There’s something incredibly healthy about simply casting off the past and looking bright and fresh faced towards the future. In many ways, as I’ve gone thru and written about my extensive catharsis of moaning and groaning with all this ‘what am I going to do??’ style of hand wringing and fretting I’ve been subjecting myself to lately… (and anyone else who bothered to read about it here, here and here); but the point is, this is a good thing… and I think I feel better because for the first time, in a very long time actually, I feel as tho I’m in control again. And while that may simply be an illusion or a state of mind, (take your pick because I really can’t tell the difference anymore), what matters to me here is the perception of control… and I’ll settle for that. So, without dangling this out there for much too long, these are the changes I’ve made to geishaland… which I suppose makes this lazy geisha version 3.0? :lol:

For starters, the Links page is gone. I put my manicured fingernail on my mouse and sent that page into cyber-oblivion. The Blogroll, such as it is, has been moved to the front page. There are two categories of links there; Blogroll and NSFW (not safe for work) – you can figure out how you want to handle that one for yourselves - the preview pane should help you out there. Some links are now gone, and that was perhaps the most difficult part of shedding my skin because people become very attached to the amount of links they’ve got coming in from other sites, even if they never bother to read them, but I made some honest assessments and evaluations about what I want to have listed here and what I actually might read that I had to make some choices. If anyone is completely bent out of shape about their link not being there anymore, I’m truly very sorry, and please know that it truly wasn’t personal. This is something I needed to do for me as I continue to move myself and my journal in a new direction. If you’d like to talk about it, please email me.

I’ve also done some work on the main Categories by separating things into Parent and Child categories – with the Parent Categories being Blogs and NSFW.

The way it’s now organized is like so:

Blogs

• Journal – My personal journal entries

• Geek Girl – The geeky side of my attention span

• Lifestyle – Health and Lifestyle topics; Mind, Body & Spirit

• Boston Sports – Mostly Red Sox or other baseball entries

NSFW

• Your Pleasure – Adult toy reviews & articles about sexuality

• Private – My Sanctuary Entries

Most of the entries & posts under the parent category ‘Blogs’ are presumably safe for work. I’ve pretty much gone thru everything, but there’s a chance I’ve missed something so please be aware of that if you’re perusing my archives. The parent category ‘NSFW’ is pretty self explanatory, and the restricted child category ‘Private’ still requires a password to read that section as explained in this post here. The other change related to Categories is that only content assigned to the ‘Blogs Parent Category’ will appear in the front page loop, so there’s no danger of opening this site and getting a surprise, but readers will still have access to all of the content within my site by navigating by category, and everything will still show up chronologically in the RSS Feed, so subscribing is still the best way to stay current with geishaland.

All posts also have Tags embedded with them, so you can also use those hyperlinks to search for similar content within my site which is perhaps the coolest feature in the new version of Wordpress.

In a lot of ways I feel like Alexa here where she writes about finally feeling free. It’s a good feeling to take control of what’s going on around you, even if it’s only a temporary state of being. It still feels good.

What else?

Oh yes – on the geeky side of life… Jeff and I rebuilt one of our old desktop computers and have turned it into a Linux workstation for me to use for geishaland. We went with Ubuntu/Linux which is simply the coolest operating system I’ve seen and used in a really long time. It’s not quite OSX, but it’s way better than any flavor of Windows!

I’ve been using my work computer which is running XP-PRO (ugh… company standards… ) to manage my site and also do my work stuff on, but the problem with that is that the company I work for owns that machine, and a few weeks ago before I went on vacation here, I had a little hacker intrusion where some clever kiddie tried to get miss nina’s attention by flashing her an instant message by using a NETSTAT command line to trip the embedded Windows Messenger utility which is bundled with XP.

A very naughty boy indeed. :???:

So, I immediately checked my router logs and identified the open socket and closed it, more here, but suddenly security became a front and center issue for me, and I was concerned that if I had to ship my PC back to the company, they’d discover all my geishaland stuff and I didn’t think that was too smart an idea. So – I’ve cleaned off my PC of all remaining blog/website stuff and have moved it to my new Linux workstation. My Macbook is basically my personal computer which I use for family and personal things, none of which have anything to do with this site, and I just don’t have the software tools available on my Macintosh to manage this place, so this has worked out perfectly for me.

Now, if I can only get Jeff’s shit like his Avid workstation out of my office and into the basement… I’ll be all set! :razz:

Enjoy your Thursday!