blogging Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Feeling pain for blogger Kelly

ForgottenStars.net

I’ve been feeling severe emotional pain on behalf of my fellow upstate New Yorker, blogger Kelly Sedinger, the overalls guy. And I’ll admit that it’s not just empathy, but a profound understanding of what he’s been going through.

He’s been posting as Forgotten Stars for about five years, and at Byzantium Shores for nearly two decades before that.

Then, inexplicably, all of his posts after April 21, 2026 disappeared. Apparently, during an earlier outage, something else went wonky. As of Sunday evening, he can post, BUT the pieces he wrote in the past month and a half are still MIA. And the formatting has been stripped.

At least the individual post links now load. And the comments now work; I LOVE comments, making them and receiving them.

Kelly wrote: “I’m not going to lie, folks, all of this has really sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for this notion of doing content creation…and it also has me questioning my whole strategy on that score, anyway.” It’s almost impossible for me to focus on writing when my site is down. I could technically write on a backup site, but it’s not the same.

Joy

There are those of us, like Kelly, who write for the joy of the sharing. And we spend some moolah keeping our junkie habit, I mean, our love of the written word alive. Friend Chuck Miller recently wrote, “I can tell you that, from personal experience, blog hosting does not operate for free. At least not GOOD blog hosting.”

I’ve been spending more than a few dinero on this enterprise, changing providers along the way.

Kelly has been spending his money too. “I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. “

I have some alleged redundancy/backup to this blog, if I understand what the heck all of those plugins are supposed to do. (Nope, I really don’t fully comprehend, and people explaining in tech-speak does NOT help.) My last problem was one plugin that was screwing up another plugin with a very similar name!

My blog was down for 23 minutes on both Saturday and Sunday nights, my Jetpack informed me. But it came back up on its own, or by magic.

So keep a good thought for Kelly Sedinger, who, if he’s anything like me, is emotionally exhausted by all of this.

The state of the blog

The `xmlrpc.php` file (?!)

Kelly, the Buffalo-area guy, posted about going to the moon. And then nothing for a couple of weeks. I thought that Ralph Kramden had assaulted him.

As it turned out, his blog was full. Specifically, “I have been unable to access my site on the back end for over a week, because the database was full. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think it’s that after over 24 years of blogging, I finally filled up the space I’ve been paying for here. (Well, I was on BlogSpot for years and years, but I ported all of that content over here.)” I assumed he was physically all right; he had posted on Facebook.

This, of course, got me to start wondering about the state of the blog at rogerogreen.com. Lessse, what IS the name of my provider? (It really DID take me a minute to remember.)

No threats from viruses – yay! I had an entity fix a hack attack in 2024 and spent $30/year to maintain it.

“This certificate is valid and currently in use; it will automatically renew.”

My storage is at 30%; that’s comforting, given that I have imported not only MY Blogspot blog from 2005 to 2010, but also my Times Union blog from 2008 to 2021, though I didn’t blog there daily.

My CPU is only 4%. But my RAM is at 90%. I had this problem six months ago, and it was fixed. Also, I bought extra RAM. Do I understand what was done? Do you understand the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown cartoon? I’ll have to keep monitoring it and ask for help again.

Bill coming due

Ooo, I switched to this hosting plan in March 2017 based on a recommendation by the late Dustbury. I spent a bit of change back then. It expires in March 2027. Can I renew for another decade? I cannot. The longest available option is 36 months. Of course, the three years will cost 70% of what the ten years have run me.

I suppose it’s the cost of therapy.

One other thing: I have the Jetpack plugin. But it’s not responding as it did before, when it would tell me each morning whether my blog had been posted or had gone down. After “talking” with Jetpack’s bot, I wrote to my provider:

Hello, Support – I am experiencing an issue with Jetpack on my WordPress site, and it seems that XML–RPC access is being blocked. Here are the details: – The xmlrpc.php file returns no response at all. – Jetpack backups require XML–RPC to be enabled. – A “200” error is indicated in Jetpack‘s connection test, suggesting XML-RPC is blocked at the server level. Could you please check your firewall/security settings for any XML-RPC blocks? It would be appreciated if you could whitelist XML-RPC access for my site or adjust the security settings to allow it. Thank you for your assistance.

