gwax's rumblings

Having become annoyed with comment-spam, I have cho­sen to imple­ment Gudlyf’s AuthImage plu­gin for WordPress. The plu­gin makes one of those pic­tures with funny text that’s hard for com­put­ers to parse. The plu­gin also demands that you type in the con­tents of the image or you don’t get to post a com­ment. I don’t really like forc­ing some­thing like this on peo­ple but the spam was piss­ing me off and this seems less obtru­sive than send­ing peo­ples’ com­ments to mod­er­a­tion and then accept­ing them later. If this is really unpleas­ant for peo­ple, let me know and I’ll con­sider other options.

I’ve added a new sta­tis­tics sys­tem to my blog in order to replace the hit counter that I used to have when I was run­ning blosxom. The pack­age that I am using under WordPress is DElyMyth’s Wp-Dstats2 because it seems to be the clos­est thing to what I want. Wp-Dstats2 has a bunch more fea­tures than I actu­ally want but I guess it will be col­lect­ing some inter­est­ing stuff along the way.

The only down­side to using a new sta­tis­tics engine is that I have lost all of my old infor­ma­tion. Oh well, such things happen.

I recently got rid of my old cell phone plan in favor of a new T-Mobile plan with a Sidekick 2. The Sidekick 2 is this fancy lit­tle cell phone/e-mail/IM/web/camera/etc. thing. For the tech­no­log­i­cally savvy out there, I’ve got an SSH client on the thing too. Anyway, part of the rea­son that I upgraded my blog from blosxom to word­press is so that I could post from my side­kick, and that is just what I am doing right now.

You may have noticed that I have not posted in a very long time. My lack of posts is not for lack of inter­est­ing things to say (as that has never stopped me in the past) but because I have been switch­ing to a new blog­ging sys­tem, WordPress. Now that I have got­ten every­thing copied over and the new sys­tem work­ing well enough, I can start blog­ging in full anew.

I just changed things around a lit­tle on my blog thing so that when you click on a com­ments link it will spawn a lit­tle com­ments win­dow (if you have javascript, oth­er­wise it will behave as nor­mal) so that you can look at com­ments aside from the blog itself. The script is sim­ple; it works; it does what I want.

There is, how­ever, one prob­lem. The con­ven­tions (and pos­si­bly the spec­i­fi­ca­tions) of javascript are such that when defin­ing a new func­tion you have to put the open­ing brace (‘{‘) on the same line as the func­tion dec­la­ra­tion. Placing the brace on the same line as the func­tion dec­la­ra­tion is some­thing that I absolutely loathe; I want my open­ing brace (‘{‘) to line up ver­ti­cally with my clos­ing brace (‘}’). If other peo­ple want to put the open­ing brace on the line with the func­tion call that is their busi­ness (and they are hideous peo­ple for it because it makes their code less read­able) but I am not going to force them to do it my way and as such they should not force me to take up their abom­i­na­tion of a syn­tax. I hate it so much that I put the whole func­tion on one line (good thing it was a sim­ple function).

There, that’s my angry tirade against javascript. I seem to remem­ber dis­cov­er­ing this atroc­ity and being equally dis­gusted at some time in the past too. Oh, and don’t even get me started with peo­ple that don’t know how to indent. I’m going to stop before I dou­ble the length of my blog com­plain­ing about cod­ing styles that I hate. Also, I know that my code isn’t per­fect either, but I like to think that it’s pretty easy to fol­low if you know what you’re doing.

I decided to reor­ga­nize the cat­e­gories of my blog. If this results in break­ing links or any­thing like that, I appol­o­gize. My blog was get­ting kind of messy and I didn’t like the trend.

It occured to me, while look­ing at Hippo’s blog that I would do well to add the abil­ity to have pic­tures accom­pany my blog entries. It’s not that I have any good pic­tures to add right now, but at some point I might. Now, I could have thought about it a bunch and come up with a good bit of CSS on my own, but I’m lazy so I just stole and mod­i­fied some of Hippo’s blog’s CSS. Some peo­ple might say that I’m a bad per­son, but at least I’m giv­ing credit where credit is due. Of course, on the other hand, I’m not giv­ing any credit for the hippo image that I found some­where else on the Internet and have since for­got­ten the ori­gin of; I’m pretty sure that I Google-imaged for ‘hippo’. Well, I guess I actu­ally am a bad per­son then; oh well.

Now watch the danc­ing hippo as he hyp­not­i­cally makes lewd ges­tures for your amusement.

UPDATE 2005-09-21: I have long since stopped using this method for fig­ures and instead now use class=“alignright” and some CSS taken from the default (Kubrick) theme for WordPress 1.5.

I was a lit­tle bit con­cerned with try­ing to find a way to post to my blog when I wasn’t at my per­sonal com­puter. This prob­lem has now been solved as exem­pli­fied by the fact that I am writ­ing this post from an Athena dialup machine and will be post­ing it from here too.

w00t!

Ok, so I think that I’ve got­ten this blog thing set up to my heart’s con­tent. Now I think that I’ll prob­a­bly go about find­ing other ways to waste my time for a while.

Oh, by the way, if my ban­ter seems a bit inane and bor­ing, it’s prob­a­bly because I just started on this blog thing. So bear with me, it’ll prob­a­bly take a lit­tle while for the pert­er­ba­tions to work their way out and for me to reach a steady-state.

Well, I’ve finally gone and sold out (again). Here’s my new blog. As of right now it’s pretty much a work in progress, so we’ll see where it gets to from here. Heck I might even aban­don it if I’m not suf­fi­ciently amused. But all that is, as we say, in the future.