May 14, 2003
Blogration News: Part I
I've decided to migrate off of MovableType. I'm pretty happy with the application, but it doesn't seem to be growing with me as I'd originally hoped. Republishing takes forever and I need a lot more flexibility when it comes to dealing with large numbers of photographs.Stayed tuned - more to come.
April 27, 2003
Article Archive Goofiness
Article archives are under construction. One of those five minute tweaks gone awry. Deal with it. I'm going golfing.But while I'm gone send me lots of email with ideas regarding how I can break out specific categories from the RDF feed and turn them into their own feeds so that aggregators aren't inundated with inanities and irrelevancies like this one. Thomas will love you forever if you can help me figure this out.
April 22, 2003
Debugging MT Templates
Apologies to anyone that may have been reading out the RSS feed last night - or even to those of you that happened to visit while I was blasting the main page with bogus posts.MT has been behaving badly since I imported my old Radio posts. Sporadically, the server would return a 500 error when I posted a new article. And of course, there was not pattern to the behaviour. I couldn't figure out why for the longest time - it didn't seem to be a code problem, data integrity seemed to be fine, no fatal flaws in any of the templates - everything seemed to be working A1.
Last night in going through the category archive templates with a fine tooth comb I noticed this:
<MTEntries last="90">Aha! It should have read:
<MTEntries lastn="90">"MTEntries" is a container tag representing a list of entries/posts from your blog. "lastn=" is a modifier to MTEntries that simply displays the last n entries to the blog.
In the absence of a properly formatted "lastn=" MT was simply trying to publish archive pages that included all entries for that particularly category. And each time that it got to the "Random Bytes" category, MT choked on trying to create a page that consisted of 100's of entries.
Silly me.
I would love to see better template debugging tools. There really is no way, except trial and error, to find culprits such as this one.
April 15, 2003
Still timing out...
Upgraded to MT 2.63
Joe was kind enough to put a new engine under the hood of byte.org. This is just a test post. Let me know if you encounter anything weird with the application over the next few days.April 08, 2003
Don't look down...
...things are falling off the bottom. Okay, so its been a slow week. Gibson drives a Jetta. I got stuck with a minivan - would have bought a Jetta if I was allowed.March 19, 2003
Spring cleaning...
I managed to get one more feature working yesterday that I've been trying to figure out how to do for a while. Right panel, RSS feeds from sites of my choice. Neat. TimA's RSSFeed drives this. I've got a bit more tweaking to do before I've got it doing exactly what I have in mind for it, but until I get back from Brazil, this will have to do. Thanks to Mr. Joe for getting this setup for me.Brazil - yes. Going to the ICANN Rio meeting. Not sure how extensively I will blog this. I suppose that would be dependent on the the intensity and quality of the meeting (or alternatively, how bored I am :) I would expect Brett and Thomas to do a better job than I...we'll see ;)
February 23, 2003
Imports done...sort of.
So, most of the importing is done. There are a few days that won't import no way, no how - but I've lost interest in the chore. Its really just the last week of December 2002 that is being a pain the ass. If you really want to browse back, you can always use the Radio archive and start filling in the blanks starting on the 20th. Continue reading "Imports done...sort of."Tweaks
Made a ton of small tweaks to the front page. Mostly around the vibe of the layout - I wasn't crazy happy with the way things looked so drasticly different from the old site in terms of look, style and feel. At least some of the old feel is back. I'm still struggling with weather or not I actually want to go to the trouble of reviving the old look and feel. Continue reading "Tweaks"February 02, 2003
Cut-over notes...
The cut-over is completed and things are mostly settling down. I've actually figured out a way to import legacy items into my blog in a most pleasing way. More on that later - it will probably cause me to create an entirely new blog just to explain that seemingly small little thought. I've still got a few navigation things to work out and some fixes that I want to bring to the RDF and RSS feeds, but for the most part, I'm happy with what MT has allowed me to do. More details as they become available. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Rather than spending the entire day in front of a computer today, I think I'm going to finally set up a terrarium for hot peppers...also more on that later...:)
January 27, 2003
Todo
Make sure that you sync up the "Local Links" category in the right-nav and also include a self-apparent link back to the main page.
More Tweaks...
A lot more tweaks went in place today. In the process of working through a blog installed for internal use (reminder to self: make a corporate donation to MT.org) I uncovered a lot of tweaks that needed to be made to the default templates - far too many to enumerate here, but suffice to say, I think we're done with the tweaking of both.
This should put me in the position of doing the final few things that I need to do to take byte.org live under the new look and feel as well as cut-over the internal project to live this week as well. While the tool is definitely easier to use than Radio, I can't say that this is at the point where I'd want to allow my dad to use it yet - too many knobs to break off ;)
Lastly, I'm pleased to note that I've found a way to import all of my Radio items into MovableType. The problem is that I have to go "old skool" to do it: cut and paste. Needless to say I've got mixed feelings about this. On one hand it means that I can finally put to rest the question of where the content lives, on the other hand I've got 289 (according to Joe) entries to manually import and massage. Hat's off to the software architects that made this easy to do and raspberry's to those that didn't.
January 17, 2003
Good night...
...and good night. Dropped in a ton of small tweaks tonight. Still haven't really started messing with the real structure of the templates or the stylesheets - I'm still figuring out what I want to do with the site as far as look and feel is concerned.
