Tag: blog

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been edit­ing the com­ments late­ly, then you may also be want­i­ng to know why.
Well first off spam gets delet­ed with out hes­i­ta­tion. What is spam? Any com­ment that has links to sites that are of no inter­est to me, and not rel­e­vant to the dis­cus­sions on my site. They are sim­ple delet­ed (and the offend­ers added to my black­list).
But actu­al real com­ments for real live peo­ple, well that’s dif­fer­ent. I make a point of pub­lish­ing almost all the com­ments peo­ple post, yes even the neg­a­tive ones.
But the last few days have seen a large num­ber of com­ments post­ed, and I’ve sim­ply been mak­ing a few slight changes because I don’t want TOO many peo­ple find­ing this page, so names and oth­er such details are being altered to pro­tect my own butt.

Well I’ve got­ten to 99 pho­to entries already and decid­ed that this whole pho­tolog thing is enough fun to put a bit more effort into is. So the pho­tos now have there very own page!!! Sor­d­dinville is online. And they also get there own RSS feeds now. Yay. Sor­d­dinville XML.
This also means I’ve got my apple­script auto­mat­i­cal­ly upload­ing the files to the blog now. Which took a whole lot of sort­ing out. Still haven’t fig­ured out how to get the script to pub­lish the entries… i’ll work on that some oth­er time.
Oh, and in a side note, the rea­son the pho­tos weren’t show­ing up was cause Mov­able­Type does­n’t put img tags in its ‘excerpt’ sec­tion, which is what it uses to make the feeds.
By the way, the apple­script that I’m using at the moment is in the extend­ed entry if any­one real­ly cares.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Pho­tolog for real?”

So I’ve spent the last few days with my head bur­ried deep inside apple­script (always amazes me just what you can do with this stuff). I’m work­ing on automat­ing my pho­tolog stuff and I thought rather than just re-invent the wheel I’d see what else is out there first.
I found the basic idea I want­ed to use at The Tao of Mac in the arti­cle HOWTO Process Images With Apple­Script and jhead, but as always no script does every­thing you want, for a start the image files I have don’t have EXIF info, so I need­ed to find anoth­er way to rename the files.
While dig­ging through Apple’s site for some info I came across a nice list of resources which includ­ed some sam­ple sub-rou­tines, very handy stuff.
Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Blog has an infor­ma­tive and link filled arti­cle on Intro­duc­tion to Pho­to­blogs and MoBlogs, which includ­eds a link to the king­dom of squir­rels arti­cles A PHOTOLOG IN FIVE EASY STEPS so that’s where I’m think­ing of going at the moment.
Cre­at­ing a sep­a­rate, but con­nect­ed weblog to run just as a pho­tolog. Now if I can just fig­ure out how to FTP with apple­script every­thing will be great.
Some­times I real­ly, real­ly do with Win­dows had a script­ing lan­guage… oh well.

I’ve known for some time that the blog lay­out would casu­al­ly crap its self if viewed in IE for win­dows, espi­cal­ly if the “Text Size was set to “Largest”. And I have for some time insist­ed that the fix for this was sim­ple… use a bet­ter brows­er and/or oper­at­ing sys­tem.
How­ev­er.
Some poor peo­ple are forced to suf­fer IE, so I’ve looked into it.
I’ve decid­ed it is high time to go to a fixed font size for the lay­out… this gets around most of IE’s ren­der­ing bugs if the user sets the font size to any­thing oth­er than “Small­er” (which for some rea­son is the clos­et to every oth­er browsers inter­pre­ta­tion of the CSS rel­a­tive font sizes). But this intro­duces two new prob­lems.
The design is a lit­tle less ‘flu­id’. I gen­er­al­ly pre­fer to design flu­id for web­sites… I’m just crazy like that.
And the sec­ond is that even with all that IE still does­n’t sup­port CSS font size con­trol of table con­tent… great. So until I find a work around for that one my cal­en­dar in the top left still might look crap… oh well.
Of more con­cern with a fixed font size I’ve lim­it­ed acces­si­bil­i­ty… not a good thing, and one of the many things I’ve been try­ing to avoid. So I’ll just have to final­ly get around to the ‘alter­nate view­ing’ CSS’s.
Look at that I’ve raved on and you prob­a­bly haven’t even noticed that I changed any­thing, right???
Oh, and if you real­ly do care, here’s a nice table that shows just how bad CSS sup­port real­ly is.
Which lists IE’s ‘Font sizes — key­words’ as “Bug­gy — a non-triv­ial bug, which although not nec­es­sar­i­ly always trig­gered, when trig­gered is seri­ous.” See, I was right, get a bet­ter brows­er.

Over at A List Apart they have a great arti­cle on 10 Tips on Writ­ing the Liv­ing Web.
So, lets see how I do:
1. Write for a rea­son
Okay, so I don’t have a good answer for this. This weblog real­ly start­ed as an exper­i­ment with the tech­nol­o­gy. Back then I was using a nice bit of soft­ware called Grey­Mat­ter and all was good. Then I changed to using the nicer (sub­jec­tive) bit of soft­ware Mov­able­Type. I’m still using Mov­able­Type, and have found it fun.
But what of the exper­i­ment, well I know a great deal more about the instal­la­tion and run­ning of a weblog (or oth­er reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed news or jour­nal sites). And I know a lot more about the lim­i­ta­tions, for exam­ple I know that I could­n’t addapt Broadsword with­out major fea­ture addi­tions.
So, I’ve not real­ly got a good rea­son for run­ning this, maybe I should look at find­ing one.
2. Write often
Hmm, well I don’t score very well here. I tend to be sparadic at best, I think I’ve man­aged to write at least once a month.
3. Write tight
Well, this one I do do. Some­times too much, leav­ing more of the idea in my head and less on paper than was planned…
4. Make good friends
Okay, so I don’t tend to “go out and find new stuff to read” much.
5. Find good ene­mies
Hmm… I guess I’d first have to decid­ed what I want­ed to say…
6. Let the sto­ry unfold
Score bad­ly here too…
7. Stand up, speak out
Yes, but say what?
8. Be sexy
Not a prob­lem.
9. Use your archives
Okay, this one I’ve got sort­ed.
10. Relax!
Hell, have you ever meet any­one more relaxed???
Total
Looks like maybe 5 out of 10, if you fudge the num­bers a lit­tle and round-up a lot.
So I have some work to do, but first I need to decid­ed if I could be both­ered doing it. Do I want to con­tin­ue this weblog as is, or do I want to make it bet­ter than it could be?

Look­ing through my sitel­og I’ve found what I think is the fun­ni­est thing any­one has ever searched for and found my site:
“ever fuck a toon”
I can’t fath­om how this brings up my lit­tle shack on the net.

‘kay, its a bit of a slap togeth­er job, but I was just get­ting sick of the default lay­out so here you go, new and improved and in three coloums (not sure what i’m gonna use that 3rd coloum for yet… sug­ges­tions wel­come).
And yes, before you ask it is sup­posed to look kin­da like it did before the move. Hey I liked where I was going witht he design back then, I’m not gonna change it all just because I’ve done it before.