Category Archives: Sunday’s Rant

Five more jokes are in the queue, and things are kinda going OK at the moment. I find it odd, however, that Bing’s image search is still hot-linking to where the image files used to be located… Oh, how can I explain this…

Before 2016, all the images were stored like this:
https://flushtwice.com/wp-content/uploads/year/month/image.jpg

As of January 11, 2016, the “/year/month” part of the address had been removed so that all images are stored directly under “./wp-content/uploads”. A week later, Bing, Yahoo, and something called Kik began referring people to those images in their old locations, which of course results in a 404 not found page. What’s worse is the search terms used had nothing to do with the image they were trying to view.

I know what you’re thinking… Maybe they were linking to those images all along, and you just noticed it when the 404’s started happening… Well, no… There was simply no direct linking to any of my image files until a week after the change. I check for that stuff, because in the past I would have been ecstatically flattered if someone hot-linked to one of my comics in some forum, but that never happened, and these are just search engines lumping my comics with random offensive search terms that aren’t related to the comic. The whole experience has led me to permanently disable hot-linking. Although I’m not too happy about the way in which my webhost actually handles the hot-link blocking situation, it’s the best I can do for now.

So more controls have been put in place, more IP addresses have been blocked, and that includes every IP address belonging to Microsoft to keep them from crawling my site for at least the next 90 days. Fingers crossed, I’m hoping the overall traffic to the site will start to look more legit in the coming weeks.

Pax,

-f2x

I’m having what you might call a tantrum with regards to the search engines at the moment. I’ve already blocked most of the crawlers out there, and this past week I went and axed Bing, Yahoo, and the almighty Google.

And a couple days later I let Google back on.

Interestingly the moment I blocked those guys, the Ginger Jokes immediately stopped getting hits, but for some reason Bing is still referring people to images that aren’t even here.

So this past week has been really rough… My civilian job truly sucks, and I’ve been working so much overtime I really haven’t had time to work on lining up any jokes. Please accept my humble apologies if the jokes are lame or missing this week.

Pax,

-f2x

This is great. Usually I have to write this stuff on Sunday, but thanks to the miracles of content management systems, I can write it ahead of time and schedule it.

We got another week’s worth of jokes lined up again, and it just occurred to me that there’s a common thread in all of them: Sex.

To be honest, most of the jokes I publish here involve sex. It seems to be a very popular subject in the area of humor.

So if you like sex jokes, you’re gonna like the 18th thru 22nd here on Flush Twice.

Pax,

-f2x

I finally did it, and Wow… About all I can say is “Wow”.

I did the equivalent of a format/re-install on Flush Twice today. I backed up everything, wiped the site, installed a fresh copy of WordPress, and imported all of the posts, pages, media, and settings back like it was. Well, almost. The directory structure for the media files is more streamlined.

I learned a lot, and feel more confident about the site’s backup and restore-ability. I can also tell you that this site is absolutely clean.

In case you weren’t aware, the back-end of the site had become rather corrupt. There were a lot of glitches and sometimes crashes. In some ways I feel I have to give WordPress fair credit. Flush Twice had been running off the initial install back in 2009. (It was briefly running under Movable Type from around October of 2008, and blogger before that.) When I think back five years ago, and all the experimenting with themes and plugins, it’s a wonder the site made it this far.

But everything is back in place, and it looks like it’s all running quite smoothly. I even managed to preserve all of the star rating data.

                            Wow.

Pax,

-f2x

We’re going to try something new. These “News” items used to be “ephemeral”, but with the aid of a couple of plug-ins, they are now able to be preserved. You can actually click on the date above to see this text’s permanent home. I really hope this works out.

OK then… We’re still on our winning streak with five more jokes lined up for January 11 thru 15. I can hardly believe we actually got through 2015 without missing a single Monday thru Friday, and I’m hoping we can pull it off again this year!

On to another topic: It appears as though things are starting to get back to normal. I’m still way too fat from eating so much over the holidays, but at least the food was tasty.

I did try to eat more healthy this past week… Unfortunately I forgot about the bananas on top of the fridge, so now I’m making banana bread. That still counts as fiber, doesn’t it?

Pax,

-f2x

PS: New comic on Saturday.

Flush Twice is back online again. Sure… It may seem like I change direction more than a feral caged animal looking for an escape, but this time we’re almost 100% positive that WordPress is going to be our new saviour since Movable Type was obviously not working out for us.

Meanwhile I’m going to try to get all these posts back up and in place, but I just realized that it has to be done manually… yes- one. at. a. time… since MT was storing its back up into a directory that I didn’t have access to.

I also came to the sudden realization that I made a mistake when I started putting everything into MT. Apparently I was shorting myself a panel… So this page is being retro-posted to help make up the difference.

But nevermind that boring stuff. Just go and enjoy the jokes and comics!