Fiber Musings

Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Category: Weave Page 27 of 34

Weaving Retreat

By

On 27 Mar, 2009

In Weave

Would you believe that I only took 2 pictures at the weaving retreat with Judith this past week? And they are both of the sunset. Both are lovely, but this one is oh so dramatic.

ptbonitasunset

The first few days were windy, cold and drizzly, but then the sun came out.  The last day or so was down right balmy.  Coats were definitely optional.

Everything was wonderful except for the bunk beds. I forgot to bring a foam mattress to put on top of the camp styled bunk beds.  This body has gotten soft and missed my pillow top mattress.

Here’s a picture of my project sample.  (We wove another sample in the class, but it was just a 10/2 cotton sample and nothing spectacular.)

dbl-weaveMy warp consisted of Mountain Colors Silk and Ewe (50/50 wool and raw silk/noil, red/blue handpaint) and Mountain Colors Winter Lace (50/50 wool and silk, blue/green handpaint). The weft is 20/2 Redfish silk in charcoal.

I’ve decided that I really dislike the Silk and Ewe.  The noil was all over everything like bad dandruff. Albeit, colorful dandruff.  No, thank you.

But I really like the way the Winter Lace looks.  I’ve sampled with Winter Lace as both warp and weft and hated the pseudo plaid look.  It was too much like a school girl uniform.  But the Winter Lace with the 10/2 silk. Sigh. Absolutely lovely stuff.

I purchased enough to weave an airplane blanket. Something to snuggle up into on the plane without using the icky airline supplied nylon thing.  Something wide enough to cover me at the shoulders, with extra to tuck around, and long enough to cover me from chin to toe, including the extra cinch in at the seat belt.  Something light and squishable to tuck into any carry-on bag, but substantial enough to keep the draft from the overhead vents out.

Oh, and see that mis-threading of the Silk & Ewe just off to the right of the center band?  I really like how just that single line “pops” in there and gives the fabric a little oomph. (Yes, that’s a technical term.)  I have some more of it leftover to randomly tuck into my warp to give it a little extra zing.  Just to keep it from getting too boring.

Unfortunately, I have to wait until I get new heddles.  I have some regular old steel stamped heddles that came with my loom and it shreds my warp like nobody’s business.  I have ordered inserted eye heddles from Morgaine.  I’ll have to wait for it to arrive before I can put the warp on.  I need 800 heddles.  And I really need to replace the heddles for the other loom as well. Yikes!

I agonized over what I was doing that was causing my warp thread to shred, even while working on the  baby blanket. I was convinced it was something that I was doing.  I broke it down to how I was throwing the shuttle to the way I was changing my shed. But nothing seems to fix the problem with my shredded warp threads.  Judith took one look at what I was doing and immediately said it was my heddles.  Months of agony identified by Judith in under 1 minute.

Have I ever said how much I love Judith?

Gone Weaving

By

On 23 Mar, 2009

In Weave

A little weaving retreat with Judith.

Geeking

By

On 19 Mar, 2009

In General, Weave

Moving a blog isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Don’t do as I did.

While waiting for a new build from the development team (of one), I decided to poke around a bit. I’ve been meaning to move the blog off to its own domain for years. Why today? Don’t know.

A quick whois shows that fibermusings daht anything is wide open.  I quickly registered it and added it to my hosting service account. Within 5 minutes, the website is up. I started to research how much work it is to move the blog from the old domain to the new. The answer, not much.  Since it’s all on the same hosting account, I don’t need to do a new installation.  I just needed to move it from one directory to another.

Huh. Really? That easy? Let’s try it…

Yeah, that’s all the thought I put into it. Not much. No planning. No thinking through the possible issues.

Things start to fall apart after that.

WordPress encodes full URL to all image links. Yup. All posts with pictures have to be changed. Manually. A quick Google search shows that I can do it via a SQL command to the MySQL database. Here’s the nail biter. You’re changing a live database. Yeah, I can do the whole backup and restore business. But I usually have DBAs who do this sort of stuff for me. I decide to go for broke. I’ve done everything up to now half assed, I might as well continue.

Here’s the appropriate MySQL command:

UPDATE <wp_prefix_posts>
SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘old_url‘, ‘new_url‘)

For example, if your WordPress database table prefix is wp_, then in place of <wp_prefix_posts> you would enter wp_posts.  I did try it out on a single image heavy post first to make sure it worked before applying the script to the entire table. (Add ‘WHERE post_id = <some_id>‘ to the end.)

You need to apply this to the <wp_prefix_postmeta> table as well. A little more care is required here since this contains file system path instead of just URI.

Then there was the matter of redirecting the old blog location to the new.  More Googling shows a nifty trick with the .htaccess file with the following line:

Redirect permanent /<old_blog_directory_location> <new_URL>

Place the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website.  And voila! Everyone going to the blog in the old location will be automagically redirected to the new location.

Of course, this only resolves the issue of when someone actually visits your website. Anyone reading the blog using an RSS feed is hosed.  The feed is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.  They have to re-subscribe.  But then, it’s the age old question.  “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”  The equivalent here is, if everyone is using RSS Feeds (Bloglines, Google Reader, what have you) to be notified of new posts, and you’ve stopped publishing feeds at the old location, how will they ever know that you’ve moved?

The correct answer would have been to make a post announcing the up-coming move. Wait until the aggregators have received the feed, then make the actual move.

Yeah, that would have been smart. But I didn’t think of it until it was too late. Now it’s broken.  There’s a new feed and no way to push that out there.  Idiot.

Then, I come to find out that by moving it the way I did, I broke the smart upgrade system that my service provider provides.  It’s their system for one-click upgrades for installed software packages. I have no clue what I’m going to do about that. I’ve sent off an “I’m an idiot. Please help me.” message to their support.  We’ll see what they have to say.

Moral of the story? Don’t do as I do. Do as I say. Don’t do things half assed. Think it through first. I know better, but still didn’t follow my own advice. It may be a case of the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

For now, I’m okay as long as WordPress doesn’t come out with an urgent patch.

Update 1: The .htaccess hack appears to do the trick. The old RSS feed pings bounced off of the .htaccess file and onto the new feed. So the old feeds will continue to be updated.  Hooray!  This is confirmed with both Bloglines and Google Reader.

Update 2: My hosting service replied with, “If you’ve gotten this far with your blog move successfully, you have the requisite skills to upgrade WordPress manually.” And followed it up with atta-girl.

I guess I got lucky.

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