Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
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.
I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.
Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.
Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.
More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?
I’m about to be heading to bed, but I spent a little time tonight playing around with Amazon‘s recommendation features. As you bounce through Amazon you can tell them what you own and assign ratings to items, which they then use to create recommendation pages. So far, it’s actually be fairly impressive — the more I put in, the more accurate they get. At the moment, off the top of my head, I’d say that for every 5 items they recommend, I’m likely to already own 3 of them (at least with music — the ratio for DVDs and books is somewhat less). Quite interesting.
I’ve also created an Amazon wishlist so that should anyone ever feel like spending money on me, they’ll have some suggestions. Woohoo!
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Seattle, Downtown, Woody, Male, 26-30!
(via Doc Searls)
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….
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.
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?
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….
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.
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.