Are We There Yet?

We've all got goals in life. Some of them will be reached tomorrow (if a good meal is your idea of a goal) and some won't be reached for several years. I've been using computers for over 10 years now and have never established an online presence of my own. I guess this blog is my first step towards that goal.

I've never been one to go with trendy things, especially when it comes to technology. I'd like to think of myself as a bit above all the hoopla that gets generated over the latest "thing" for the web. But, I must admit that the appeal of a blog was too much to resist. I don't have a ton of free time on my hands these days, but using this handy software from Blogger.com has made the overhead of having a blog practically zilch.

Lucky me.

So, what's the point of this?

Well, I'm a bit of an intellectual at times and spend a good deal of my day just thinking (usually about work and my projects). But even when I'm not at work, I'm still thinking about stuff. Sometimes it's important (the Cubs play the Astros tonight for the lead in the NL Central) and sometimes it's not so important (what am I going to eat for dinner tonight?). Like most healthy humans in this day and age, we all need an outlet for these thoughts. I like communication as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't dream of torturing my wife with ramblings about the latest Cubs acquisition (Tony Womack?!) or my current Neal Stephenson novel (Cryptonomicon). That's where you come in to play.

Lucky you.

I've been using an excellent RSS aggregator lately from Nick Bradbury (original author of HomeSite and current author of TopStyle) called FeedDemon. I've found that this program is like liquid caffeine for my news addiction. It's still in beta right now, but the latest feature is integration with w.bloggar so you can use FeedDemon to keep you up to date with your favorite blogs as well as to update your blog.

Since I've just started this thing out, I downloaded w.bloggar to give it a spin. While Blogger.com seems to be great, especially since you can blog from anywhere through their web interface, I like having a Windows GUI from which I can blog as well. I use Mozilla FireBird as my browser, so I don't always trust every web site to fully support me. Especially when it comes to doing the kinds of advanced things with HTML that the Blogger.com web site does. I've also heard horror stories from others about their login to Blogger.com timing out while writing longer blogs causing them to lose their post. My parents have been known to suggest that I give the Reader's Digest version of stories from time to time, so the thought of this happening to me didn't sit well either.

So far so good, I think. This is my first post with w.bloggar, so we'll see how things go. It's certainly a pretty slick looking program and I like having an integrated spell checker.

I've searched out and tried no less than 5 different solutions to syndicate this blog in to an XML feed so RSS aggregators (such as FeedDemon) can read this blog. None of them have gotten the job done for me.

I did find one, called RSSify, that seemed to work when running the script on their server. But when I ripped out the PHP script they made available so I could run it on my server, I started getting all sorts of weird PHP errors. I don't know a lot about PHP, so I wasn't able to fix the problem. IMO, it's a heck of a lot easier (and more informative) to write your own under these circumstances since debugging a language you're not too good at can be an exercise in futility.

I've found some great resources on the format of an RSS 1.0 XML feed, so I guess that's the direction I'm headed in. I guess writing a comments system will have to wait for now, because I'm more interested in doing this.

Hooray for string parsing.

And still on my list of things to do with this blog is update the template to something a bit more original and more my style. I'm a better coder than graphics or layout artist, so who knows when that will happen.

So it turns out that there is a bug in IE6 where certain HTML elements aren't read properly by the IE6 engine. The end result is that IE6 cannot tell how long some elements are and ends up truncating at what appears to be an arbitrary length. As such, anyone using IE6 to view this blog up until now has seen as much content as a Texas legislature meeting minus a dozen Democrats.

I inserted the fix in to my template and republished the entire blog. I see there's still some quirks with IE6 (odd indentations of the first few paragraphs), but I'm not going to worry about something as minor as that right now.

I found some new blog software yesterday that I'm toying with the idea of using. It's called Movable Type. It's quite different from Blogger and is definitely the "geek's" blogging solution. Installation took about an hour to get all the components in their proper places and installed as well as file permissions set. The configuration options for it are staggering.

It's entirely hosted on your own server space and does nothing with the Movable Type website, unlike Blogger. This means that I'm no longer at the mercy of the Blogger site being up in order for me to post. It also uses Perl, which I'm not too crazy about. The last program I used that required Perl was PopFile for spam filtering. PopFile worked like a charm once it was properly trained. It used perl to parse the emails and store/load/compare the word list it created. The thing is that the perl executable turned out to be an incredible resource hog. It ended up holding 30-40MB of RAM, which I thought was pretty unacceptable considering it was being used by a program only in execution during SMTP transactions. I got rid of PopFile after that. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the same.

Other improvements for Movable Type:

• Integrated comments system with full control over them through web admin (including IP blocking)
• RSS v1.0 and v2.0 syndication. I had written a PHP script that created an RSS v1.0 compatible feed from the page, but this is a more complete solution.
• Categorization of posts. This might be useful since I talk about all sorts of things on this page.
• Integrated search feature.
• Much more powerful and better archive support.
• Supports importing Blogger posts so I wouldn't lose anything or have to re-enter posts.

Of course, this all comes on the announcement that the now Google-owned Blogger is folding their subscription based Blogger Pro and wrapping its features in to the free Blogger. Their Blogger Pro web site is acting funny for me, so I have no idea what this entails right now.

As you can see, I have migrated over to the Movable Type blog software that I posted about previously. I found an excellent template from Neil Turner that's he's made available on his site. I made some minor changes to it to suit my tastes, but it's pretty slick, isn't it?

