fun, go see if it is.

While I've got you here: The archives for this weblog are all online and accessible through the right menu. Most of 'em are under "My Old Weblog" but as some have realized and written me, I don't yet have a search engine working for that section. I'll get to it, I'll get to it. Sorry for any inconvenience. I'm slowly working my way back into the good graces of Google so that may help you for now to locate a specific old post you seek.

I think this one was my fault. I went to post one message and instead, the software posted a year-old obituary. Please pay no attention to that if you saw it. That person did not die again.

Hey, whadda ya know? It's still up.

To those of you who came to this site earlier today: No, I probably wasn't "hacked" again. It was probably a continuation of the earlier hacks. Last November, someone got into my wing of the file server…and I'm not sure how they got in, though it appears to have been through the Steve Gerber site. They installed two "cloaked" sites here — websites running off my server but hidden deep within its files so I didn't know they were there. One sold prescription drugs — especially those designed to induce erections — and the other sold counterfeit Louis Vuitton, Prada and Balenciaga purses. I thought I'd cleaned all that stuff out but I apparently hadn't. They'd also planted little "time bomb" viruses designed to bring my site down, perhaps as punishment for deleting theirs. The virus-laden files crashed me a week or so ago. I cleaned out (I thought) the time bombs. Today, I was crashed again, apparently because I'd missed something. I have deleted more suspicious files and reinstalled much software and now I think I'm clean. But I thought that before.

I'm installing additional security and scanning every damn file on the server and let's see if I've gotten it all now. I think I have but will not be surprised if this site crashes again soon. So don't you be surprised.

If you came to this page earlier today, God knows what you saw. I had the yellow background up until about 10 AM when I changed it to blue…and I foolishly thought to myself, "Ah, all my configuration problems are done." Around 10:45, for reasons I'm sure were unrelated to the backgrounds, the whole site crashed.

During the restoration work, the site looked incomplete for a while. Then it was offline for a while. Then when it came back up, it was the old design and the most recent entry was from New Year's Eve. Then it was off again. Then it was this look but with one message telling all that I was working on it. And now I think it's back and correct. Deep exhale.

I'd take full credit for this masterstroke of technological know-how but a lot of it was made possible by a nice lady who really knows her job well. Her name is Jennifer and she works in tech support for Dreamhost, the company on which I host my many domains. Remember yesterday when I was complaining about companies where the employees don't know anything? Well, this is the opposite.

So…thanks to Jennifer and things should be copacetic from here on out. Until something else goes wrong.