It’s been awhile since I talked about coding on my site. I’m still using a custom Perl CMS—although the group I worked with has long since disbanded. In any case, I’ve generally used a more basic editor on my site. Although I’d love to someday integrate something more complex, the simplicity has made it easy for me to maintain my blog. But, that doesn’t mean I can’t make it better.
Over the last month, I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my website. I’ve had a few lingering issues to take care of. Unsurprisingly, this led me down a few different paths. From simple fixes to big ones, I’ve made a few subtle changes that impact the feel of my site. Hinted at in my change log, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the adjustments made thus far.
Taking a minor departure this Memorial Weekend, my ZX81 program is actually from my childhood best friend. Neighbors during our time in Italy, Jeremy and I spent a lot of time together playing with our LEGO bricks, D&D, and on our computers. U.F.O is a simple shooter game that takes a unique approach to graphics.
Finally making the leap, I released a new template for my primary website this weekend. As noted in the past, I’ve been fed up with my 2006 based theme and have been testing out new designs for a few months now. Transferring most, but not all, of the design ideas from my test site, I just couldn’t wait any longer. Tweaking continues, but you can enjoy the new look now.
I’m slowing working through updating my site. Recently, I decided to update my icons. I’ve been using favorite icons for years—favicon.ico for those that care. But, it was old and boring. Time to update.
I’ve been using this theme and with the WebAPP CMS for a few years now. Unfortunately, it is getting a bit old in the tooth. Although mostly flat, which fits nicely with today’s designs, it isn’t responsive. In fact, the original mobile version of the site was for the Palm Pilot. Really?
Sad to say, but I’ve deactivated the Who’s Amung Us map widget I had been using. They’ve changed the way the pins are saved and it is pretty much useless to me now. I enjoyed seeing where I received visits from. Unfortunately, I typically only would have a few pins on the map, including myself. I still have the widget installed in case they ever change it, but for now the map itself is disabled.
I’ve been using the tag cloud concept on a lot of other sites and find it useful at times. The idea is pretty simple, supply keywords or tags to your content. Those tags are then counted and a tag cloud of links is displayed, with more frequent links larger then less frequent ones. Since my site was lacking in that capability, I decided to program it in.
Although the default icons that come with WebAPP are nice, I thought I’d try to create a few original ones. I’ve tried to update most (but not quite all) of the icons that I have categories using pictures from from collection.
Sigh. Seems all I seem to do lately is update my Mods. Truth is, I’ve been working on another web site, but found some issues adding in my Slideshow Mod and decided, while I was there, to fix a few other minor annoyances I had with it. I also cleaned up some minor issues in BlogCal as well. For th
Sigh. Another day, another bug. Seems that writing scripts for my theme meant that I was missing some issues that occur if you run Blog Calendar on a standard WebAPP install. So, here is the latest fix for your Blogging pleasure: Blog Calendar Mod
Darn, I hate it when I miss simple issues. Two more bug fixes in this release. First, the wrong year was being passed when pulling articles. The second one was that I wasn’t properly translating 2 digit years passed as arguments.
Oops! I had a minor bug in the current month display. A bad assumption on my part that was easily corrected. You can download the lastest version from here. If you are running R2, you just need to update the blogcal.cgi file.
For those interested in using the various WebAPP Mods I created, you can now download them from the Downloads section. Currently, this includes the latest Slideshow and Calendar Mods. Enjoy!
Well, after spending a few months adding back in my slide show and calendar, I’ve converted my site to WebAPP NE. Please let me know if anything doesn’t work quite right. My main reason to convert to WebAPP was to not have to start from scratch in writing my own comments system.
I’ve updated the Blog Calendar Mod to revision 2. It includes the two calendar option and fixes some bugs I found while cleaning up the code.
JackDeth recommended a two calendar blog, and it was a note worthy challenge. I still need to package it up, but there are now two calendars at your disposal. If nothing else, I was able to clean the code up a bit and make it a bit more modular. So, anything else?
Okay, finished my Blog Calendar MOD today. It is currently available here. Edit: Please let me know if you find this Mod useful.
Well, I have my Blog Calendar Mod working. You can now click the date and it will displays articles on that day. Took me a bit to figure out all the different routines that WebAPP uses to do things, but once I found the right code, it doesn’t look too bad. Now, I just need to package it up and g
Working on re-creating my Blog Calendar as a Mod for WebAPP NE. I think I have the MOD fleshed out, but I may have a slight problem. It doesn't appear that WebAPP can display articles based on date. 🙁 Maybe I should be creating a Blog module. 😃
I’ve changed out my back-end Perl scripts using WebAPP — Web Automated Perl Portal System. The task of writing my own scripts to allow comments, article management, and all the security around them seemed more effort then I had time.
I finally got around to updating the top of the site with a nice picture. It is one of a number of pictures I took during my business trip to Singapore last year. I liked the colors in the harbor along with the interesting skyline.
Okay, you probably won’t see any differences, but my blog is now a valid RSS feed. Okay, may not seem by much, but I was actually trying to get it to work in IE7. If you have IE7, or other reader that recognizes the <categories> tag, you should see my categories as well.