I try not to get too political on this site — that’s what Twitter, personal conversations and Facebook groups are for — but the state of poverty across the world is something that I think is fundamentally important. When I was in the 11th grade, I joined the Model United Nations program at my school. For the next two years, I researched international events and policies and participated in various MUNs across the country. It was a life changing experience and it helped shape my ideologies today.

The real benefit of something like MUN is that you have to consider policies and world affairs from the perspective of another country. While in MUN, I represented India, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and Turkey. Although the UK has more closely aligned views to that of the United States (I tend to prefer the UK’s views, personally), studying and “representing” each nation helped shape my global perspective, and led me to learn much more about the rest of the world.

When most of us think of poverty, we think of third or fourth-world nations, you know, the Sally Struthers commercials. We think of a far away problem that is sad, but you know, ultimately not something that affects us directly.

Except it does. Beyond the poverty that exists in our own backyards (and as someone who lives in Atlanta and used to be downtown on a daily basis, we have more than our fair share of homeless citizens), the poverty that exists overseas, in all countries, has an effect on the world economy as a whole. Fair trade, forgiveness of debt, fighting against totalitarian regimes, these can all help the problem — but fundamentally, I believe that the greatest weapon against poverty, in the US and abroad is education.

When you look at socioeconomic gaps in the United States, and we have become a country that is less divided by race and instead divided by class, improving education is what always helps those areas turn around and thrive. Education continues to get cut from the national and state budgets, but because most of the areas cut are in lower socioeconomic areas, many regular Americans really don’t see its decline in person.

Because my mother works for a public school system, I have had the opportunity to observe the differences in funding in the same county, just based on districts (which are almost always divided by socio-economics). A particularly bad school district in Gwinnett County started to get some new expensive neighborhoods about seven or eight years ago. Because heaven-forbid, the rich white children assimilate with the black and brown kids from the wrong side of the tracks, a whole new high school was created just for the families with money. Meanwhile, the existing high school continued to languish.

I was very critical of many aspects of Gwinnett County’s Board of Education while I was a student (K-12), but after volunteering at inner-city schools for my college sorority, seeing the state of their equipment, seeing the size of the classes, basically seeing Season 4 of “The Wire” in person — I was even more grateful for my suburban upbringing.

I’m really not trying to get too intellectual in this post (I just don’t have the energy), but the best way I know of fighting poverty is to vote for change. Vote for better education. Vote for a fair system of health care that does not discriminate against people that have pre-existing conditions (or that, like me, suffer from Major Depression — I can’t get insurance that costs less than $500 a month because I take Effexor. How fucked up is that? And without the insurance, my medication alone would be over $2000 a month. As it stands, even with insurance I pay $180 on top of my monthly premium. Because my serotonin levels are fucked up). Vote for more fair tax plans.

Many people equate social programs with socialism. That’s bullshit. It isn’t socialism to want the advantage that the elite have over the weak. It isn’t about giving the poor an extra-advantage, it’s about making the playing field fair. America has never had a free market and we never will. Free markets are a great idea in theory, but in practice there have to be regulations so that people don’t cheat.

We have a government for a reason. And it isn’t just to spend $100 Billion a month on wars that we aren’t winning and situations that we aren’t helping. I met a soldier on leave while at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in March — he said flat-out that we weren’t helping, that things weren’t improving and that the situation was at an impasse. It wasn’t that he and his comrades didn’t want to help, the process just prevented them from doing anything. He was younger than I am. He is a hero, and he deserves to be at home or on a mission that has a chance for success.

Vote to show the government that they need to do more than just pump money into a military disaster. That they need to do more than just step-in after financial disaster is already taking place. That education should be a priority and that No Child Left Behind just means teaching the test and cheating the system for cash, not actually solving the problem.

Vote. I don’t care if you vote for John McCain — even if I do strongly oppose his positions and policies. I don’t care if you vote for Barack Obama, a candidate I support fully and think will bring this country back on track. I don’t care if you vote for a third-party candidate. Just please, vote.

Here are two guys that are my age (actually, I think they are younger) who are truly doing something to get the message out and make sustainability more than just a buzzword. Go to MakeMeSustainable.com and consider signing up for your own profile (you can even link it with your Facebook or OpenID account). It’s really easy to fill out your basic carbon profile and then pledge (or commit to things you already do) to reduce the amount of carbon you emit each year. Via Twitter, Steve Lawson (@solobasssteve) told me about a similar site based in the UK, A Year of Living Generously.

