Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

TypeKey broken?

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I’m not sure how I’ve managed to do this, but while disabling the OpenID Comment plugin (which was apparently causing issues with submitting comments, and wasn’t really being used anyway), I’ve managed to break the ability to log in via TypeKey for authentication. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong — all of my code looks like it should be doing what it’s supposed to — but for whatever reason, the link to log in to TypeKey isn’t showing up.

So no TypeKey until I figure out what I broke. Meh.

iTunes “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson from the album Smells Like Children (1995, 4:53).

Ten Years (roughly)

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I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).

As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.

My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?

Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.

Sound familiar?

Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.

That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!

I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.

In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):

  • 3,614 entries.
  • 8,548 comments.
  • 1,228 trackbacks.
  • Four different management systems:
    1. Hand-coded
    2. NewsPro
    3. Movable Type
    4. TypePad
  • One lost job and subsequent Slashdotting.
  • Countless new contacts, friends, and interactions, some of which have spilled over into the “real world”, others of which have been entirely through the electrons of the ‘net.

Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.

And here’s to the next ten years.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

Silktide Sitescore

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Silktide SiteScore for this websiteFrom what I can tell, my site gets a fairly good score from Silktide, which appears to be a web development firm based out of England. Some of the areas I got marked down on aren’t a surprise at all (W3C validation, for instance, is failing miserably right now, something I need to pay attention to rather soon), but I did get a laugh out of the one section that I was rated as ‘Very Poor’:

Amount of text A page was found to contain a very large amount of text. Users very rarely choose to read large, continous blocks of text, and these pages require time to download and scroll through for relevant content. Recommendations: Break larger pages up into several smaller pages, and consider restructuring content to make navigating it easier.

Yeah…I get it. I talk a lot. This isn’t exactly news, especially if you’ve been following my site for any length of time. Good for a laugh, though.

Now to take a look at those validation errors and see if I can’t bump my score up above a 7.8…

(via A Crank’s Progress)

Update: With some work tweaking templates and a mix of simple fixes (some missing </div> tags) and not-quite-so-simple fixes (tracking down all the unescaped ampersands), I’ve managed to push my way up to an 8.3 rating. While I still rate a Very Poor for Amount of text, I’m now Good on Size of pages, Features, and Speed, and Excellent on Popularity ranking, Popularity on Google, British legal requirements, Use of fonts, Use of forms, Use of Flash, Use of frames, Table-based layout, Use of headings, Use of style-sheets, Use of Interactive Elements, No of links, No of images, Links to, Use of page titles, Refresh redirects, Basic HTML design, Use of advertising keywords, and Use of audio. Amusingly (and quite accurately, in my opinion) for many of those categories — Flash, tables, redirects, audio — it’s because I don’t use them that I got the ‘excellent’ rating.

I think that’s all I’m going to worry about.

iTunes “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” by Darin, Bobby from the album Legendary Bobby Darin, The (2004, 3:02).

Program on the emergence of civilization.

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I have no idea what prompted someone to leave this comment on my site, or what relation (if any) they think it might have to the post that it was added to…but it’s just long and bizarre enough that I think I’ll keep it. It didn’t come with any URLs or spam links, so I don’t have to worry about that. Just some odd ranting.

iTunes “Touch ” by Wolfsheim from the album Spectators (2005, 4:10).

I’ve got the blues…

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…but in this case, it’s a good thing.

I’ve been wanting to move away from the (slightly tweaked, but still) stock template included with Movable Type 3.2 for some time now, but just haven’t been able to find the time and energy to tackle the project.

Today I actually managed to find both at once, and here’s the result — the return of the “Blue Distressed” theme for my site. I’ve missed this one, and apparently, so have at least a few of my readers, from comments I’d gotten from time to time. The theme has been slightly tweaked from its last appearance on the site, but it’s still essentially the same: blue-grey colors, and a kilted me up in the corner.

Of course, that picture is quite out of date — I’ve got a bit over a year and a half’s worth of hair now — but fixing that will have to wait for a while yet. For now, I’m just happy to have this place looking a little more “me” than it has for the past few months.

As always, feel free to let me know if anything seems obviously buggy, or cries out for further tweaking…unless you use Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE, get out of the ’90’s and upgrade to a browser that works (unless, of course, job restrictions restrict you to IE…in which case, I pity you). ;)

iTunes “Hallowed Ground” by Erasure from the album Innocents, The (1988, 4:05).

iTMS Affiliation is a pain in the butt

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First, the good: I’ve gone through, bug-checked, and slightly tweaked the code for automatically linking to the iTMS in ecto to ensure that it works and performs searches as it should (something I’d been meaning to do for a bit now, as that page seems to be referenced fairly often by people working on that particular issue).

