website

Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.

Yet another trick in place

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Alrighty then — more goodies are in place!

To go with the (re-)addition of the smiley hack, I’ve combined a couple other ideas to really enhance the comment postings here. Now, when you leave a comment, in addition to the live comment preview, just above the ‘Name’ field you’ll see a ‘Show smileys »’ link. Clicking on that will reveal a row of smileys — click on any one of them, and the correct code for that smiley will be automatically added to your comment post. Not enough smileys? Click on the ‘More smileys »’ link for a second set. If you don’t want all those faces staring at you while you type, just choose ‘« Hide smileys’ or ‘« Hide more smileys’ and they’ll go back into hiding.

A close examination (well…okay, it wouldn’t have to be that close) of the multitudes of smileys that I originally posted will reveal that there are a lot more smileys available here than I’ve included as clickable in the comments area — I’m still deciding whether or not to add a third set to the comment forms. For now, however, should anyone want to use one of the other smileys…well, I’ll leave that as an exercise for you to figure out. :D

Thanks to ScriptyGoddess Jenn for the clickable-smiley code — the hide/show code I actually managed to figure out on my own after checking out quite a few examples, including Scripty Goddess Jenn’s, Aarondot’s, and an article from O’Reilly.

Smileys are back!

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I had this hack installed a while ago, and had managed to kill it — well, it’s back! Now, when I or anyone posting a comment types in a ‘smiley’ code (for instance, ‘:)’) it will be replaced by the corresponding ‘smiley’ (in this case, ‘:)’).

Below is a list of all the smileys available – just hold your mouse over each one to see the code that produces it.

Thanks to Yahoo! Messenger for the smileys, Sector 101 for the list of codes that mine are based on (though not identical to), and So Very Posh for the hack.

Cool tricks with MovableType

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I wanted to toss this up really quickly before I crashed out tonight — over the course of the evening, I’ve tossed in a few very cool tweaks to my blog setup.

First off, the month-by-month archive listings (listed beneath the calendar on the right under the heading ‘Monthly Archives’) now display as a full calendar, with links to the individual posts displayed on the day they were posted. Just a nicer visual presentation than one long page for each month, as I had before. (Suggestion from andersja, code from Dive into Mark.)

The second tweak I’m all sorts of impressed by. There was a great little script posted on ScriptyGoddess that allowed me to implement live comment previewing. Basically, this creates a preview area where you can see what your comment will look like as you type it. It renders HTML as it’s typed too, so if you like to use any code in your comments, that will show in the preview too! Really, really nifty — and easier to see for yourself than for me to try to describe. I’m sure you’ll figure it out easily enough once you see it in action.

That’s about it for tonight…bedime for Bonzo now, tomorrow’s my really late night at work. Woohoo!

WudiVisions

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One upside of having to redo everything from the ground up is that it’s allowing me to play with some ideas that I’d had floating around in my head for a while, and just hadn’t tried yet — and other ideas that have just appeared during this project.

The latter category is responsible for the newest addition to my site — WudiVisions, a ‘PhotoBlog’. While I certainly make no claims of being a professional photographer of any sort, I do occasionally come up with something that I like, and so I figured I’d toss this together as a way to keep something of a ‘best of’ archive of my photos.

The design isn’t final (nor is the name, actually — anyone care to suggest a better title than ‘WudiVisions’?), but as with the rest of the site, it’s at least up and running. I’ve also dropped a small preview icon into the sidebar here on The Long Letter — anytime I put a new image up in WudiVisions, that preview image will update.

See? More goodies!

Progress

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It’s a long, long way from where we want to be…

— O.M.D., ‘Pandora’s Box (It’s a Long, Long Way)’

A long, long way it is, but progress is being made. I’ve managed to get all the template files that MT uses to build the pages recreated, so my site is back to the look I’d settled on just before the crash.

There’s still a long road ahead of me — everything from reconstructing the rest of the site outside of the Long Letter to re-entering all of the old Long Letter posts (yup — all 500-some have to be put back in). Still, I’m started. That’s something, right?

Rebuilding from scratch

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Okay…so here’s the scoop.

In brief — everything died.

Last Thursday, I grabbed a moment during work to check my site, and found out that it was down. This wasn’t immediately a concern — computers do occasionally freeze (though it’s wonderfully rare with OS X), my router has a tendency to lock up on occasion, and I’ve got the occasional tendency to forget about some of the more important of my bills — so I just didn’t worry about it right off.

Unfortunately, when I got home, it quickly became obvious that this was no minor problem. The iMac that I’ve been using for my webserver, was dead — “D – E – D, ded”. No response to any keypresses…no response to the ‘panic button’ reset switch…not even any response after I unplugged it, let it sit for a minute, and plugged it back in. Not a good situation.

Especially when I noticed the faint smell of something burnt lingering in the air.

So, my webserver is no more, and I’m in the process of rebuilding things from scratch. My first priority was to get my blog back up — but to do that, I’m starting with just the default Movable Type template. The rest will fall into place…though it’s likely to be a long, slow process.

On the bright side, I’d done a backup of my website just three weeks ago, towards the beginning of August, so I’ve only really lost about three weeks of posts. On the down side — just copying that backup into the webserver directory of the machine I’m using now, didn’t work, so I still have to rebuild everything. Still, it’ll go a lot faster than if I’d entirely lost all that information, so that’s a good thing.

In the meantime…well, things are likely to be a bit odd around here for a while as I get things going again. Caveat emptor.