I’m not going to lie, these guys absolutely made me blush. Movie star handsome AND smart. Yeah, I totally, totally love my job. Apologies to David and Ben for any sexual harassment — what can I say, I’m human!

Two other interviews that I really, really enjoyed (and haven’t already posted) were the adorable Chris Saad from DataPortability.org (see it here) and the always dynamic Gary Vaynerchuk from WinelibraryTV (see it here).

And while I’m in SXSWi recap mode — I didn’t get to interview Sunir and Saul from Freshbooks.com (I was running the camera — hence you can blame me for the bounciness — hey, a director is NOT a DP (unless you are Soderbergh…)!!) but meeting them and hearing their story was great. That’s a company I want to do business with. And interviewing Kevin Marks from Google OpenSocial was a true honor — and a great way to end what ended up being one of the best weeks of my life.

Out!

The net result? Jasonstealmycohost.com OK, I’ll admit it’s pretty badass (I was asleep with a migraine when all the actual creation and tweeting about the scheme took place). It was all in good fun, and a total joke — until Calacanis pulled his whole, Mahalo Daily Idol thing. And you KNOW how much I love American Idol.

So, we’ve decided to go one step further (I might not be a New Media Douchebag, but I’m a New Media Diva, to be sure) and this afternoon, we made this:

Yeah. I’m officially here to play. Bring it bitches!

And go to Jasonstealmycohost.com and leave a comment there (or here) if you want to join Team Christina (or really, Team film_girl!

So, earlier this week I posted about how successful my WordPress 2.5 move was — and it was — and talked about how I was going to be moving to Media Temple. Well, that move didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped — but in ways that were pretty much all my fault. I figured I would take the time to share what I did correctly, and what I totally fucked up in doing — in the hopes that some other people might be saved some headache/heartache.

To start, I should provide some background. Back in November of 2003, 1and1 was making its big US debut and they offered 3 years of free hosting (including, I believe, a domain name — for one year) for free to people who signed up under some special plan. Now, at the time, I had been paying for my domain, filmmania.net for about three or four years (I can’t remember if I signed up for it the summer of 1999 or 2000, probably 2000) because I was like, “hells yeah, I’m finally going to create my awesome web site” and then it was just a custom e-mail address for like 3 years. So I signed up, thinking that I would actually do something this time. I’m a huge liar, as it took ANOTHER FOUR YEARS for me to get off my ass. I’m awesome. In that four years, I’ve gone from the free package to the Home package to the Business package. All without doing anything but storing my MP3s and legally (coughyeah, rightcough) obtained software on the server.

Although I had never been fond of 1and1’s tech support, or lack thereof, I had seldom actually needed to contact them. I figured I would see how my blog was doing, evaluate my hosting needs, blah blah blah. Well, other than some ugly downtime in January — and the increasing unreliability of their mail servers (which used to be freaking fantastic — now I’m stuck using Google Apps, which I really don’t love — but am thinking about paying for a good mail only account somewhere to host my MX tables…whatever), the service has remained fine. Not great, but fine.

When I decided to launch an upcoming video project, I knew I wanted to be with a more reliable host — and not on the typical shared hosting system. To me, it was worth paying twice as much a month do that (in truth, if it ever comes down to it, I’ll freaking get a dedicated server and manage it myself — I’d rather not, but I’ll do that — I’m frugal, but not cheap, especially when it comes to services — and I stayed with 1and1 more because I had been there for SO long rather than the price), so I signed up with Media Temple at the end of February.

My biggest fear in canceling my 1and1 account was retaining my domains. In addition to the three package provided domains I had as part of my Business packages, I had four or five other domains and the instructions from 1and1 were ambiguous at best in terms of cancelling hosting but not domain registration. Plus, Google turned up plenty of horror stories. In order to limit the fallout of canceling my account as much as possible, I created a new “domain only” 1and1 account and started to migrate all my domains there. This is why most of my domains just lead to a landing page. I need to create a new one in Media Temple and direct them all to that directory/DNS, but whatever. Over the last month, I went ahead and migrated every URL over to the domain only account, got Google Apps to handle e-mail, blah blah blah. The last one to remain was christinawarren.com — which was still on my 1and1 hosting account. So I had to transfer it to the new domain only 1and1 account (what, they have great domain prices and I’m fine with keeping them there) and then change the name severs to Media Temple and blah blah blah. Hence, I knew downtime would be coming.

OK, sorry for making you read all of that — for the actual crux of the post,

Although I had planned for the extended DNS downtime (I had no way to access the refresh time on the DNS server), backed up my MySQL database from 1and1 and prepared to move swiftly, I still made some mistakes.

