WordPress

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If you see things looking a little different around here, it's because I bit the bullet, changed "hosts":http://dreamhost.com, and moved the blog to "WordPress":http://wordpress.com. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, but I had to leave the 1000+ comments behind for now because exporting them tended to hit a CGI(Common Gateway Interface) timeout unless I was exporting very small batches of posts at a time, and that got old and boring really quickly. So far I like the way Wordpress looks a lot. Just the ability to change themes on the site and have stuff work is very cool. When I have some time in about 3 months (heh) I'll see about hacking around in one of the canned themes to get some of my own photos/colors into a layout; maybe even similar to how I had it before.

MovableType Upgrade

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Got tired of all the comment spam, so I finally bit and did an upgrade to MT 3.2. Upgrade process was fairly painless, except that most of the comments showed up as pending, but didn't show up easily in the admin interface. It seems like I'm getting more comment spam than ever, but at least they're all getting trapped, and I can delete them at my leisure without them getting published.

Maybe some hot WordPress action is in my not-too-distant future...

Stop spam now with your gigantic p3n1s!!!

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Even though I have the fantastic MT-Blacklist installed on my site, I still get tons of comment spams, both denials that get blocked but eat up resources, and spams for as-of-yet-un-blacklisted sites that eat up resources and my patience. The flood has gotten especially bad over the last few weeks (I'd wake up to 20 new comments and hundreds of denied notifications) so I decided to take a few more drastic measures. I didn't quite upgrade to MT 3.1 yet, but I did follow most of the suggestions "here":http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php that I wasn't already doing, including renaming mt-comments.cgi, and taking off the comments popup from the link; instead forcing you to the individual entry archive. We'll see how much that reduces the crap around here. Oh, I tried to run David R's "mt-close script":http://www.rayners.org/2003/12/closing_comments_on_old_entries.php to close out all entries older than 5 days, but I kept getting an error about something to do with App.pm, although it is in my cgi-bin folder somewhere. Anyone else seen that before?

New design

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Hey, things look a bit different around here, eh? I had been planning on a bit of a redesign to reflect my new surroundings, and I had a nice quiet weekend to do it in.

Much design inspiration -borrowed- stolen from "Eric Meyer":http://meyerweb.com/ and "Douglas Bowman":http://stopdesign.com/

It's still a work in progress, and I'm probably going to tweak the colors and also replace that top image, although I kinda like how it looks now, especially since I took it.

Interior pages will be upgraded as I get to it.

Oh, and if it looks all weird, do a shift-reload; you might have a stylesheet cached or something.

Whoopsie

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Well, looks like I had "some more":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000435/ "DNS issues":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000586/ of my own over the weekend. It wasn't even "Dotster's fault":http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/12/how_dotster_cost_me_.html; I had set up my account emails to go to a Yahoo email address that I never check, because I figure I would just get oodles of "WHOIS":http://www.arin.net/tools/whois_help.html spam there. I checked it so infrequently, in fact, that they disabled my account and deleted my backlog of emails there. Oops. So, I'm guessing that I did indeed get a timely email reminder about my pending expiration, but never saw it. BTW, I just want to point out that I got not one, not two, but *three* emails with the same subject line of "Dude, where's my blog?" from friends on Friday morning. You all need to get some new material. ;-)

More posts to come... 2 weeks to go, and a lot going on.

Buh bye, TextAmerica

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Well, after TextAmerica went and broke their RSS feed _again_ a few weeks ago, breaking my homepage display of the latest moblog image, I finally got motivated to change services. I've had a few run-ins with them before. One of their bizdev dudes took offence to my posting code to parse their RSS feed to strip out their stupid ad links and link (correctly, in my view) to the full-size image page from the thumbnail. We went back and forth via email, and eventually I took down the code that was getting his panties in a twist. My homeslice "Joshua":http://firepile.com/log/ (who is now "a rawk star":http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/29/moblog_image_import_.html, btw) recently whipped up "an application":http://www.firepile.com/software/archives/000133.html to pull all of your images off of TA(TextAmerica), and then you can either save them locally as some XML(eXtensible Markup Language)/XSL(eXtensible Stylesheet Language) files, or you can email and post them directly into your new moblog account, which in the case of "my new moblog":http://moblg.net/blog/feralboy is on "MoblogUK":http://moblg.net/.

"MoblogUK":http://moblg.net/ seems like a pretty sweet site; you actually "own your own images":http://www.firepile.com/software/archives/000133.html, and it seems a bit more community-based, with ratings and open comments and (my favorite) seeing who has been to your moblog recently. I still need to tweak the code that's pulling up my most recent image to include the title and description, as well as put a "border=0" on the image tag, but already I'm about 1,000 times happier with "MoblogUK":http://moblg.net/ over TA(TextAmerica).

