Took me a bit of doing but I’ve updated my old theme to work with the latest version of Wordpress. Most of the effort and time was taken up because I decided to do it in as much the, so to speak, right way as possible.
Other than changing two lines of functions.php, everything is accomplished using CSS.
If you want it, you can grab my theme.
I have finally gotten around to updating my blog to the latest version of Wordpress (I used to be horribly behind). As you may have noticed, I am back at the default theme; I will likely do something about this eventually; you may have to bear with me until then, if you haven’t already left due to my extended silence.
Speaking of that whole silence thing; I’m hoping to return to posting more often than I may have in the past (not that I haven’t said that before). For right now, I’m focusing on being in flux and getting things back to where they were; with luck it’ll just involve writing some new css to go with the default theme. To get those square boxes, borders and the like back; perhaps fit to width as well.
Anyway, just wanted to break silence and let you guys know that that’s my intent for future times.
It’s the 4th of January in a new year and, if you’ve followed me this far, you might recall that this is the anniversary of gwax’s rumblings’ fp (first post). Although it’s been a slow year and I’ve gotten pretty lazy about updating regularly, I’ve been doing this for four years and I’m not planning to stop just yet. Speaking of anniversaries, you might recall the sychronicity of my blog sharing a birthday with Uncyclopedia, which just turned three.
Today marks the third anniversary of this blog’s inception. Fancy that, I’ve been spewing crap onto the internet for three whole years; go me! I don’t know that I’m contributing more to the internet than this-one-quirky-guy-who’s-done-some-stuff’s opinion but I was never promising much more than that and I like to think that the this-one-quirky-guy-who’s-done-some stuff is a lot interesting than many of those people that have converted myspace and livejournal into festering hives of angst. Heck, without this blog we wouldn’t have ever seen the likes of my solution for stuck LCD pixels or my answer to the chicken and egg debate (my records show that you people really dig these things). Anyway, happy third anniversary my blog and thanks to all my readers for, well, reading.
Oh, and it’s the magical anniversary because three is the magical number. I mean, surely you’ve read fairy tales. Right? Anyway, magical or whatever, three is my favorite number so it’s still special.
I have, just recently, gotten a spiffy Speakeasy DSL connection installed at my home for my personal use. The DSL connection provides me with 3.0Mbps/768kbps (up/down) speeds and a number of static IP addresses, which means that I can finally move my server out of an MIT closet. This move will take a few hours during which time my server will be completely down and then there will be a lag time as the DNS servers are updated to reflect the change. So, what I’m saying is, expect a day or so of downtime for all of gwax.[com,net,org], including mail services, sometime in the near future.
After the migration, there’ll be another fun server happening, namely a rather big upgrade. I’ve been thinking of upgrading my server since I got a properly paying job and I happened to be browsing the Dell website when I noticed that they were selling rather fancy equipment at rather large discounts. Long story short, in a couple weeks, I should have a brand-spanking new Dell PowerEdge SC430 server with a 2.8GHz Dual Core Pentium D, 1GB DDR2 RAM and 160GB SATA Hard Drive space, which was discounted from $976 to $499. This machine is going to be an absolute beast, totally blowing all of my other computers out of the water (there’s Moore’s Law for you). So, after that beast arrives, I’ll get it set up with all of the services that my current server provides, slowly migrate serving responsibilities over (which ought to be transparent to all of you) and then retire my current server to some other menial task.
There is, of course, one question left to answer: what should I name my new machine?
Right now, this blog is about half an hour away from two years since fp (first post). Happy two years putting up with my yammering, Internet. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve found this fantastically keen plugin that generates an image showing what time of day I post. I’ve decided to set it to report over the past 351 days, for obvious reasons. The graph is displayed here and should also appear at the bottom of pages.
I’ve finally gotten around to doing a full workup of my Wordpress theme so as to provide a style more in line with the style that I use on my homepage and also to bring my blog up to XHTML 1.1 compliance. Being only one man, I haven’t been able to do a complete QA workup of the theme so if you see anything that looks wrong, doesn’t work on your browser (I’ve tested Firefox 1.0.6 and IE 6.0 under Windows XP some) or doesn’t validate to XHTML 1.1, please let me know so that I can fix it. Beyond that, I’ll try to find any problems that I can.
Also, I’ve decided to stop using nested comments and to get rid of the comment preview box because I was the only person using the nested comments and the live preview box didn’t work well enough for my tastes.
SonicWALL Internet Security offers content filtering services and via their website, you can look up the rating (right column, down a little) of a website. Apparently, my blog is rated “Category 22 – Games”, while my homepage is “Category 64 – Unrated”. I guess that means that I run a gaming blog; fancy that.
I have set up the StatTraq plugin for wordpress to handle gathering statistical information on my blog and have made it publicly viewable for anyone that cares. There is also a small “Statistics” link in the Meta section of my sidebar now. In order to get it working, I started with StatTraq 1.0b and hand applied the patches from adsworth. So yeah, statistics are up and you should feel free to take a look at them.
Obviously, the statistics are incomplete as they only begin tracking as of a day ago.
With their powers combined, Debian and R-type form my new server setup. Since I was getting pretty sick of using VNC to connect to r-type when I needed to change or fix something, I decided to get Linux up and running on it instead of Windows 2k. Having gone through the process, r-type is now running Debian, which gives me the wonderful powers of SSH and apt-get. SSH is the part that I really care about because I can now futz with things from my sidekick, any Linux machine and any Windows machine that I can put PuTTY on.
As a side advantage, I’ve managed to get SSL working so now I can deal with administering my blog and phpmyadmin over a secure connection.
As far as I’m concerned, the migration to WordPress 1.5 has been sufficiently dealt with. I haven’t got statistics up yet but that’s because the current version of StatTraq doesn’t work with my permalink structure and is kind of hacked for WordPress 1.5; thusly, I will wait for STatTraq 1.0b before really caring much.
Also, nested comments.
I have upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5, expect things to be in a bit of a flux state until I work out a few things. If you see anything missing, not working or just plain wrong, please leave me a comment.
Issues that I have identified so far are:
Again, if you see anything else, please let me know.
Comment spam pisses me off. It’s not terribly hard to get rid of in WordPress but I don’t like having to. What’s worse is that this is why I installed one of those fancy image authentication things.
Let’s take a moment to think about spam. Most people don’t like spam and it doesn’t work on most people. Spam is a very cheap form of advertising but not free. In order for spam to continue to exist, there have to be at least a small number of people that respond to spam and to those people I say, STOP BEING A FUCKING RETARD, YOU DON’T NEED WHAT THEY’RE SELLING AND YOU ARE RUINING THINGS FOR THE REST OF US!
Well, today is the first day of classes of my last semester as an undergraduate and this is also my 200th post.
This leaves two things to discuss and I’ll start with the 200th post bit. 200 posts, hooray! Ok, that’ll do for that.
So, first day of classes, I guess that I might as well give a bit of a preview of what this term is going to look like for me. I’ve got my schedule narrowed down to only having classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I intend to use this fact to work on my thesis on Mondays and Wednesdays and get three day weekends as well. I’ve also got a pretty nice class loadout to go with my beautiful schedule. I am taking 3.063: Polymer Physics, 11.125: Exploring K-12 Classroom Teaching, and 21M.600: Introduction to Acting. This term is going to be totally sweet.
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.
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