Beck's Cafe » Coffee Chat

Happy Holidays Ad Turns Commerce into Something Beautiful

beckscafe — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:20:02 +0000

This is really great, the ad part is subtle…totally helps make our holiday season

Beck’s Cafe open at WordPress.com

beckscafe — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:51:51 +0000

After the awful two hacks, the last one which redirected parts of my WordPress Admin panel to yahoo.com. After having my ip address changed for the third time (without notice), so that I had to figure out how to log into C-Panel, I decided, Beck’s Cafe needed a new home.

And here we are

We’ve got some work to do as usual….move the links, reapply categories to blog posts, clean up dead links and broken images, fix a thing here and there, adjust this and that but we’re in business again!

We’re the same Beck’s Cafe, same great coffee, same wonderful writing…just with new paint, new plumbing, new espresso machines…oh

and

with Lotsa coffee, chocolate and love

Just a little checkin here; everything is fine at Beck’s Cafe @ A Small Orange

beckscafe — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 04:07:31 +0000

I just thought I’d drop by here at Beck’s Cafe at WordPress.com to checkin on the backup site! We are still blogging over at Beck’s Cafe at A Small Orange.

We only use this site if the main site has a problem, which for the last year it hasn’t

See you all at Beck’s Cafe at A Small Orange

Finn’s Flame Beck’s Cafe! International Incident Caused

beckscafe — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:00:43 +0000

It was bound to happen eventually of course but when it did, I nearly dropped my coffee on my lap! “It” being one of my posts offending a reader to the point they made a very visceral response. In a nutshell, I’ve been, unabashedly playing with certain keywords to attract traffic and to gain million of dollars in click on my Google Ads. While visions of basking in untold Google Dollar wealth had fleetingly been in my mind, it’s been clear I and my “team of barista’s” is really not up to the task. As Michelle, my good friend and fellow connosoir of Vietnamese food once remarked to me, “I like your blog but, you know, Rebecca, you don’t write in it that much”. Apparently one has to actually write words in order to have readers. That my gal pal had to remind me of this fact tells you how far astray I had gone in my Google Dollar Delusion (GDD).

But the post in question,Crossdresser tip 3 for MtF transgender persons: Keep a Pashmina Shawl in Your Purse, I thought was pretty innocent, despite the obvious, and frankly awkward, use of keywords in my pos’ts title. Well it was not just awkward it was Finntastically inFuriating to one of our Finish readers, Suvi-Tuuli Allan, who made no bones about telling us so, “I’m a transsexual woman. If someone would call me “MtF” anything, I’d kick their teeth in.”

I appreciated her bare knuckles honesty. But, I was taken a back.

In discussing this international incident with a friend over tea she said, “So, it sounds like Suvi was really objecting to the use of your terms. I wonder how your other readers felt”. I hadn’t thought of that.

How do you feel? Beside all full of holiday cheer (read: booze).

Terms, I have to confess, I generally dislike for a few reasons. One, I feel they put people in boxes they really don’t need to be in. As humans, we can be pretty changeable from week to week (or for some of us hour to hour). So why box someone in with a label? Second, I feel that terms can create caste systems that are both artificial and that erect barriers that were not there prior to the term being used. Why do that? In our Transgender Community, here in Greater Boston anyway, we generally use the term “Transgender” in a global umbrella to encompass crossdressers, gender queer (well some do at least), bi-gendered, transexual women, and anyone in that general constellation.

Merry Christmas everyone, and, keep your holiday spirit alive!

—————–

10-16-2011 Update: Changed titles of fashion posts to reflect a wider audience; they don’t apply to such a narrow group. Also, the idea of writing specifically for the search engines was really a flawed approach vs. just writing content that is helpful to our readers here at Beck’s Cafe. Thanks to Tuvi from last year’s comment for making us think about this topic. The posts labelled “Crossdresser tips for MtF transgender persons” we changed to just “Fashion Tips” as a result; you can see them all at this link: http://beckscafe.com/category/fashion/

Beckscafe.com back online! Many thanks to ASO tech team!

beckscafe — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:39:10 +0000

Well Beck’s Cafe is back online at beckscafe.com thanks to the ever vigilent team at A Small Orange. While Beck’s Cafe did not suffer a DOS (denial of service) attack we do know something wicked was afoot.

So we’ll be blogging back at beck’s cafe now

Thanks everyone for your patience!

Beckscafe.com hacked; Apparently hackers love our coffee

beckscafe — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:33:28 +0000

Upon opening the doors to Beck’s Cafe on Monday May 17th, our baristas, glam girls, feisty fellows and assorted jovial, coffee swilling sorts were greeted with two undecipherable sentences in Chinese! After which time the fleet of foot technical team at A Small Orange, our host provider, locked our site down to prevent something worse from happening.

Beck’s Cafe has not closed or gone off the air, but our site now reads the message,

Your connection to this server has been blocked in this server’s firewall.

Possible reasons:

Too many failed login attempts (brute force password attack)

Too many simultaneous connections (network/DOS attack)

Attempting to access non-valid ports on this server (port scanning)

It looks like our cafe has faced a hack from China! So beckscafe.com is currently being “fixed” and can’t be accessed; I think whoever it was broke our front door. We’re working with the team at A Small Orange to fix things up asap!

You know, if they liked our coffee that much we’d have gladly given them a free cup!

Thanks for staying tuned in the meantime!

WOW – How I love A Small Orange

beckscafe — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:47:28 +0000

I love A Small Orange web hosting! Beck’s Cafe was down and, with one email, the A Small Orange team had it back up and perking!!

WordPress.Com is a wonderful solution but if you are hosting your own version of WordPress I’d suggest you consider A Small Orange, they are juicy!!

So blogging at Beck’s Cafe is back on

Becks Cafe at beckscafe.com down

beckscafe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:26:41 +0000

I have no idea what the deal is but Beck’s Cafe at http://www.beckscafe.com is down. The error message when I try to reach the Cafe is:

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the becki_wordpress database.

Are you sure it exists?
On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.

That’s the same message whether I try to get there through the WP Dashboard or just get to the site. It’s not dead as I can reach the site via cPanel and ftp. I’ve checked MySQL for Beck’s Cafe and I can’t see what’s wrong…at least it’s not obvious to me anyway.

I’ll be asking the team at A Small Orange what I can do here….stay tuned

No, this blog isn’t dead…it’s a sign post

beckscafe — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:31:27 +0000

Hi there, if you’ve come to this Beck’s Cafe it’s run by the same woman that runs that other Beck’s Cafe. This one was set up to get that rockin’ awesome key so we could implement Akismet to eat the spam mice that come for the crumbs at Beck’s Cafe.

SO, this blog gets posted to very rarely….so come for the fresh brew over at my site, Beck’s Cafe (also proudly powered by WordPress).

Things are still perkin’ at Becks’ Cafe

beckscafe — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:18:52 +0000

Life is still perkin’ along at Beck’s Cafe. We’re doing considerable amount of redesign again. We are now using Sandbox which will bring us such goodies as:

A new base structure that is future extensible
advanced, semantics-based theme
Beautiful on the inside
For WordPress 2.0.2 through 2.2.x
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
Widgets plugin-friendly
hAtom and hCard microformats (XFN was already built into WordPress)
You can totally customize it with CSS alone—no need to bother with other files.

So quite a bit really. Working with CSS has been alot easier than I’d thought it would be really. I’d say tweaking a design is about the same work. Being able to modify Sandbox just via CSS is, in some ways, a welcome relief really.

So come visit Beck’s Cafe to see what is new