Then, the bad: while I love the idea of iTMS affiliation — and if I got more traffic, it might even bring me more than a few pennies here and there — I’ve got to agree with Scot Hacker that the whole shebang is really a pain to deal with. While I haven’t had to fight with the POST/GET issues that Scot is, some of his issues sounded very familiar to me…

It turns out that a lot of the links provided through the LinkShare back-end (Apple partners with LinkShare for the affiliates program; you have to use their back-end to generate your custom links) simply don’t work. See the six (currently static) album covers in the left column of the site? Only two of them actually take you to that album in iTMS. The other four take you to the iTMS homepage. All six links were pasted directly out of the LinkShare link maker, and should work as-is. This problem is totally unrelated to the POST problem — they’re just dishing up broken links to affiliates, period.

[…] I was expecting to find some kind of ad rotation mechanism for affiliates. See those static Stevie Wonder banners at the top of all the lyrics pages? I should be able to drop in a block of code and have those rotated out automatically from iTMS. Instead, the only option is for me to return to LinkShare every few days and grab some new static code. …why should this be so difficult?

[…] I’m trying to sell music for Apple here. You’d think they’d welcome all the help they can get. This whole process has been incredibly frustrating. Maybe I’ve drunk too much of the Apple Kool-Aid, but I really expect better from them.

iTunes “Insane in the Brain (Hot Tracks)” by Cypress Hill from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 5:18).

Tweaking the ads

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I’ve done a bit of tweaking on the ads served up on the pages of my site. While I certainly have no intentions of becoming an adfarm — I’ve seen weblogs where it’s difficult to find the content in the midst of a sea of ads, and that’s the last thing I want to do with my site — I finally decided that I didn’t mind at least slightly increasing the possibilities of having a few pennies slide my way from time to time.

To that end:

Donations: Two methods of simply tossing money at me are now displayed towards the bottom of the sidebar, using Amazon’s Honor System paybox and a PayPal donate button. No, I don’t really expect these to generate much (if anything), but you never know…I’ve been surprised a time or two in the past.

Advertising: For some time now, I’ve had one Google AdSense box just below the first entry, and an iTunes ad box in the sidebar. To these, I’ve added an Amazon ad box and a second Google AdSense box in the sidebar. Clicks through the Google ads and purchases made after clicking through the Amazon and iTunes ads will send a few fractions of a penny my way.

Now, as I’ve said, I don’t want the ads to overwhelm the content, so for the most part, I’ve made them as unobtrusive as possible — only one Google ad box is visible “above the fold” (visible when the page is first loaded), and the other ads don’t show up until you’ve scrolled through four full screens. Advertising mavens would probably tell you I’m doing this all wrong, but for me, it seems a good balance between having the ads out there and not overwhelming my few visitors.

It’s worth a shot, at least.

Feeds are tagged too

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It’s a good thing I subscribe to my own RSS feeds — the ‘full content’ feed and the ‘full content with comments’ feed have both been updated to include the new tag support. Sorry about the mass-refresh in your RSS readers if you get hit with it.

Folksonomy tag support added

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One of the things I’ve wanted to add to my site for quite a while now has finally been added: tagging, along the lines of del.icio.us or Flickr. Admittedly, I still have a ways to go in getting all my old entries correctly tagged, but that will come with time. For now, they’re showing up in a few places.

  1. On the main page of the site, the tag listings below each post that previously pointed to Technorati search pages for the individual tag now do tag searches internal to this website.

  2. Also on the main page of the site, there is now a ‘This Week’s Tags’ box just below the Table of Contents. This is a quick list of just those tags that have been used on posts within the past seven days…a handy overview of what I’ve been babbling about over the past week.

  3. On individual entry pages, the tag line below the post now searches internally (just as on the front page). There are also now quick links to search on individual tags on del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr.

  4. The main archives page now features a tag cloud listing tags used within the past month (31 days, actually). The tag cloud is also size-weighted by the frequency of each tag’s use.

  5. Lastly, I tweaked the tag search results to be a little more useable — rather than a simple listing of links to each result, I’ve added the entry excerpt for each result to give a little more context than just the headline.

All this is thanks to the excellent Movable Type plugin Tags.app.

As with everything I fiddle with around here, questions, comments and words of wisdom are always appreciated (whether or not they’re heeded is another thing entirely, of course…).

Reconnecting

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This is great.

Some time ago — back in April of ’04 — I came across an old Anchorage Press article talking about the “glory days” of the underground/punk/alternative music scene in Anchorage, from the late ’70’s up to the early ’90’s, which touched off my own post reminiscing about my days running around the local scene, from the ’90’s to the early 2000’s.

Touched off by a couple of random Google searches, over the past couple of weeks (starting in August, and really picking up steam in November), that post has become an impromptu meeting point and simple message board for quite a few of the Anchorage scenesters of the ’80’s. While I was just a few years younger and don’t know any of the people who’ve been posting, I have been having an absolute blast watching all the various comments come in as this group of old friends re-connect after twenty-odd years or so.

All I did was provide the right Google keywords and a comment form that these guys have been using to get back in touch…but it’s enough to get a grin on my face whenever I see another comment roll in.