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It’s entirely possible that some of you may have tried to leave a comment here in the past few days and gotten an error message instead. Turns out that there’s currently a nasty little conflict between Movable Type and CPanel (a webserver administration package) that’s hitting me.

If you are experiencing intermittent “500 Server Errors” while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the prblem: a nightly CPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

Until that’s fixed, things may be a little tweaky around here. Unfortunately, it’s hitting me, too — I’ve got my next mix ready to Podcast, but I haven’t been able to get MT to rebuild and actually display it yet. I’m not even sure if this post is going to make it up immediately.

In any case, the problem is known, and — I hope — will be rectified as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

A quick look at my traffic over the last month does a good job of illustrating the benefits to moving to a server that can actually respond at a decent speed:

The day I moved is pretty obvious — the 7th of June. Prior to that, I was averaging 921 page loads a day, and it was trending downwards. Once I switched to the new server, things suddenly improved, and until the past few days, I was averaging 1,490 page loads a day. Nowhere near any of the big sites on the net, but still not too shabby.

So, once again, many thanks to Rain City Story for hosting me!

That spike over the last few days (up to 2,820 page loads yesterday) is almost entirely due to people looking for pictures of the Fremont Solstice Parade, arriving either from Google searches or links to my picture pages from other sites. Lots of pervs out there looking for pictures of naked bikers, would be my guess…and good for them!

I wholeheartedly approve of pervs in most situations — moreso when it drives a traffic spike to my site. ;)

“We Care A Lot” by Faith No More from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1987, 4:05).

Flickr recently introduced a new badge generator with a lot of new features, including the ability to restrict the photos displayed to a certain set or group pool.

I started experimenting with whether it was possible to place badges into my weblog posts where appropriate. For instance, a post about a specific event could include a badge displaying photos from that event’s Flickr photo set or group pool.

My first attempts met with some trouble. The code that the Flickr badge generator creates comes in two sections: the CSS for style, and the HTML code for the badge. Unfortunately, the CSS block was causing issues, breaking validation (under XHTML Transitional, you can’t have a block inside a element) and doing something else that resulted in a random string of characters displaying instead of the badge.

After trying a few different forms of badge, though, I found that as long as I kept the same color and background choices (in step four of the HTML badge creator), the CSS code always stayed the same, and it was only variables in the Javascript call to Flickr that determined which photos were displayed.

So, I chose the style options that I wanted, created a badge, and put the CSS code into my stylesheet. I then took just the HTML code, dropped it into a post, and bingo — everything displays fine. As an example, here’s a random selection of images from the Utilikilts group pool:

Other advantages — because the CSS now lives in the stylesheet, you can create different color combinations for different stylesheets (if you use a stylesheet switcher), and your Flickr badges will blend in with the rest of the design no matter which design you choose.

Not a mind-blowing tip, sure, but could be useful from time to time.