1. Not realizing that my WordPress URL settings would affect where the site itself was directed — meaning, that while I was waiting for the DNS to update, I couldn’t have my blog already in place because my database back-up just re-directed to christinawarren.com, which was still not resolving. What I SHOULD have done was backup the important tables, posts, pages, comments, etc. and skipped users and wp-config settings. That way I could have manually changed that after the DNS resolved, but still had access to my site and known what everything looked like. Instead, I had to wait for the DNS to resolve to the new address and then configure the blog — this was problematic because…
2. The backup that I had from my site (WordPress runs an automatic backup thanks to this plugin and e-mails me the MySQL file every Sunday morning) was done prior to my WordPress 2.5 upgrade. This wasn’t hugely problematic, but it meant that my easiest course of database backup was missing my most recent entry/comment. I actually hadn’t planned on using this backup at all, I just figured I’d dump the MySQL database from my other phpAdmin setup and reimport, as I have on my MAMP installs. This was compounded by the fact that the export I did from my old MySQL database wouldn’t import properly at first. I was a dumbass and didn’t realize I had to comment out (or just delete) the “create database name XXX” line at the beginning of the file, so that my new phpAdmin would be able to accept it. What I SHOULD have done was run a complete backup, including all plugin tables BEFORE ever changing the DNS entries. Upon first running into the MySQL import error (and at that point, I was even having problems importing the older backup from Sunday that I had NOT intended on using), I did something VERY, VERY stupid:
3. I changed the DNS/nameservers back to 1and1. It only took an hour or so to propagate — I figured switching it back wouldn’t be that time consuming and then I could do a proper backup. In theory, this would have made sense. But remember that whole part about how I switched my domain name to a domain only package? Yeah. BIG MISTAKE. Big. Huge. (that’s from Pretty Woman, by the way) It didn’t take long for me to realize that I couldn’t just point the DNS back to 1and1 because at this point, my domain was no longer on the same account as the hosted files — and trying to set it at its hosted directory on the OTHER account was painful and while probably technically possible, no fun whatsoever. Huge mess. Huge, huge mess. I thought I would be able to get it to point at another site, the one domain that was still ostensibly linking to my 1and1 hosted files (meaning I’d just redirect christinwarren.com to boxtopfilms.com which was pointed at the WordPress directory on my host), but the fact that WordPress was setup thinking that christinawarren.com was the blog’s URL caused the site to redirect from boxtopfilms back to christinawarren.com which then just redirected back to itself in an endless loop. So I couldn’t access the admin page of WordPress to do an in-blog backup and my website was just a mess of redirects to itself with massive errors for anyone visiting. I changed the name servers BACK to Media Temple, wanting to forget the whole nastiness every happened. At this point, I went to bed

When I woke up Friday, I was able to retry uploading my backup MySQL database and that got things working, I was just missing the entry from Sunday morning. Later that afternoon, Grant informed me that I needed to comment out stuff to get the MySQL working properly, I successfully got the full file up in a new database, switched databases, and voila.

So, in short:

*Don’t compound a mistake by making a bigger mistake. *Make sure you do a complete in-WordPress backup BEFORE switching hosts *Don’t compound a mistake by making a bigger mistake (this one is important)

The end.

Out.

So I’ve been AWOL My bad. It’s update time. WordPress 2.5 was released today and I went ahead an upgraded my blog. All my plugins seem to be working just fine (although there seems to be a problem with SRG Clean Archives, not in how it functions but in how its Options page displays in the new dashboard, I had to manually edit the plugin file to turn off the Moo.FX (they conflict with the JQuery components in my sidebar elements; I think I could adjust this using the new JQuery workaround for using Moo and JQuery libraries at the same time, but it’s more of a hassle than it is worth), but I think I’ll have to test it out a bit more before I know for sure.

Thanks to both Adii and Chris Murphy for pointing me towards Dean Robinson’s Fluency Admin Theme — it is SO hot. Although I have come around to liking the default 2.5 dashboard a LOT more than I initially did when the previews started to leak out — and I do prefer it to the old dashboard — Dean’s take is far superior, at least in my opinion. I really like lots of the upgrades and updates to 2.5, but I’m seriously having ExpressionEngine envy, especially after seeing their 2.0 preview. I’m playing around with the free Core Version for an upcoming project and may end up using the full commercial version for that site. This site will more than likely stay WordPress (I really like WordPress), but for lots of video content (which is what the project will be about), I’m exploring all my options. Plus, it’s just SO pretty. And I’m a sucker for prettiness.

