Blog

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

More archive tweaks

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I spent some time this morning doing some more tweaking, trying to get the archives into a more useable and user-friendly format. The current layout has a calendar for the current month displayed, with any day that I’ve made a post as a clickable link that will take you to that day’s posts in the archive files. Underneath the calendar are links to the monthly archive pages dating back to Nov. 2000. The ‘full archives’ link underneath that links to a page listing every post I’ve made, split up into categories in a table. On that page, the header for each table will take you to the full category archive (these pages can be huge, though), and the individual post links will take you directly to each post on its own.

Hopefully this will make digging through my archives a bit easier (in case there’s anyone here quite crazy enough to bother).

No more splash page

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I just nuked the splash page for my site, so now this page should be the first thing you see. I’d been tossing it over in my head for a while, as it really didn’t serve a purpose other than making it just a little harder to get to the actual content of my site. Then, today I came across Web Pages That Suck, and it opens with a splash page that goes into detail on why splash pages shouldn’t be used. So…mine’s gone.

Just imagine — now you can get to the random babble that I put up here that much faster!

Cross-platform 3.0

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I got this e-mail today regarding my comments on OmniWeb in my browser compatibility chart:

From: Andreas Varga <xxx@xxxxxx.xxx>
Date: Wed Feb 27, 2002 03:12:09 PM US/Pacific
To: djwudi@yahoo.com
Subject: browser compatibility

Hi…

Just wanted to let you know that you should revise your opinion about OmniWeb. The latest sneaky peek versions have much improved CSS support. The attached screenshot shows your page using the latest sneaky peek version 49 released today. While it’s not perfect, you’ll surely agree that it’s a huge step forward.

Regards,
Andreas

Well, he was right. OmniWeb is making great strides forward, and I’m now looking forward to the next public release. Thanks Andreas, and the compatibility chart has been updated.

New blog name

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I just stumbled across a nifty quote on the web, and it inspired me to change the title of my blog. I’d been just calling it the ‘Wudiblog’ for lack of a better idea. However, I’ve just retitled it to be ‘The Long Letter’. Here’s the quote that inspired the switch:

Please excuse such a long letter — I didn’t have time to write a short one.

— Pascal

As someone who, like my dad, has a tendency to say in 50 words what can be said in 5, I thought it was fairly fitting. This won’t really change anything major around the site in any way, no address changes or such. Just something I wanted to do.

I knew it wouldn’t all be good news

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Two big “ouches” that may be affecting the site due to my upcoming move — a $300 fee I hadn’t expected, and a possible downtime of as much as 2 months (worst case scenario). I was afraid this might happen….

All that’s going on is when you sign up for a DSL account with Speakeasy, you sign on for a 12-month contract. Should you cancel your service within that 12 months, you’re subject to a $300 cancellation fee. Since the DSL line is hooked up in co-operation with the phone service provider (Qwest, in my case), it can’t be simply tossed onto another number…even when changing apartments, it’s a process of closing one account and opening another. On the bright side, though, if you re-open your account at the new address within 90 days of cancelling your account at the old address, that $300 is refunded. Still, I have to spend it in the first place, which hurts.

The last downside — because I’ll be starting the connection process over, my website could be down for as much as close to 2 months. Speakeasy asks to allow up to two weeks for the connection to take place (from placing the order to the signal coming up and online), and they can’t start the process until after you’ve had a working phone at the address for a month.

I’ll see what I can do with creative juggling to make the transition as easy as possible, though. Melvin just told me I’ll be able to move into the apartment on March 15th. I’ll be paid up at my old apartment through the end of March. So, figure I leave my webserver at the old apartment until the very last possible day — that will have my website up and running through the end of March. If I start my phone service at the new apartment on the 15th of March, then I’ll be able to place my DSL order on April 15th, and the new DSL line will be up and running by the end of April, with about a month of downtime. If I’m really lucky, Melvin will allow me to place the order to start phone service to that apartment at the beginning of March, before I officially move in, and I’ll just leave that number unused until I actually start living there mid-March — if I can do that, then that could move all pertinent reconnect dates up by two weeks, giving me only two weeks of downtime for the website. I’ll see what I can do.

I should still be able to get online for e-mail and such the entire time, though, as I’ve got modems in both of my computers now — so at least I won’t be going through the same ‘net-less existence I was when I first moved into my place.

More updates on all this nonsense will appear as I nail down the details.

A splash of color

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I did a little bit of dinking around on the site this evening. Nothing really incredible, just playing with some of the styles that I use. Added the green background, made the day division headers stand out a bit more, changed the color of the text for quotes so that there’s a more visible difference between my babble and quoted babble, and rearranged the links a bit.

The wierd thing is, somehow this seems to have borked up the comments boxes a little bit — they now don’t quite fit within the defined window size. I’m not sure why…will experiment a bit to clear that up, though.

Cross-platform 2.0

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Tom was good enough to send me two screenshots of my site that he took on his *nix box. Generally good results, but (sigh) not perfect. In any case, I’ve updated my browser compatibility chart with his submissions.

Thanks Tom!

MT Upgrade

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While I’m sure this matters to absolutely nobody except me, I thought I’d post a quick note to track the changes — I’ve just upgraded Movable Type (the scripts that I use to run and manage my blog) to version 1.4. If anyone reading this is tech-geeky enough to care, here’s a list of the changes in this upgrade. I may be playing with some of these new features in the future….