Die, fuckers.

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The trickle of "comment spam":http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/01/12/mt_comment_s/index.php that I've been seeing in my comments has finally increased to the point where I was finally driven to install "MT-Blacklist":http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/, and I have to say I'm amazingly impressed with how easy it was to install, and how clean the interface is. Imported the "current blacklist":http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/blacklist.txt without any problems, and it even found a stray comment that I hadn't realized was spam (it was trying to give me some line about how my site didn't work in OSX; nice try, sister!).

Site updates

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Couple of small changes yesterday. I added the fantastic "MTLinkTitles":http://www.rayners.org/2003/06/06/mtlinktitles.php plugin from "David Raynes":http://www.rayners.org/, which goes out and grabs link titles from pages I link to (since I'm lazy and don't always put the TITLE attribute, even though I have that nice floating tooltip dealie), but the only problem is that rebuilds in MT(Movable Type) are taking a really long time now as my site tries to go out and hit every page that I've linked to in ALL my posts. It takes way too long, and I'm getting CGI timeout messages, but it's supposed to cache the retrieved titles and not have to re-fetch them, but still trying to get through the inital link title fetching. Also disabled immediate posting of comments, and instead forcing you to preview first, which "might help(Simon Willison - Solving comment spam)":http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/28/solvingCommentSpam cut down on "comment spam":http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/ a little, until I get around to "upgrading MT to 2.661(Simon Willison - Moveable Type now kills PageRank on comment links)":http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/21/mtPageRankKiller, or maybe just wait for version 3.0 to come out. I don't get a lot of spam, and I haven't had someone go through and hit every entry like "Joshua":http://firepile.com/log/ has, but that doesn't mean I _want_ it to happen.

The tipping point

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Well, that did it. With "k's comment":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000755/#comments about my ultra-white bread spelling of "freakin", I reached 393 posts (not counting this one) and 394 comments. Considering I started this weblog "back in June of last year(Our long national nightmare is just beginning)":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000172/, it feels like somewhat of an accomplishment that enough of my 5 friends feel compelled to comment on the drivel I write on a semi-regular basis. So, thanks!

Updated Photoalbum

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I was pretty tired of the ".nizzle":http://www.asp.net/ control that was handling my "photoalbum":http://feralboy.com/photoalbum/ section; I couldn't add descriptions, pages would get really long and take awhile to load, no preview on the main page, etc. So, yesterday I found "this cool (and free!) control":http://www.rebex.net/ImageGallery/ that handles all those things for me. I can now go in and edit an XML(eXtensible Markup Language) file to add titles and descriptions to photos, which were sorely needed. Plus, the "front page":http://feralboy.com/photoalbum/ of the photoalbum looks much nicer now, thanks to a thumbnailed layout of the galleries, also XML(eXtensible Markup Language) controlled. I have a lot better control over design and layout of the pages, thanks to a suave template-driven implementation. I'll try and go back and put descriptions on pictures, but I promise that'll be a slow process.

New Domain

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I saw "this deal":http://tools.komlenic.com/158 for 3 _years_ of free hosting, and had to sign up. Picked up a "new domain":http://trulycrap.com/ from "Dotster(FeralBlog: ...And we're back, ladies and gentlemen.)":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000435/, and everything should be coming online. Problem is, I don't know what to put there yet. So, what sort of site would you expect to see at "http://trulycrap.com/":http://trulycrap.com/? One suggestion was for bad movie reviews, etc. Another would be where I would put all the "uninteresting coding stuff":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/nizzle/. Any thoughts?

...And we're back, ladies and gentlemen.

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Well, that sucked! Just a friendly word of advice, if you're going to register your domain with "Network Solutions":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000082/("boo!":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000073/), use an email address that you check more often than every 6 months, even if it means having to wade through pages of spam, otherwise you might miss your domain renewal notices. Doh. I've still had it with them, and based on "this glowing review":http://www.kungfugrippe.com/previously/002447.php, I'll be switching my domain name to "Dotster":http://www.dotster.com/ today. They "spam-protect":http://web.dotster.com/products/domaintools/PrivacyPost.php your email address for you! How cool!

DNS woes

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Seem to be having some DNS problems with the site last night and today; couldn't get my mail last night, and couldn't hit the site (at least from home.. I think the DNS is cached here at work). I used a "web-based ping":http://www.microtech.co.gg/dns/utilities.php tool, and that also couldn't do the lookup, so maybe it's not just me. Sent a message off to my "host":http://www.alentus.com/, so here's hoping they can resolve the problem quickly.

