Notes From Zone 4

It was supposed to start raining about ten this morning, so we didn’t worry about leaving the sap uncovered to cool. There was half an inch of snow on the ground (and in the sap) at six this morning. One hundred sixty five gallons boiled down to fifteen over the last two days. It’s

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Hermione finally had her piglets yesterday, 119 days after coming home from East Hill Farm. Nominal pig gestation is 115 days: She pushed it as hard as she could and of course had them in a snowstorm. The good news is that all is well, six live piglets that she is feeding and looking

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In setting up the Localvore blog I needed to duplicate some of the custom pages that I made for this site. The categories page was the first. Lo and behold, when I went to select a custom template for the page I was writing, not only were there none, but the select box was also

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I’ve decided regretfully that WordPress MU is not suitable for our application. It apparently does what it is designed for well. Unfortunately what it does is not what I want done. WPMU is a wrapper around Wordpress that allows a single WP installation to support ridiculous numbers of blogs in a single DNS tree.

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We’ve had our T1 for a few weeks now, and it’s been a wonderful step up from the satellite travesty, albeit at a very high price. It still doesn’t download like a $50/month cable modem, but it does upload symmetrically. We’re getting some of the cash back by dropping our co-located server in Virginia once

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Our spiffy new T1 got turned up last week, and I finally found time to move the LAN over today. Yippee, a connection that works. It doesn’t have the download speed of a cable modem, but it is symmetrical, so uploads do actually go at 1.5 megs. Given the number of pictures we post, that’s

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Right up front, Don’t get satellite internet if you can get DSL or cable. Don’t even think about it. If you can’t get DSL or cable, seriously think about a dedicated dial up line (personal), or a fractional T1 (business) as alternatives to satellite. It’s that bad. I’ll put a geek appendix at the end

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The hay feeders have been a big success. In normal winter weather (say low of 8°F, high of 18°F), we’ve pretty well stabilized at two bales a day. Miguel’s crew clean out their feeder every day with the extra to Leon and Buster, and the other two pens each eat one in two days. This

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I just spent a couple hours demonstrating that there is a maximum product image size that can be be uploaded to ZenCart. I’m posting this here so the next person that hits the limit can save some torn hair. Anyway, when creating or editing a product the expected situation is that you have a product

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We finally have Google Adwords running over on Zinmasters.com. For sure it’s a low traffic site, but google and awstats are sure not seeing eye to eye on the issue. It’s only been three days, but here’s the situation: Day awstats pages Google Impressions Friday 62 56 Saturday 31 7 Sunday 9 2 Since I didn’t get adwords running until midday on Friday, that[s a pretty solid agreement for that day. So what happened Saturday and Sunday. Well, there are certainly some hits to awstats that Google wouldn’t see. But the number is much more like 4 than 24. I’ve checked that all pages show the adwords, and I haven’t seen any public service come through in my checking, so I’m really wondering what’ going on here. Today will actually be a test. I _know_ there were at least 6 impressions, because I saw them.