I’m also going to be switching web hosts within the text few days. I signed up with Media Temple about a month ago for the project I will be launching soon and want to go ahead an host my blog there too. I haven’t had any major issues with my current host (1and1) — and I’ve had my account for like 4 years — but I can’t rely on them if I do need to make a technical or customer service request, which is why I nixed them for my video-based project — and I can’t justify spending $10 a month to host this blog when my $20 a month account should be plenty to host both. Over the last month, I’ve migrated the majority of my domains to a domain only account (still with 1and1), to limit the potential fallout when canceling a 4-year old hosting contract) and I was just waiting for the 90-day limit on my christinawarren.com URL to pass (though now that isn’t even necessary) and for 2.5 to come out so that I can backup my MySQL tables and move the installation over to the new site before switching the DNS servers.

My goal is to have it all moved by Monday morning — but we’ll see.

We’ve been posting intermittent interviews from SXSW at DownloadSquad and the remainder should be up this week. I will link to all of them when I’m done.

Out!

In the last two months, I have gone from basically knowing nothing about WordPress from a backend level (the last time I even test installed it was like pre 1.5), to being able to successfully help other people use it. I’m by no means a WordPress Rockstar, but for two months I think I should at least get to open for a band that’s kind of popular. Truth be told, I’m writing that out to kind of reassure myself because when I get frustrated when I struggle with getting something to work the way I want it to work, I really don’t think in terms of, “you’ve used this system for two months total” — I guess because I’m usually a fast learner and because I have certain expectations of myself to become proficient very, very quickly. Especially if it has anything to do with technology.

Anyhoo, it is fitting that today is the two-month anniversary of my site because I just solved two styling issues that were bugging the bejesus out of me. Ever since I updated my theme, I’ve had an issue with the styling of my blogroll. To be clear, this is NOT Chris Murphy’s fault — in actuality, the pretty link only scheme with a CSS description tag would be more than suitable, except for one thing: Safari has issues with displaying certain types of tooltips and I don’t know or care to know enough about how it works to try to fix it. Plus, I kind of like having the descriptions on my blog roll itself.

See, basically what happened, from what I can tell, is that when WordPress moved to 2.3, they deprecated the old blogroll linking system. So when Chris updated his theme, he changed the mechanism of calling up the link list to reflect that. Unfortunately, one of the issues with the new link system is that if you want to style an image and a description in the same “linked” state — it like doesn’t work. So getting my blog roll to look the same as my “recent comments” and “recent posts” boxes was pretty much driving me insane.

In the wee hours of the morning, after tearing my hair out, I was finally able to get it looking like I want it to look. It doesn’t look identical to the other sidebar modules — again, WordPress makes that kind of impossible — but it looks close enough and it is infinitely better than what it was before.

I’ve also restyled the CSS for my Twitter plugin and again, it might not be perfect yet, but it is significantly better than it was before and I actually like it better than any of my other attempts at styling.

Oh — I feel I should post an update to my spam-plugin woes: Akismet was updated and the update seemed to fix the whole, “we’ll auto-delete your comment tables without even asking” bug. I briefly switched back to Akismet because Defensio’s accuracy rate is not completely reliable, but then Defensio updated, so I switched back again. I’d be willing to just use Akismet because I do think it is more accurate, I just don’t feel like I can trust it not to delete my comments or prevent them from being viewed in the Dashboard.

And finally, I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to visit this site in the last two months and for all your comments and e-mails. The fact that people willingly subscribe to my RSS feed or regularly visit my site still kind of blows my mind, and I thank you for visiting my tiny corner of the web.

Out!

Well, another shot. I tried it on Windows ages and ages ago and was pretty unimpressed. It has improved (compared to what it was like in Windows), but beta or not, Ecto 3 is not doing it for me. I like that it has the WYSIWYG option (it’s not that I mind looking at my HTML mark-up, I just wish a toolbar for bolding/underlining/strikethrough/linking/etc. was available instead of having to use the Markup drop down. I’m trying to learn the keyboard shortcuts and once I do, I’ll stop bitching — I swear — but until then, I’m missing dinky-ass Semagic more than I ever thought I would), but everything else falls short. No place for me to insert my excerpt like MarsEdit does — thought it did allow me to have access to a lame “summary” area that showed up in my excerpt section once posted, meaning I had to go back and edit it out. I’m not a huge fan of the way its WYSIWYG mode does linking (if you want to unlink something, it’s a pain in the ass), and seeing as I’ve spent a paragraph bitching about how much I miss the WYSIWYG mode from Semagic, that’s kind of sucky. But really, what killed it for me was its tagging/category listing abilities, or should I say, lack there of.

