Blog

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

Why blog?

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Some days I sit back and wonder just why I do this. My site doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic — primarily just my folks and a few friends who stop by from time to time when they remember. And, admittedly, much of what I write probably wouldn’t be of any real interest to the world in general. Bits and pieces of my life, what I’m doing, what’s going on. Heck, I don’t even get personal enough most of the time to make for any real good drama!

I found the following quote over on Peach’s site after she left a comment to one of my posts, and it seemed to sum up fairly accurately why I keep banging away at this — because, whether or not it’s seen all that often…it’s fun.

I am very pleased with my (o.k. and yours too) blogger. I feel like I have fallen down the rabbit hole; just falling and falling in a blissful state, sans the drugs. I love IT! It is peering through my own looking glass at my own ego and my written word. Whether you are an amatuer or a professional; whether you are an exquisite artiste or you stink, it makes no difference. Most people who create at some time or another, have a strong sense of who they are in the images they create. Mediocrity is the scare word for us. Your word or my word, we all checked off ‘public’ for a reason. We would like to be read and responded to.

Sometimes, though, I feel that I shouldn’t be ‘published’ unless I am very, very good. And then again, who cares? It’s my Journal and if you want to read it, be my guest.

Ack

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Oops — I just upgraded my blog software to the newest version, and in the process nuked the hack I had that inserted smileys into posts. Hence, my Spider-Man post isn’t displaying the stars at the moment. Grr. I’ll fix it tomorrow….

A few new site bits

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I’ve added a few features to the site — one a couple weeks ago, and two just a few minutes ago — and I figured I’d babble for a moment about them.

In brief — the first is a list of books I’ve read recently, found in the right sidebar just underneath the search box. As I start reading a book I’ll put it in, and it will appear at the top of the list. Once I’m done with a book I’ll babble about it, and a ‘Comments…’ link will appear after the book title — click on that to read what I have to say. Simple, sweet, works.

The second — well, the second is a blatant plea for money and support. :D Up until now I’d avoided doing anything like this, but as my finances aren’t what they used to be, I figured it was worth a shot. Via a program that Amazon offers, there’s now a voluntary paybox towards the bottom of the righthand sidebar (at least I didn’t put it right at the top…if I’m going to beg, I’ll make it as subtle as possible). Should you feel like it, click on that, and you’ll be able to donate money to me to help me keep things afloat. I’m not expecting much (if anything) from it, but I figured it was worth a shot. The worst anyone can do is ignore it, right?

The third is also a potential way for me to make the occasional buck or two off the site. Another Amazon program allows me to set links for books, movies and the like to point to their site — then, should somone click through the link to buy something, I get a small percentage of the purchase price. As with the others, it probably won’t add up to much, but every little bet helps.

Technical details follow below.

Read more

ISSN 1539-4387

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Back in March I found out that I could apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for my blog, legitimatizing it as a serial publication in the eyes of the U.S. Government. I figured what the hey, I might as well, applied — and just got the noticed that I’m registered!

This doesn’t really have any truly major benefits or consequences for me, other than the fact that librarians everywhere can now look me up in the ISSN database, but what they hey — I’m official. Why not?

Site statistics are back

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It took a while, and I had to reset my server logs to do it, but the site statistics page is live again.

Getting it running was a bit of an adventure, that’s for sure. It’s something of a geek milestone for me, however — in the process of getting Analog up and running, I ended up doing my first compile of a *nix command-line program from source code!

A bit of background…

I generally like to have Analog set to run daily at midnight on an automatic schedule, so that my statistics page is automatically generated every day, and I’ve always got the most recent statistics available to me (or anyone else, if they’re that bored). However, until now the only version of Analog I’d had was the Mac port, where it had been given a (minimal) user interface. Nothing really wrong with that, and it is more familiar to long-time Mac users, but it meant that for me to run it, I had to leave my webserver logged in under my username, as the Mac port wouldn’t launch while the machine was sitting at the login prompt. It was only a minor security risk, sure, as the webserver itself resides in my apartment, but hey…I wanted to “do it right,” so to speak.

