Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Crushing On: Smart Girls at the Party

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E and I joke that in our relationship she contributes most of the food discovery, while I chip in most of the media. She finds fresh foods, new snacks, and recipes, while I unearth new bands, programs, and news.

Lately we have slightly flipped the script, with me signing up for a CSA and E getting more connected with the women in tech movement. Which is how I walked downstairs the other day to find her watching this:


(If you can’t see the embed, you can watch the episode elsewhere.)

I sat down. I laughed and cried. I was delighted.

That’s an episode of Smart Girls at the Party, an unusual and awesome internet talk-show hosted by Amy Poehler of SNL and Parks and Rec. The show’s mission statement is “Extraordinary individuals changing the world by being themselves.”

What that boils down to is Amy Poehler interviewing young women who are trying and succeeding at anything and everything they want to do.

“We wanted to represent real female friends and celebrate that stage of life where you write down what you want to be when you get older, before too many people tell you no,” Poehler said. “And we poke fun at the talk-show format a little bit, taking very silly things very seriously. This is like ‘Charlie Rose’ for a younger audience.”

…”We wanted something to feel bite-sized and positive and I do think that there’s some lack of celebration of the unique, original girl,” Poehler told the Daily News. “So in some ways, it was a response to that. But, honestly, we really wanted to do a talk show that had a dance party at the end.”

I am not a fanatic about Poehler, but here her typical deadpan delivery makes for hilariously honest interactions with the wide age-group of her guests. She never condescends or jokes at their expense. Actually, she builds them up as characters and experts by interviewing them from a place of delighted naivete.

Despite being a major feminist, I’m always unsure when it comes to girl-centric programming – whether that’s curricular or in media. On one hand, I know girls need to get away from the shadow and influence of boys in educational and social settings so they can grow up with equal footing. On the other, girls-only can be a ghetto, and it can serve not only to over-shelter girls but also exclude the inquisitive, equality-minded boys that form the other half of a equal-opportunity world.

It’s a tough line to tread, and I feel like Smart Girls at the Party really gets it right. It’s a show I would share with girls or boys, and I’m sure they would both find it equally delightful – it just happens to feature the empowered young women who will change the world tomorrow by being themselves today.

Best of all, it’s a reminder that smart girls at the party are often the coolest ones in the room.

How to turn off post revisions in WordPress 3.3

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Did you just update to WordPress 3.3 only to find that post revisions have returned even though you previously engineered some way to turn them off?

Don’t worry, I can help – but, first, some background and chatter.

Way back in 2008 WordPress added Revisions to its core features, and the feature persists today in the newly released version 3.3.

This is the amount of WP revisions I can create in a single week of editing if left unawares.

Revisions captures every published iteration of a post you are working on, so that if you republish with some minor changes you still have the prior version available to roll back to, if necessary.

This feature can be helpful if you make a lot of major changes to your work, or if you are on a multi-author blog and need to occasionally reverse someone’s edits.

It can also be detrimental, or plain old annoying.

The revisions feature nearly destroyed Crushing Krisis. Because, you see, my managing editor is an OCD Godzilla that lives inside my abdomen and due to his influence I have been known to spend my spare time making literally hundreds of tiny edits to spelling and spacing across the million-plus words of this site. Each edit I published spawned a new post number in a new post ID. My database ballooned by thousands of lines, I was using more RAM on my server, and legacy posts and pages linked by their post IDs were suddenly appearing at new permalinks!

There have been plugins to turn Revisions off, but when a new version of WP debuts sometimes those plugins don’t work right away. That’s why I am sharing the manual way to turn off Revisions.

This involves editing core WP files. You do so at your own risk. I am not a WP developer, and I cannot provide support to you if you hobble or destroy your blog. Unlike a plugin, this will not still work after a reinstall or upgrade of WP, so when you move to WP 3.3.1 you need to do it again.

Ready?

  1. In your root directory you have a file called “wp-config.php.” Save a copy of it elsewhere in case you mess things up terribly.
  2. Open wp-config.php and scroll down. At some point you should see a comment that reads “/* Stop editing */” – we will insert our new code just above that.
  3. Insert this code:
    /* Disable Revisions Feature */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );    If you would rather just limit the revisions that get saved, change as follows:
    /* Limit Revisions Feature (by number of revisions) */
    define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',6);
  4. While you are here, you could also choose to add a line to define how frequently you would like WP to make single autosaves of your posts, which frequently saves my ass in the case of a browser crash. That code is:
    /* Set Auto-Save Timing (in seconds) */
    define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 );
  5. Voila! Though WP will still inform you of your revision number in your posts table, it is no longer saving revisions.

Keep in mind, you do still have a number of revisions in your MySQL database, sitting around doing nothing like some vestigial appendix-like organ in your body that may or may not cause a later explosion.

(If you are me, that number of revisions is 250 in the one hour since you installed WP3.3. Yes, I literally make that many edits to CK in an hour. OCD Godzilla is a terrifying beast.)

To do away with them you simply need to delete all of the rows in your post table identified as revisions. Any time you directly edit your MySQL is potentially bad mojo, so I am not going to specifically advocate doing that. However, if you have backed up your DB and know what you are doing, visit WP Recipes for the simple one-line SQL query that will wipe out your revisions.

I hope this helped you! Personally, I get completely frantic when WP updates and one of my old plugins stops working to provide (or, in this case, block) a feature I rely on.

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I talk about my “obsessive collectorism” and my Quixotic quest for the perfect set of coasters.

What an example of something you’re obsessed with collecting? What thing did you pass up the chance to buy that you wish you could go back in time to purchase?

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I answer one of my friend’s recent Facebook Poll queries: “Is pure altruism real? Do people ever do anything out of concern for others that is completely independent of their own self-interest?”

I know my examples of altruism aren’t exactly the work of Mother Theresa, but my point still stands – I think even when we do the best possible thing for someone else we get something for ourselves, even if it’s just a bit of satisfaction.

Do you agree? Can you think of something altruistic that you do totally free of any psychological reward for yourself?

A Moment of Krisis

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Watch as I answer today’s NaBloPoMo writing prompt: “When you are writing, do you prefer to use a pen or a computer?”

Somehow I don’t forsee these getting any more serious.

What I didn’t say in my moment is that I’ve also always been obsessed with the idea of permanence and archiving everything, so it makes sense that I don’t like to write things in pen – much harder to back up that way!

What about you? Are you a pen and pad devotee, even in our digital age, or would you happily elect to forget the dying artform that is cursive handwriting?