Now, I know WordPress only recently joined the 21st century in terms of doing tagging — I get that it’s hard to update older clients for that function — but if you make it look like you can tag something in a category and then add tags and then it not only doesn’t tag shit — it doesn’t even assign all the categories you selected, well FAIL.

So, in the words of the fabulous Heidi Klum, “Ecto, you’re out. Congratulations MarsEdit, you’re in.” Of course I don’t get to say it with that awesome German accent or looking like a VS Angel, but what the hell.

Out.

Anyhoo, right before that call started, the Heath Ledger stuff started coming in over the news readers and a day later, the Internet and social webs are still abuzz. I have to admit, it was shocking to me too — and I certainly had an emotional response (not a deeply emotional response, but a response), unlike when Brad Renfro died last week and I was totally nonplussed. Speaking of Renfro, frankly I still don’t understand all the Facebook freak outs. OK, so a guy our age who we all had a crush on in 6th and 7th grade died — he was a drug addict — it was totally unsurprising, given how he was arrested buying heroin in one of the nastiest parts of LA. Plus, I mean, when was the last time you saw him in a movie that didn’t go direct-to-video? I remember his bit part in “Ghost World” — but Jesus, that was like 6 years ago.

With Heath Ledger I guess it is slightly different because he was well on his way to being an actual star with actual box office mojo behind his name (and that’s the difference — you can be famous but not be famous enough to drive people to the movies — see Alba, Jessica). I thought he was supremely talented and really do feel for the daughter he left behind and his family.

I can’t help but be disturbed by how much of the Euro/LA paparazzi element infiltrated his New York apartment. That’s what disturbs me. I can kind of understand that happening in LA, that is part of the culture, for better or worse, but New York is supposed to be different.

Oh well. In other news, I’m playing around with various Open Source CMS platforms again. Joomla! 1.5 was just released and Drupal 6 should be out soon (RC2 is out now). I really like most elements of WordPress, but there are elements of the backend code, especially with regards to how the databases are structured that don’t really impress me. Normally, I wouldn’t care — but after kind of reinvigorating my interest in PHP and overall web development, I’ve taken a stronger look.

Oh! Speaking of WordPress — if anyone has commented on my blog in the past two weeks and the comment did not show up, I apologize. It’s Akismet’s fault. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the spam plugin is great in theory — but as of right now, it is utterly unusable to me. Why? Well, after Shashi tried to comment on my last post, he told me that he was trapped in Akismet’s filter (apparently it happened to him before earlier in the week), well in the course of trying to rescue his comment — I was unable to actually view the comments WordPress had marked as spam inside my dashboard. This had actually been kind of an ongoing thing. I had six total spam according to the dashboard, but I could not see any of them. Thus far, I have only received one trackback spam comment, and that was two weeks ago. Since then, I just assumed that the non-existent, yet accounted for spam was either a trackback or accessible somewhere. But after Shashi’s tweet, I realized that legitimate comments could be trapped, so I did my damndest to try to retrieve them.

Doing lots of Google searches and searching the WordPress.org forums basically led me to finding lots of other people who have experienced that problem over the last 18 months or so (I was finding stuff from summer 2006), but there was no definitive solution, nor was there an explanation for why this was happening. For some people, it was something that was self-corrected, lending credence to the idea that it is a server problem, but then some other forum posters who seem to be active in the project said that Akismet won’t show you any comments that it “knows for sure are spam” — meaning that if another person has classified someone or some address as a spammer, you won’t see it. Now, that sounds patently absurd to me. In any event, absolutely nothing would let me find a way to retrieve my comments marked as spam and I was unable to find out where the spam comments were stored in the MySQL database.

So Akismet is dunzo. Defensio is my new spam fighting plugin. It installs and configures almost identically to Akismet — except I can actually see comments it marks as spam. So far I have had only one comment not get correctly labeled (it was spam, Defensio missed it), but seeing as my other comments even before the disappearance were showing up as spam, this is manageable. No offense to the WordPress crew — and congratulations on that $29.5 million second round of funding — but if I cannot have access the comments you are marking as spam, whether they are or are not — your plugin is useless.

Long rant short, if you commented and the system ate it — I apologize — please comment again.

Out.