I knew that the original version of Analog ran from the command line, and that I’d be able to have it run in the background no matter what state my server was in…but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it running. There was a pre-compiled command line version for OS X, but when I first started looking at this there was a typo on the page and I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I e-mailed the guy behind the pre-compiled OS X version to ask (and he’s since fixed the typo that had me confused), but in our correspondence he recommended that I go ahead and give compiling Analog myself a try. Well, heck, why not? Ya gotta learn sometime, right?

So, yesterday evening, I spent a few hours installing the developer tools onto my server (necessary to compile software under OS X), downloading the Analog source code, mucking about with configuration and make files…and ended up with a working version of Analog that I built myself! Sure, by many geek’s views this is simple, entry-level stuff…but I hadn’t made that entry yet, so I’m pretty happy that I managed to get it all working.

I did end up nuking the Apache log files in the process of this (quite intentionally), so at the moment, the statistics page looks pretty empty, but it’ll become more useful over time.

So…that’s my latest excursion into geekdom, and my initation into compiling source code. Fascinating, I’m sure….

Update: The site statistics discussed here were for my old webserver. While it’s still up and running, they no longer have any real sigificance to this weblog. So it goes….

Smileys!

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I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.

So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!

Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!

Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.

More site reorganization

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If you’re a regular visitor, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve moved things around a bit. Basically, I’m working on simplifying the site, especially the first page that people see when they show up, trying to make things a bit less overwhelming (since I do tend to babble).

In essence, the first page of the site now serves as a table of contents/overview of what’s on the site. The table of contents that used to be on the left hand side of the page now fills the main content area, while the Long Letter blog itself has been moved to its own page. The links listed in the right sidebar have been split between the pages — more general links on the main page, and more blog-related links on the Long Letter page.

Lastly, I was able to set the entry for The Long Letter up so that it will always show a short summary of the most recent five entries in the blog. Clicking on the title of the blog will load the main page, while clicking on the title for the individual posts will jump to that entry on the main page.

Overall I think these will help simplify things. Feel free to e-mail or comment if you’ve got any thoughts on all this, of course.

MovableType 2.0

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I’ve just upgraded the backend for my site to Movable Type 2.0, which was just released today. New toys are always good! :)

Front page changes being the most visible, I’ll address those first.

Of lesser consequence, I’ve taken off the ‘Recently Read’ box for the time being. I’m not reading as much as I was before my ‘puters got down here (something I hope to work on correcting after the hullabloo of moving into my new apartment settles down), and I wanted to open up space for the newest addition.

The newest feature addition is one I’ve been looking forward to being able to do since I started reading that it would be included in the MT 2.0 upgrade. On the right below the archive listings, you’ll now notice a ‘Recently commented on’ section. This lists the ten posts that people have (hrm…let’s work on this….) most recently commented on. Yeah, that was tough to figure out, wasn’t it? ;) Anyway, new comments will pop a post to the top of that list, and if you hover your cursor over the post title, it’ll display a comment telling you how many comments have been made total for that post. Nifty, eh?

The less-visible change I’ve made is to the monthly archive listings, and it’s also a change implemented in MT 2.0 that I’ve been waiting for. While I like the standard of having my newest post at the top of the main index page, ensuring that the newest information is always the first to be seen, it seemed kind of silly to me that this forced my monthly archive pages to also display in reverse chronological order. MT 2.0’s stronger sorting features, however, allow me to keep my main page as is, while sorting my monthly archives so that they can be read in chronological order, top to bottom. Makes much more sense to me.

I think those are the only changes I’m going to make for the moment. I’m sure if I stumble across something else that I feel I just have to add, I’ll babble about it. And, of course, suggestions are welcome, if anyone has any.

Blogsnob

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This is nice to know — I just signed up with BlogSnob to display little text ads (you should be able to see the ad on the right side, between “Books” and “blog rings/links”). I display links to other people’s blogs, and my link gets displayed on other people’s blogs. I just checked my stats, and since I signed up on the 7th — just four days ago — my ad has been displayed 208 times, and I’ve had 6 people visit my site from my BlogSnob ad on another site. This gives me a 2.88% click-through rate, which while it doesn’t sound very high, when ad banner click-through rates are commonly reported at somewhere around .25% or lower, it’s pretty good. I’ll be staying with these guys.

I was having some problems getting the code to validate, but just got a little help from ServMe (FriedKitten), and now everythings validating and displaying without a hitch. Woohoo!