I barely know what I just wrote, but it was in my provider’s queue. Long answer (involving six emails and a few hours), after disconnecting Blackhole for Bad Bots, Really Simple SSL, and, surprisingly, Jetpack Protect, my Jetpack is finally working, which made me happy.

Sunday Stealing – Let’s Blog about Blogging

alternative facts

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week’s meme is swiped from If By Yes, a Canadian blogger who describes herself as a “left-wing left-hander with two left feet.” It’s a shame she doesn’t update her blog anymore. Anyway, she participated in a meme that she tells us was popular way back when.

About Blogging

1. When are you at your blogging best – a.m. or p.m.?

Absolutely in the morning. At some level, if I have an idea about a post, I sleep on it, and often I have at least an approach mapped out in the morning. The only time I work on the blog after about noon is doing something mechanical, such as adding links to articles and music posts.

2. How many blogs do you have? Please include the links in your answer.

This is it, at least publicly. The rogerogreen.com blog content morphed from the rogerowengreen.blogspot.com on May 2, 2010. The old content from those first five years is here, but not all comments have been moved, so there’s that. My old work is defunct, as are a bunch of others I’ve participated in. I had a blog on the Albany Times Union from 2008 to 2021, but that ended; the content is uploaded here.

The rest is silence

3. Do you prefer silence when you compose your posts and write your comments?

Absolutely not. I write to music, and it doesn’t matter if it has words or not. I am listening to Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi, which Kelly posted. But usually, I listen to compact discs of artists whose birthdays are in the current month, such as John Hiatt, Joe Strummer (The Clash), and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin). Indeed, I can’t do very much without music. I use it when I’m cleaning or filing.

Conversely, I can’t listen to talk, such as the NPR news shows my wife likes to listen to. Sidebar: I’m very sad/angry about the death of the CPB— the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

4. What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever spilled on your keyboard?

Probably Diet Coke.

What’s the use of getting sober…

5. Ever posted while intoxicated?

I don’t generally write on Facebook immediately. I might write a blog post and then post that, but that requires time, thought, and a cooling-down period. The only immediate things I have posted on FB and BlueSky lately are public service announcements about accidents and severe weather.

I don’t even post immediately when ticked off, but let the thoughts simmer. These recent examples bother me as a librarian because they are not fact-based decisions. The FBI redacted djt’s name from several references in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. The Smithsonian said it restored a display to an earlier version, which notes that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” djt accused the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, of faking jobs numbers, directing his team to fire the former President Biden appointee. These are, to quote a former White House staffer, “alternative facts,” which are bad for democracy.

But see how c-c-c-alm-m-m-m I am? And sober.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

My wife was reading my blog

a whoa moment

Much to my surprise, my wife was reading my blog. She mentioned to me in last week of June, she perused the post about our daughter coming back from South Africa, and also the next one.

Then, on Saturday morning, June 28th, I heard music from her office. Usually, if she has any audio entertainment, it’s either talk from NPR or classical music, but this was distinctly not that. No, she was listening to links from my post about the #1 country songs in 1955. This is fascinating because I’ve been writing for two decades, and that hasn’t always been the case.

I remember the days when we would visit my friend Fred Hembeck and his wife and child. Fred and I would talk about things we had in our blogs. My wife is trying to understand what we were talking about.

FGH

In fact, I wrote about it here in 2008: Fred, “our wives and I also had a philosophical conversation about blogging. My wife chastised me for saying that she should look at my blog, rather than me having to explain what I had written. I noted that it isn’t just the information in the blog that I was trying to convey, but the style and manner in which I said it.” Ultimately, I resigned myself to making inadequate bullet points if she asked.

