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.

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!

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.