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Allrighty then…it wasn’t the solution that I was hoping for, but I think I’ve managed to fumble my way through a solution for my issues with the woody_eclectic LiveJournal feed.

Thanks to a comment from qweltor, I found out that there’s simply no way to disable comments on a LiveJournal syndication feed — they’re just on, like it or not. So, not only wouldn’t there be a way for anyone to go in and turn off the comments for the existing feed, but there wouldn’t be a point to my going in and creating a new feed account. That handily blew all of my already-conceived plans out of the water.

So, I ended up coming up with a new plan. And I do love it when a plan comes together…

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Okay, here’s the situation. Right now, there’s 29 of you reading my stuff (or at least skimming it occasionally) through the LJ syndication account woody_eclectic, which I think is great. There’s just one little issue, though…and it’s one that I can’t (easily) fix on my own. Update: Never mind…looks like there’s no simple fix after all. More info below…

The big issue is that comments are turned on for each of the syndicated posts. Since I wasn’t the one to set up the account, though, I don’t get notification when someone leaves a comment though LiveJournal. So, if someone comments on one of my posts — as has happened here, here, here, and probably other posts in the past — I’m generally not likely to see it. Additionally, LiveJournal only stores the last twenty or so entries, so once they disappear, any comments associated with them disappear as well.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about this. I asked in a syndication-specific LJ community today, and it appears that while there is an option to turn comments on or off for syndicated posts, only the person who originally set up the syndication account can do that according to this comment, comments are on no matter what, and there’s no way to change that.

So…could whoever set up the syndication feed (assuming you’re still subscribed to it) do me a big favor and turn off the “allow comments” setting? Everyone reading my feed will still be able to click through to the original post on my weblog to comment there along with all my non-LiveJournal readers, so this won’t be entirely removing the ability to comment — it’ll just consolidate all the comments into one place, where they won’t disappear, and where I’ll actually see them.

I’ll give a few days or a week or so to see if this works (it may not, as it’s entirely possible that whoever originally set up the feed got bored with me and unsubscribed, leaving it orphaned and without anyone to change the settings). If it doesn’t, I’ve got a backup plan…it’s just one I’m not looking forward to implementing…but it looks like I’m going to have to go forward with a variation of this:

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I’ve finally gone in and made a few slight tweaks to my about page, adding a short list of other sites that I participate in and a few other bits and pieces here and there.

One change that is more major in my head than anywhere else is the addition of a paragraph about my identity as “the Microsoft blogger”. I’ve resisted this until now, as I’ve always felt that: one, it’s a very small part of who I am, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable with looking like I’m trying to capitalize on the fracas; and two, it was a dumb mistake on my part that I keep hoping will evetually disappear into the great bit bucket of ‘net lore.

However, given that the three primary posts about that event (the picture, the day I was let go, and my wrapup from a few days later) are consistently the most heavily trafficked pages on my site — lately, they’ve been getting a boost every time new information on the Xbox leaks out, as one person or another feels compelled to point to me during the ensuing discussion — I figured it was time to just shrug my shoulders and admit that yeah, that’s me, and point to the pages in question.

I’m still not entirely comfortable with that, but ignoring it in the hopes that it would go away hasn’t done much, and I’m not so determined to get away from it that I’d actually delete the posts in question…so, there they are.

At least I didn’t end up inadvertently coining a new term for getting fired — ‘djwudi’d’, ‘michael’d’, or ‘hanscom’d’ just doesn’t roll off of the tongue like ‘dooced‘ does, anyway. ;)

Assuming I’ve managed to figure out the right combination of shell scripts, SSI includes, CRON jobs, and other associated voodoo, the Eclinkticism linklog in the sidebar should be up and running again. As before, it’s just a dump of the most recent items I’ve added to my del.icio.us account, so feel free to add that RSS feed to your reader if you like.

“What’s Going On” by Lauper, Cyndi from the album Twelve Deadly Cyns…and Then Some (1989, 3:51).

It’s entirely possible that some of you may have tried to leave a comment here in the past few days and gotten an error message instead. Turns out that there’s currently a nasty little conflict between Movable Type and CPanel (a webserver administration package) that’s hitting me.

If you are experiencing intermittent “500 Server Errors” while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the prblem: a nightly CPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

Until that’s fixed, things may be a little tweaky around here. Unfortunately, it’s hitting me, too — I’ve got my next mix ready to Podcast, but I haven’t been able to get MT to rebuild and actually display it yet. I’m not even sure if this post is going to make it up immediately.

In any case, the problem is known, and — I hope — will be rectified as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!