Category: Wordpress

remembering vova zinger

whbeebe
Vova’s last photo

I’ve followed Vova Zinger’s photo blog since before the pandemic, so far back I can’t remember the first time I visited his blog. For years, especially during the pandemic, Vova was faithfully posting a photo every day, and they were, without exception, wonderful to behold. Then in early November 2023 he posted this last photo and stopped.

Vova always took the time to reply to comments people left on his posts. He was just a very nice person. But he even began to stop answering posts. His last two posts on that last photo were ominous:

28 Nov — There are other less pleasant reasons for this, but I will try to resume posting again. Sorry.

4 Dec — Thank you very much. I hope to be back with more posts.

Then no more. Finally, in April of this year, came a post from another follower saying that he believed that Vova had “passed away earlier this year.”

Vova had been posting on his blog since August 2007, or a good 17 years. Only death stopped him from continuing on.

I find his last photo oddly compelling. The fence starts in the foreground and goes off into the distance, over a hill to some unknown destination. What lies over that hill at the end of that fence if we could but somehow follow it? Maybe Vova was trying to tell us all something about a journey he was destined to take, one that we couldn’t follow him. I miss his presence, even if it was just through the photos in his blog.

Links

Old wooden fence

Remembering Vova Zinger — https://thedeepeningground.com/2024/02/08/remembering-vova-zinger-eulogy-photography-boston-nature-memory-art-poetry-poem/

Vladimir Zinger Obituary — https://www.echovita.com/us/obituaries/ma/brookline/vladimir-zinger-17501913

the disappearing site icon

whbeebe2 Comments

Ever since Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I’ve had this “Star Wars against hate” symbol as my site’s site icon, or favicon. In all the time it was up nobody at WordPress ever said anything, and I’m sure that hardly anyone who saw it had no idea what it meant. But after eight quiet years on my site the old favicon disappeared sometime this past week and was replaced with the WordPress default icon.

I have no idea why it went away, if it was a deliberate act on the part of WordPress, if something else. I’m tending towards something else because WordPress is written in PHP, and WordPress apparently stepped up to the latest 8.1 branch release around mid-June. I know this PHP update caused issues with one other blog that was unable to post comments after the update, so who knows what other little gremlins were let loose when the update took place.

My problem was I lost track of the original image I’d first used, and I’d never bothered to save a copy on my blog as a regular image. I’ve now saved this copy as a regular image which is why it’s in this post.

Here’s hoping that this blog will last eight more years (I started it in late 2013, so it’s now over a decade old), and that I last eight more years (I turned 70 in December), and this favicon stays around just as long. We’ll see…