So, now I've got a great layout, a comments system, RSS v1.0 and v2.0 syndication, and better archiving. I'm pretty excited.

I've got Ian converted over to Movable Type now and copied over the template to him as well. He's discovering the joys of having 100% control over your blog. First on his list of things to play with? Auto-trackback.

So, here you go, Ian. :-)

I've scrapped together another blog where I can put all my baseball / Cubs / sports related material to keep it out of this one. I guess I'm somewhat of a rarity among geeks since I care as much about the Cubs and baseball as I do about TCP/IP, my email, and what Blizzard is doing.

Anyway, check out http://www.futureviperowner.com/cubs/ if you're interested in that part of my blog. Warning to all visitors - a graphical artist I am not.

If you're counting, I've gone yet another 12 days without a post. Life has slowed down a bit, although not entirely for positive reasons. Of the two projects I spoke of in my last post that have kept me from the time to blog, I've only completed one of them. Thankfully, it's the one I get paid to do. The other project was put on hiatus because I didn't feel as though I had enough things to do already so I decided it was time to have another bout of kidney stones. Not one to do things half-heartedly, kidney stones wasn't enough to knock me flat on my back, so I had my appendix removed, too. Joy.

I've also decided that one of the things that's kept me from being a frequent blogger is the fact that I simply can't post short entries. Just browse through my archives and you'll see that it's virtually impossible for me post something less than 5 paragraphs. Those types of posts take time to compose and edit. I don't know if it's because I've got too much to say about things or if I'm just incapable of getting to the points of things quickly. Either way, it doesn't lend itself well to posting on a whim when a topic of interest strikes me.

I guess I'll just see how things go over the next couple of days and do my best to make some time for the blog. Posting is therapeutic at times. It's nice to have personal forum where I can talk about things that interest me (even if I'm only talking to myself - God, there's a psychologist's bill waiting to happen). I've had a revolution pertaining to remote desktop software that I'll try and get finished soon and posted here.

Cripes! I'm getting worse! It's now been over a month since my last post! I could go on to tell you that I've made a New Year's resolution to try and spend more time with my online therapist *cough*, I mean the blog, but that would imply that I regularly make New Year's resolutions (which I don't) or that I keep them when I make them (which I also don't).

So, what's my excuse this time? Well, work has been as busy as ever. The main reason for my absence has been the birth of my son, Gavin Thomas. I've been spoiled by my 17-month old daughter in to believing that all kids are happy watching Elmo for an hour while you "decompress". Alas, the only thing that satisifies our son for that long is something I can't give him.

Well, now that I've scared off every geek without a <boy || girl>-friend / significant other with the implications that last statement makes, I think I'll return to the regularly scheduled programming of "Are We There Yet?". Well, hopefully the regularly scheduled programming of August or maybe September...not the white static noise that's existed on the blog since my Death March to a software release began in November.

The honors keep flowing in for me. I've just received my first "Comment Spam". Like the referral spam I talked about a week ago, comment spam is also frequented by the porn sites and lovers of the little, blue miracle pill. "Commenting" on my post about Activision caving on their exclusive demo release of Call of Duty from back on August 29, 2003, the spam encouraged me to keep up the great work on the site while adding a link to an impotence site.

Sheesh, guys, I can take a hint...

Little do they know that just a few hours earlier, I upgraded my Movable Type installation to the latest release version of 2.661. This new version is a stepping stone to 3.0 that was released to address (drum roll, please): comment spam! Among the improvements are the ability to close comments on a post (which keeps posted comments displayed while disabling new comments) as well as using redirects for all URLs used when posting comments. The redirects effectively eliminate the Google page rank increase since the link does not go directly to the site, rather it's redirected to the target site by a script from one of my pages.

I was going to check out the MT blacklist plugin hoping that it would keep me from having to change my comment options from open to approve (since I know all 6 of the posters that have made comments up to this point might revolt at such a change in operating procedure). But, I see that apparently the plugin doesn't play nicely with the aforementioned Movable Type upgrade. Guess I'll have to wait for now.

I recently started messing with the StyleCatcher Movable Type plug-in to accommodate a few other blogs running on this server. On the surface, it's a great concept. Customizing templates on older versions of Movable Type was a bit of a daunting task and required more time than I cared to dedicate to the task. Now that the base template is centered around CSS, this customization process is a lot easier. Six Apart's style contest was also a great idea to get talented web developers to create a gallery of templates to showcase the changes.

Now that StyleCatcher is properly configured, I can appreciate how streamlined and simple the process can be. Unfortunately, it took a fair amount of tinkering to get to this point and it's still not behaving properly under all circumstances.

Another few months, another woefully neglected blog. So neglected is it that I realized my Movable Type installation is out-of-date. Six Apart has moved on to version 4.0 of the Movable Type publishing platform, and I'm still running version 3.34.

For the most part, I've never been a big fan of upgrading things just for the sake of it. If something isn't broke, there's no reason to fix it. That's not to say that every software title installed on my computer is running the same version that I first installed. I like new features, improved interfaces, and more eye candy as much as the next guy. I certainly never miss a Windows Update, but one could easily make the argument that Windows is exempt from the aforementioned adage as it's fundamentally broke and therefore always requires fixing.

However, upgrading something like Movable Type isn't as cut-and-dry as it might sound.