This isn’t the first time I’ve posted questions in their forums before and not gotten a response, so I’m going to post the two questions here and see if anybody here running around the ‘net right now can help me. Read on…
Category: Site Info
Two Years Ago Today
This site as you know it was was born two years ago today (though, as I mentioned on that entry and more recently, I had been blogging before that but my archives got trashed). But today marks the anniversary of two years of consistent blogging on this MovableType installation.
So what did I do to celebrate? Nothing, really (maybe I’ll buy myself lunch today or something). I did finally get around to renaming my mt-comments.cgi and mt-search.cgi files so they won’t get hammered as bad by automated robots hellbent on breaking my site. But this entry is what I did. Read on…
Cleaning House
Last night I went through and got rid of every remnant of the “utterlyboring.com/blog/archives/xxxxxx.php” addresses from this site’s archives, replacing them with their current, more useful (though sometimes longer) URLs. I had a pile (nearly 1300) statements like this in my .htaccess file for this site:
Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/001275.php http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2003/12/22/thing_may_break_for_a_bit.php
I’ve long since quit using the “/blog” subdirectory here, because I realized that I’m never really going to put anything else here other than the blog, so there’s no sense for subdirectories. (The original reason for the subdirectory was because this site was hosted under jakeortman.com, and I had my resume, portfolio, etc… on here, so subdirectories were needed.)
So I had those redirects in place since I did a massive rebuild nearly a year ago. Now I’m getting rid of those redirects now that there’s no remnants of them anywhere on my site, and if there are old bookmarks to them at this point, oh flippin’ well. The entries are old, and Google’s long since picked up the proper URLs, and now that I’ve gotten my 404 page to work with dynamic publishing (thanks to this article), I just hope people are smart enough to use a search form.
I also got rid of my RSS 1.0 feed, and made an .htaccess redirect to the RSS 2.0 feed (whose location has changed as well to www.utterlyboring.com/index.rss). If this buggers up your feed readers, let me know, but I have setup .htaccess redirects for all the various addresses (FeedDemon got the redirect, and immediately started reading from the new address, changing its settings — man, that’s slick). I just didn’t see the need for two RSS feeds and an Atom feed.
That gives me one less index template to rebuild upon posting, as well. So that makes it so that my RSS 2.0, Atom, Main Index, Main Archive, and Left Column Archive and Stats (up on the right column of this page) are the only index templates getting rebuilt on posting, and the individual entry’s page is getting built for that entry as well. Otherwise, everything else is getting built dynamically and cached with MT 3.0’s dynamic templates, making posting and rebuilds fly right along (much more so than before).
Long time readers of this site (and I’m talking REALLY long time readers) know that this site had a stage for a few months where there was no posting. While the archives here date back to Nov. 2002, I’ve been posting on this site for longer than that. The problem was that I had a problem with my server at my previous host combined with an early 2.x build of MovableType that I didn’t know how to use. Being an idiot, I didn’t back up, so I lost several months worth of posts, and I got too busy in my new job to do anything about it. I thought the entries were gone.
Then Barney and I were discussing the Web archive, and I thought to myself “Wait a minute, I betcha they have those old posts.” and sure enough, they did. Granted, I posted for a couple weeks then, but it was several posts a day. So expect those to be copied/pasted as entries into this system as time allows.
So expect more random crap to show up on this site on a future date. It’ll be dated, and some of the URLs won’t work, but I’ve put quite a bit into this site over the years, and there’s no sense on not having it all in one place.
WYSIWYG Editing for MovableType
The one gripe new users of MovableType have had is that it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor for post creation. I, personally, don’t mind not having one, as I compose all my stuff offline using SharpMT, and like working with code. But many folks like to have the WYSIWYG editor, and many other blogging solutions have it. Heck, Six Apart, the company that makes MT, recently implemented a fancy editor for it’s TypePad hosted blogging solution, so why it’s not a part of MT is beyond me.
Thankfully, MT 3.0 has made it a bit easier to implement a WYSIWYG editor, thanks to its CSS interfaces, and Movalog, an indespensible site for MT hackers, has a great tutorial on how you can implement HTMLArea into your backend. It’s still a bit complicated, and SixApart should really make this far easier to do (or just make it part of the main MT install), but at least you can have one, if you so desire. It’s now on my To-Do list (which I really need to edit/update).
I Promise
Got all the political crap out of my system today. Will be back to normal mindless crap tomorrow.
Yes, I know…
…the quantity of links has dwindled the last few days. I’ve been busy as heck with work, helping my dad get all of his stuff in order for some patents he’s going to apply for (never thought my dad would be an inventor, but he is), and am just all-around tied up (we’re also considering doing a re-finance on our house, so that’s taking time to research). I’ll have a bit of time tonight to plow through my submitted links and flagged feeds and will get some content ready for the rest of the week.
On another site note, I’m pretty dang sure I have MT-Notifier up and working. Basically, what it allows you to do is subscribe to comments on each entry. Just check the box when you make a comment, and see if it works. If it doesn’t work for you, please let me know so I can test it, yell at the author. If it does work for you, let me know so I can praise the author. If it’s something I did wrong, let me know so I can yell at myself. I’m also doing some general clean up of templates around the site, and will be setting some of my templates for dynamic publishing here soon (making rebuild and posting times a ton quicker).
Honey, I’m Home
Have a pile of links to post over the next couple days, will get to them later. Meanwhile, we had a good trip to the coast — beautiful sunny day on Friday — and enjoyed the weekend. But I do know that I’m not going on a trip with a one-year-old again — ever. While she was generally pretty good, we had to keep an eye on her all the time. My grandparents live right on Hwy. 101 on the Oregon coast, and if we weren’t watching her, she would’ve bolted onto the highway. One thing’s for sure, we’re not going anywhere until she’s older. We needed this vacation, needed a break, etc… . It was certainly nice to get out of the house, that’s for sure. I’m not entirely looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, but what are you going to do — the bills have to be paid after all.
Back to regular blogging tomorrow after I get through all my e-mail and RSS feeds.
Heading Out For A Vacation
No blogging until Sunday at the earliest. I’m heading out on a much needed vacation tomorrow morning, leaving my laptop at home. I’m heading over to Salem Thursday morning, playing at the A.C. Gilbert Discovery Village with the kids, hit the Salem Carousel, have a nice dinner, and then sleep. Wake up the next morning, head over to the Oregon Coast Rockaway, specifically), maybe stop and sample some cheese. Stay a couple nights at my grandparents beach house on the lake there. Come back Sunday. Sleep. Go to work on Monday.
See you on Sunday, folks. I don’t have MovableType’s scheduled publishing feature setup yet, so I can’t pre-write a bunch of posts for the weekend. I left you with a bunch of links to read and digest today, so have fun.
For those of you on my mailing list, I apologize as you’ll see these same links for a couple days as I can’t get the thing to not send when there isn’t anything different. Sorry.
<church lady>Well isn’t that special…
I’m the number one result on Google for “babysitter sex,” number seven for “man boobs,” number four for “man breasts,” number five for “green poop,” number two for “sex in iraq,” number four for “college panties,” number one (and two) for “woman boobs,” number two for “drunken mom,” and, most disturbing, number 14 for “real doll.”
And I’m also number two for “Bend Bulletin.”
And there are a ton more in my AWStats for the month. I really need to quit looking at those things.
If You Can Read This, It Worked
If you can read this, this site is now running MovableType 3.1 (been holding out on 2.661). I still need to test things a bit, get Typekey installed on my templates, and tweak a few things (especially following Neil’s speed up tips and setting up dynamic templates on some pages to speed rebuilds).