Do you have those moments where you discover something and want to dig into it? Today was that day for me. Although what I found wasn’t new, I still want to share what I learned—that way I won’t forget later. In this post, I’ll walk you through what I found, why it’s broken, and what I did to fix it.
Practicing a “get it done” attitude, I've recently added a constant stream of features to my site. Most visitors wouldn‘t notice. They aren‘t dropping by to relish my web design, nor are they interested in my latest tweaks to enhance their experience. Nope, they‘re here to read an article. Or, more likely, they‘re lost—but I digress. If the content is there, the looks, assuming the basics are present, is secondary.
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.
Well, encoding issue is fixed. Sort of. After digging around I found that the routines in my CMS are forcing the use of ISO-8859-1 which makes it difficult to easily convert to UTF-8. It isn’t impossible, but it isn't what I want to work on right now. I’m saving that exercise for another day.
The Mistake We all make mistakes. My mistake was not understanding the code behind the categories sections that my site uses. What I wanted to do was create a new category called “Writing” that I could log my NaNoWriMo entries to. It seemed simple enough. I went into the category administration section and created a new one. My mistake was wanting to reuse the news picture. It was late at night and I was in a hurry to get to bed. In my hast I forgot that the program links the picture and category name together. Worse, I didn’t even realize I’d done something wrong.
I took a break from educating myself on z80 machine code, more on that later, to fix a few things that have bugged me about the site. They are minor and probably will go completely unnoticed by most, but I wanted to make a quick note for future reference. Hey that’s what blogs are for, right?
Today, like most Fall Sunday’s, is a great day to watch Football. It was fun watching San Fransisco play, but I often hack around on the computer during games. Fortunately there is plenty of time between commercials and time-outs to work on code.
I recently started using FlashControl for Chrome to control which sites use flash. I was getting annoyed with sites I ran across sucking up my computer’s CPU with flash programs. It is annoying how many sites use flash, my own included. I’d swapped out my original JavaScript slide show some time ago for Flickr’s slide show to show off my recent LEGO renderings. It always annoyed me that Flickr wrote the slide show using Flash and wouldn’t display properly on my iPod. I didn’t bother me much until FlashControl started blocking it. It was time to do something about it.
What do you do on a lazy Sunday? Write programs of course! I was reading Tim Hartnell’s book Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer and ran across a little gem for generating random names. It is short and sweet and easily converted into Perl.
Last night I happened to notice that my last blog post didn’t look quite right when viewed in an RSS reader. Come to find out, it appears that the code that converts the UBBC tags wasn’t undoing a quote conversion earlier in the code. This caused the regular expression that tries to show bare URLs as real URLs to convert parts of my image tag into an anchor tag. Not quite what it is supposed to do. It took me hours of futzing with the code to unravel the mess. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Use the same darn subroutine that the articles use. Duh. One freaking line of code to change.
One thing that always bugged me with using scripts is that you tend to see the script name. For example, this site has always had an index.cgi and most PHP sites have index.php in the links. I find it tacky and many commercial sites don’t do this. I don’t want to change my software, so there has to be a way around this problem. The search is on!
So, I broke down and bought a new laptop last weekend. No, I didn’t buy an Apple. I just couldn’t see myself shelling out twice as much money for half the computing power. I purchased one on sale with similar specs, if not the same OS and “coolness” factor. I was able to transfer most of my settings making it much easier to get up and running. It did take me a bit to get the “crapware” uninstalled. However, it did provide me the opportunity to try out some new software.
As much as I use the 360voice.com data, I thought it only fitting to give back. So, today I launched 360voice Dynamic Userbars. If you’re a 360voice user and like userbars, show your pride by adding one of these images to your forum signatures.
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.