Redesign in progress

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Got a bug up my ass over the weekend and started work on a consistant navigation for the whole site, not just the weblog. The main inspiration came from "this nifty CSS(Cascading StyleSheets) tabs implementation":http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/tabs/tab1.php that does rounded corners purely with CSS(Cascading StyleSheets) and no images (if you're using "Firebird":http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/). There are some things I'm not sure about yet... the white box over the background is only as large as content, which means that on the weblog "homepage":http://feralboy.com/log/ when the right-side column ends the white box does, too. (I'm sure there's a way to fix this.. I just need to delve a little bit into what Matt H. is doing on "his site":http://a.wholelottanothing.org/). I'm also not super-keen on the way that the subtabs are implemented. Right now they're assigned an explicit top/left position to make them fall under the main tabs (see "here":http://feralboy.com/matt/ for an example of this), but that makes me feel dirty. What if a user adjusts their font sizes? Everything will get thrown out of whack then. I'm sure there's a way to have the <ul> subnav positioned relative to the parent container, but I haven't figured it out yet. So, if you see weirdness, kindly refresh and hopefully it'll get cleared up.

I'm also not quite sure why I'm bothering to bring in other sections of the site, since this is the only place that really has fresh content. According to my stats however, it's the "TiVo hacking":http://feralboy.com/matt/tivo/ and "Building a Climbing Wall":http://feralboy.com/matt/wall/ pages that get the bulk of search traffic. So, I guess prettying up those sections might make people want to click around a bit more. More updates as the redesign progresses.

*Update 2003.08.05*:

* Picked a more muted background image. * Pat made the fun little "branding" image for the top bar. * Made the "homepage":http://feralboy.com/ redirect right to the "weblog":http://feralboy.com/log/ * "Matt H.":http://a.wholelottanothing.org/ is using a table to make the heights of his columns appear even. Booo!!!

I've got a phonecam, and I'm not afraid to use it.

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If you haven't noticed the low-res image in the sidebar, I caved and got myself a "camera-equipped cellphone":http://getitnow.vzwshop.com/html/phones/lg_vx6000.jsp over the weekend. I've already set up "a moblog":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/ on "TextAmerica":http://www.textamerica.com/. I can send a picture as a message from my phone to a special email address, and it automatically gets posted to the site. They were even nice enough to provide an "RSS(Rich Site Summary) feed":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/rss.asp for the pictures, so you can include data from the moblog on any other site, like this one. They had a Javascript file that you could use to do it more automagically, but:

# the link opened in another window. # the link was to the moblog homepage, not the larger image of the thumbnail picture used for the link # you didn't see descriptive text (if there was any). # there was a TextAmerica ad button below the image.

So, being a programmer, with some help from "an article":http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/031903-1.aspx from "Scott Mitchell":http://datawebcontrols.com/, I used the RSS(Rich Site Summary) feed to extract all the data I needed, and created the link and description text myself. I'm even caching the data once a minute so the page doesn't have to wait for the image data each time.

There are some other neat things besides the camera. I can put my own photos on the phone, as wallpaper or startup/shutdown screens. I can also put pictures as CallerID notifications, so when Ryan calls, "his face":http://feralboy.com/photoalbum/photos/20030524_robin_joshua_wedding/P1010023.JPG comes up.

My 2nd-most favorite feature has to be downloadable ring tones. I admit, I thought that ringtones were stupid; everyone just getting the latest song from 40 cent or whatever. But "take a look":http://vzw.modtones.com/verizon/index.jsp?cid=VZW&mid=VZW_LG&hid=10 at some of the ringtones that are available! The "Alternative":http://vzw.modtones.com/verizon/mainEntry.jsp?categoryId=103&searchType=searchByGenreDrill section is a bit thin, but still has good stuff in it; Stone Roses, etc. Right now my ringer is "Let's go to bed" by The Cure.

Random Reading

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Got all fiesty after reading "the two MT(Movable Type) articles":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000287/ this a.m., as well as this guide to creating a links "sideblog", and did just that. Created a new blog, and after getting bookmarklets set up in -Phoenix- "Firebird":http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/ and "IE(Internet Explorer)":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000265/, I can quickly post links of interest to the new "Random Reading" section over in the sidebar.

Bandwagon

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Couple of quick updates: * I made a few changes to templates on the site, including using the very cool MTOtherBlog plugin from David Raynes to cross-list new posts from the new Medium Archive on this page, and vice-versa. I've also been using the beta release of MT-Textile 2, which has a bunch of new features in it, the coolest so far being the footnoting feature. * Since it seems to be the new hotness, I'm also posting a screenshot of my desktop. Like the background? * Ryan emailed me a picture from my night out with both sisters in Philly, which I've added to that post.