January 14, 2003
Decisions, decisions.
Okee dokee...with a swift flick of the wrist, I think that I've got what I need to know for now about categories taken care of. Methinks that I've just made a decision to abandon the XP look and feel for this one...hmm...need sleep.Whats old is new and whats new is...broken?
Apparently I have no clue what the categories are for in the first damned place. agh. I do like the new style sheet however.Working on categories and general setup...
This doesn't seem to be that rough at first blush. I'm still peeved that Joe is having such a hard time getting the imports done, but I'm getting close to conceding that point. Philosophy is so hard to let go. sigh.January 04, 2003
Sun, 05 Jan 2003 03:59:37 GMT
test via remote access - this should work with no problems - thanks for the motivation Brett. :)November 20, 2002
November 19, 2002
Radio 16, Me 1
So interestingly, it appears that my earlier whinings about Radio munging posts was simply me being short-sighted ;) Now while I still think that this is one of the most complicated pieces of software out there (theoretically magnificent, practically unbearable), I'm beginning to get the hang of things - but let me say this one more time in a slightly different way.I used to run a BBS that ran on software called FeatherNet, a PCBoard clone. It rendered templates into screens and required the use of a ton of macros. Radio brings back those memories all too vividly. It makes me feel like a Sysop. I hate feeling like a Sysop. Everything takes too long. Ever try and dump macros into an ANSI editor? sigh...
Anyways, this rant is brought to you for a very specific reason. If I can use the HTML editor built into Outlook Express to my satisfaction and post via email, I might just give up on trying to modify the innards of the buzzard to my liking.
And if Dave Winer or anyone else at Userland reads this, I think you've all done an excellent job. I paid for your software. Don't let my whining obscure the fact that I paid for it. People that really hate software don't whine about it, rather, they don't pay for it. :)November 17, 2002
Radio for Dummies...
Well, hopefully this self-imposed challenge doesn't soak up much more time. I've come to the conclusion that Radio is interminably disorganized. While doing simple things like posting is well thought-out, doing something that could/should be equally simple like changing to a custom template is...well, quite frankly, a pain-in-the-ass. There seems to be references, tags, schema's scattered everywhere hither, thither and yon and no real centralized way of navigating through them in order to make the necessary changes as you go. Instead, you kind of have to guess and create a mental roadmap of all of the dependencies that also need to be updated.
The current implementation is akin to Word requiring you to update both your document and the true-type binary in order to change the layout of a document.<sigh> I know they are trying real hard, but, eesh, its not exactly user friendly at this point. To paraphrase Bob Frankston who call me for technical support one day not all that long ago, "I don't need Radio for dummies, I need Radio for Ross."
Anyways, there's a few more navigation tweaks that I want to make, but they will have to wait until later today (hah - now if that's isn't a recipe for procrastination, I've never seen one...)
October 20, 2002
Minor changes...
Moved Radio from the desktop to the laptop today. If the SMTP publishing feature wasn't so flaky, I could probably just live with that - but given that it periodically crashes the upstreaming requiring a relaunch of Radio, I didn't want to live it to chance that the system would stay up during extended absences. I'd rather take the entire kit along with me and cross my fingers that the Internet access at my destination would be good enough to support some of the upstreaming functions. SMTP posting isn't that great anyways - no support for headlines or cat streaming...which basically means that every time that I post something via SMTP, I still have to sit down at the console and edit it manually...sigh. Hopefully this is a better arrangement. The laptop seems to be a little bit underpowered when it comes to rendering the entire site, but it hasn't been too bad on a post-by-post basis...
Anyways, the deed is done - now if I can just figure out a way to blog straight from my new e740 :) (yes, the blackberry is dead. Long live the blackberry.)
August 30, 2002
August 28, 2002
Moved Crap to Make Room for Stuff.
Created a new cat today for some of the pop culture things that cross my path every once in a while. It let me get some of the crap out of this category (which leaves me more room for crap like this entry ;)
August 16, 2002
Radio eats Link. Radio 2, Links 0
Apologies for the broken links below. For some reason, when I post stories via email, the links get re-written in some cases, thus obviously breaking them. I will fix them manually when I get home tonight.
Update: Originally referred to links on the home page. I must say that this is pretty annoying that Radio keeps munging links submitted via email in this way...
August 12, 2002
The web's schizophrenic little brother ?
If you've wondered why I've started putting bracketed question marks in the middle of my sentences, click on one of them one of these days and you might answer your own question [?]. The question marks lead back to a Blockstackers project called "Everything2" which is essentially a community built, self-referencing outliner, idea-sharer, definition provider...thing...Check it out, its pretty neat.
Tue, 13 Aug 2002 02:24:39 GMT
Bizarre...two days of stories didn't make it to the main page of the blog (even though I diligently added them all and they showed up in my Home screen)...then, they disappeared even from there and are now completely lost. Weird.August 07, 2002
July 30, 2002
Tue, 30 Jul 2002 12:35:49 GMT
I just realized that I named my blog very similarly to Jamie Love's "Random Bits" mailing list. The two are obviously not related - "Random Bytes" simply stems from the domain name that the blog runs under...the "Random" part means just that - no obvious theme for the content here other than items that interest me...Test for Thomas...
Thomas - this story should have the permalink enabled in the RSS feed. Let me know if I've missed the boat...