Recompiled.org » Site

New Theme, Complete with Page Header Graphic

Joe — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 04:00:12 +0000

Disclaimer: There are a lot of links in this post. I suggest that anyone who reads this views each and every one. You will be a better person for it, and will understand why I’m drooling about this like a small child.

Some of the links may contain items which may be considered “not safe for work.” Be advised.

As you may have noticed, the theme has changed again for the site. I found one I really really like, and I’ve been able to make it my own. Now, you’ll see a title graphic on the pages of a string bassist. The photo is by Chris Weeks, a superb professional photographer whose work can be found all over the place, and you probably don’t realise it. Here’s a sample from his gallery at Deviantart. Keep digging, and once you get past the photos of the celebrities of the moment, you can see what I really love about his photos: the realness. This photo of two older men playing chess… or the things he’ll notice and shoot that most people would miss… nevermind the amazing depth of field he can pull out of a shot. I wish I had a millionth of his talent and ability behind the camera.

Anyway, thank you, Chris, for allowing me to use your beautiful picture on my site.

It’s done.

Joe — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 04:34:23 +0000

Well, I moved it. Hooray. I have a sneaking feeling that I’ll be doing this one or two more times for the others. But, that’s okay, because I enjoy it in a kinda sick, twisted way. Hooray for WordPress. Let’s hope I don’t find something I really hate in the next few days.

Replacing Movable Type with WordPress?

Joe — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 02:46:54 +0000

Will I replace Movable Type with WordPress? Maybe. They’ve made a lot of progress with 2.0 of WordPress. It’s a lot cleaner than I remember. They’ve tossed in a bunch of AJAX and the like that makes the interface a lot smoother. The themes are a lot easier to manage (picking preselected themes, that is) than MT. Plugin management is also better.

As for downsides, there are always some. First, the templates are more complex in WordPress. Movable Type’s templates are like editing HTML. Here, it’s editing PHP. Second, MT allows multiple blogs per installation (not that it matters with my current setup). Also, there’s the comfort level. I’ve become comfortable with Movable Type over the past year-ish. It’s a big step, but, it’s one I might have to take.

I’ve shown this to one of my other users and they like the WordPress administration side better. So, we’ll see.

Hotlinkers will be punished.

Joe — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:17:05 +0000

Today while analysing the traffic to and from the site, I noticed that I had got a few links from a blog that was hosted on blogger.com that I didn’t recognize. Interested, I visited the page. It was some “high oil prices suck and so does Bush” (some of which I don’t disagree with). But, I didn’t see how my site was involved… until I searched the source. The guy was linking to an image from this post about high gas prices following Hurricane Katrina.

Folks, this is called theft.

So, I adjusted the image using the magic of .htaccess and some Paint magic.

The content of my blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. That means you can use the content of my site, provided you give me credit on your site with the content and you license your work under an identical license. If the guy in question would have contacted me, I would have said he could copy the image to his server (and use his bandwidth) while giving me credit. As it is, he stole my content and my bandwidth. Bad…

Site Wonkyness: php5 module update breaks dynamic site

Joe — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:04:54 +0000

So, I logged on today and happened to visit my own site, and realised that it had completely went wonky. At first glance, it looked like the database had crapped on itself. There were only two blog entries appearing on the homepage, all of the archives were gone, and even some other pages which were dynamically generated had gone totally wonky. Logging into the backend of Movable Type showed everything was intact still. So, I started to troubleshoot the display problems.

Today, I updated the following modules via FreeBSD’s Ports collection:
devel/p5-Class-Spiffy (p5-Class-Spiffy-0.12)
devel/p5-Spiffy (p5-Spiffy-0.29)
mail/p5-Mail-Tools (p5-Mail-Tools-1.67)
www/p5-HTML-Template (p5-HTML-Template-2.7_1)
devel/p5-Test-Base (p5-Test-Base-0.47)

Something in one (or multiple) of those broke dynamic pages. So, I converted both my site and Josh’s site back to static pages, and all should be fine now.

Movable Type Dumbness: Scheduled Posts

Joe — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 23:49:47 +0000

Movable Type allows you to schedule posts in advanced (for example, I’m writing this post Sunday night but it won’t publish until Tuesday afternoon). However, in order to get the scheduled post to “pop” live at the time you specify, there is script that you run from the server via crontab. It makes since that they won’t magically appear when you static publishing, since the Movable Type program actually creates each web page manually and stores them on the hard drive, content complete.

However, it also supports dynamic publishing, where the pages are created automagically by the program when they are accessed. This allows you to do stupid pet tricks, speeds up things like comment postings, and saves hard disk space on the server. It would make sense that, since the pages are created automatically as they are requested, that it would automatically publish the page that is past it’s scheduled date. But, it doesn’t. A scheduled post for today didn’t appear because when I switched to dynamic, I deleted the cronjob. It’s fixed now, but, it’s still dumb.

Lack of posts

Joe — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 15:39:44 +0000

106 days Uptime

Originally uploaded by jeversol.

Life has been hectic recently, therefore I haven’t had time to update recently. But, I’m upgrading the box to FreeBSD 6.0, and that means I’ve got to ruin my uptime.

Trackback Spams

Joe — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 23:30:06 +0000

Well, I feel like I have hit the big times. I just deleted 65 trackback spams. I feel like someone noticed. Hooray! (well, really, Thanks to the new anti-spam features in MT 3.2).

Movable Type Hack: Multiple domains, one installation

Joe — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:58:29 +0000

I believe that I accomplished a minor feat in the world of Movable Type hacks, and it required no Perl or SQL knowledge at all. I set up Holly’s blog on her site tonight. They’re both hosted on the same box, and use apache’s domain based virtual hosting to keep them independent of each other. However, we are sharing the same MT installation. The problem? In all of her pages, her links to scripts (such as trackbacks and comments) were coming back to recompiled.org instead of to her domain. Why? The CGIPath in the mt.cfg specified recompiled.org as the path. How did I fix it? Read on, my friend (or friends, but, friend is more likely).

Basically, our sites are independent of each other with no co-dependencies, other than Movable Type. Using the logic that the mt.cfg file specifies where the path is, I simply duplicated the MT directory used for Recompiled to her directory and updated the file accordingly. Since they are still both using the same database, all of the rest of the stuff works as planned. The exception will be plugins and the like, but, I imagine her system will be left alone for the most part from here on out.

So, the structure looks like this:

www-folders

-> holly_site

–> mt

—> mt.cfg with CGIPath to her site URL

-> recompiled

–> mt

—> mt.cfg with CGIPath to my site URL.

They share the same database, which means I can still make any necessary technical configuration changes to her blog I need to without logging out of my sessions. The only think I will need to be aware of is rebuilding her site from my interface.

Yes, I know this is a bit incoherent, but, I’m about to fall asleep at the keyboard. If anyone stumbles across this and wants more specifics, comment or e-mail me or something.

Burnout

Joe — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:47:29 +0000

It’s Sunday, 11:46pm. Holly has been in bed since 8:45. I am still awake because I know that when I go to bed, I will have to get up and go to work tomorrow.

Gotta love burnout…

11:57pm… ran the server logs through an analyzer. It tells you what people searched for on a search engine to find your site. Someone searched for “latinas getting raped” and found my site. I have no clue how this happened, because I don’t remember ever mentioning “latinas” or “raped” in my postings… oh, wait, nevermind. I found it in the Bob Costas entry.

Okay, I’m going to bed now. I promise.