She intellectually knew that I always wrote about her on her birthday and our anniversary, and occasionally on Mother’s Day, though our anniversary and Mother’s Day are very close together.

Now she’s reading the blog, at least sometimes. I’d taken it as a matter of faith that she’s not reading it, so the change is a whoa moment.

Anyway, today is her birthday. She’s taken off work for the summer, though I know at least a few work-related calls. This means that all things she can’t get done during the rest of the year are going on. My wife had to go through that stuff after her mother moved from one retirement facility to another, smaller location.

Things are already better. She’s cleared off the dining room table of the material that had been there since we filed our taxes in April. (Why didn’t I put it away? Because our filing systems are mutually confounding.) She probably has more projects to do than time to do them in the next four weeks, but she’ll use the time well—she likes morning walks—and I’m sure I will be enlisted to work on many of those projects.

Happy birthday, dear. I love you.

Where does the blog go?

repost

Where does the blog go? Some say, “I really like that piece” or “I don’t enjoy that post.” I’ve never thought my blog could be fairly represented in a given blog post or even a handful, but rather the body of work.

Somebody tells me that they like the music or hate the quiz; that’s fine, I shrug. I have zero capacity for writing to the audience, except when they Ask Roger Anything. I write what I need to write.

In Februarys in the recent past, I haven’t spent much time writing about Black History Month. But, oddly enough, even though I didn’t announce as such, I probably wrote more about the topic in 2025. It was, maybe subconsciously, a reaction to the reactionary anti-DEI nonsense.

In fact, I would just as soon never write about race or politics at all, a strange thing, I suppose, for a political science major. Unfortunately, politics define the allocation of precious resources. When the political leadership is… let’s say problematic… not saying something suggests my agreement with the status quo.

Process

I’d be in real trouble if I had to look at a blank screen without knowing what I was going for. This is why I tend to lean into events: my birthday, family birthdays, anniversaries, and major holidays. That’s about 20 posts each year.

I also tend to want to do a musical piece once a week. In 2025, I will write at least one post a month for the years ending in five in the 20th century. The R&B and country charts also started in the 1940s, and the adult contemporary chart in the ’60s. So that’s a total of 28 posts. Let’s add at least 4 Christmas music posts. I throw in a few Ask Roger Anything, plus linkage, and that’s another 28 posts. All I have to do is figure out what the other 285 will be: easy peasy, right?

I’m trying to figure out how to continue the blog. Certain posts I can write quicker than others, and I can free-associate on quizzes. The music pieces need links, and opinion pieces require links to verifiable sources.

One thing that occurred to me is that I will need to write shorter pieces and maybe even use some graphics, as The Post. This violates my self-imposed rule of at least 300 words, but I need more time to work on The Project.

I might want to make a few more deliberate attempts at having a repost of a couple of items each month or so. It’s not that I’ve never done a repost before. I reposted information about being in JEOPARDY and the derivation of the word lunaversary.

I always tackle Emmett Till quinquennially. The interesting thing about Emmett, whose death was 70 years ago this year, is that there’s always new information about the event or a greater understanding of how it played out.

I repeat myself when under stress.

There are a few pieces I want to, at least one in May, because when I first started blogging on the Blogger/blogspot platform, I didn’t know how to do pictures or graphics. Yeah, there was this software – I think it was called Picasa – and I followed the instructions, but could not get the images to work regularly. So a lot of my early posts don’t have graphics at all. I was also unaware of things such as SEO. I need page breaks and descriptors. The truth is that I don’t care much about that stuff, but it’s probably good blog hygiene, whatever that means.

Writing about the daughter has gotten a bit harder because I’m trying to figure out the line between telling an interesting story and her privacy. I desire not to embarrass her too much, but I have to bug her a little because it’s the joy of parenting. I had a lot of pictures of her early on, but I haven’t used a contemporary image of her for more than a decade.