Weblog Software
I recently installed WordPress on my local machine to test it out, as a possibility to replacing the seemingly dead boastmachine that I am using right now.
As I began writing the template to bring the Wordpress installation into working with my own graphical web design, I noticed all kinds of funky HTML. I've always thought that nesting a lone table cell ( <td> ) inside of another was illegal - as the real way to nest tables would be to go through the complete process of writing the table statement, table rows, then cells. But - in the Wordpress calendar, table cells were nested within one another! I also found the separation between programming and design to be somewhat absent, although I do realize that it is difficult to accomplish this fully and especially when other people who did not write the software must understand the basic idea of the code. Also, who uses <h2> in a side bar? That seems to be a central theme of Wordpress templates. Not me...but easy to fix. Some h2's seemed to be coming from some mysterious source outside of the sidebar file. There were also plenty of odd tags such as <small> - which would be something I would normally relegate to using CSS and defining the font size as a percentage of the parent element's size.
boastMachine, on the other hand, outputs very clean and efficient HTML, and although I have tuned it up quite a bit, it was good from the very beginning. The file organization in boastMachine also seems to be somewhat better (there are less files for the templates, and also the programming - it isn't nearly as complex.
If I did migrate to WordPress, I would have to write a script to move the boastMachine posts over to the WP database. I would also likely have to do some manual work to change the categories. I would also have to change the URIs to all of my posts (which I may do anyways with boastMachine - though implementing a redirect system to do it gracefully).
- WYSIWYG editor that outputs HTML nearly as clean and efficient as what I can type by hand. Boastmachine's built-in editor is not too bad, I just never use it, for some reason.
- Good file upload system. I may be able to modify the existing one.
- Ability to dynamically place flash video in a post.
- "Tag Cloud" system
boastMachine is growing old, and does not have all of the bells and whistles that one can get with WordPress. I am, however, going to stick with it and update the system in order to add in some more "modern" blog features, rather than move into uncharted territory with Wordpress, with its twenty different files for templating, new URIs, new database, and nested td tags.
Update
For the sake of marking the occasion...
Today I have finished the modifications of the CBLL.net site design, cleaning it up a bit and improving some issues that I have found around the site.
I will hopefully be able to get around to the process of removing and/or updating some of the articles. Many of them are very old, written poorly, and I do not exactly conform with their content now.
The "Howto" section is now gone. It has been merged with Articles.
MySQL System Error
I noticed today that my articles/howto pages were producing the following fatal error:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in /home/www/cbll.net/public_html/backend/global_funct.php on line 23Error selecting the database
Unfortunately, this probably was like this for quite a while. I do believe the change occurred during the upgrade to Debian 4.0 on andreas. The MySQL server was changed so that it did not accept TCP/IP connections and in my config files I had '127.0.0.1' instead of 'localhost'. When using MySQL, '127.0.0.1' uses TCP/IP while 'localhost' uses the mysql.sock socket.
See http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?52,151255,156258#msg-156258
I guess we will check to make sure everything works afterward next time w upgrade MySQL!
Sent a message to CBLL.net recently? There's a reason I didn't respond.
The e-mail account which serves as the dump for my comment/contact scripts has been flooded with insane amounts of spam, well over 3000 messages per day. I had to delete most of the messages by hand from the Maildir on the server because e-mail clients were crashing upon learning that there were 20,000 messages in the inbox!
Apparently someone has written a program which skips the whole screen scraping/form filling ordeal and just formulates a huge pornographic POST request and sends it to my muBB comment system's main script. Somehow they are getting past the verification methods (creation of php session with two integers - one from 0-10, the other from 0-100. User must read them from an image and add them in order to submit the form). This is obviously due to an error in my implementation or else someone has some really damn good OCR software running somewhere (and is actively participating in the spamming of my site as the image is a recent addition), but figuring that out is a project for another day.
If you did send me a message, it more than likely was deleted with the rest of the SPAM. Sorry for any incovenience this may have caused. Comments on both the weblog and through the articles, etc via muBB are turned off until I fix the verification methods.
Back to the electricity-fueled obilivion
After the first week back at college from the winter break, we are actually experiencing winter-like weather. With with winter weather comes the senseless, wasteful quirks of many of the students here:
- Substitute an electric heater for a blanket!
- Just blow the heat out of the apartment with a fan!
- Turn up the heat and open the window!
- Cover the gas-heated steam radiators and crank up the electric heat instead!
- Throw your coffee cup in the street!
- Shower four times a day!
- Throw your beer cup in the neighbor's bushes!
- Black out your window with curtains and run electrical lights all day long!
- Kick people's trash cans into the street and cause a ruckus.
THERE IS NO CONCEPT OF RECYCLING WHATSOEVER HERE. WEDNESDAY THIS WILL BE HAULED TO ITS FINAL RESTING PLACE
IT WAS ABOUT 15°F WHEN THIS WAS TAKEN. MY FRIEND RYAN SAYS: "I BET THEY WERE BLOWIN' BUDDAH OUT!"
IF THAT WERE THE CASE THE SCAVENGER SMOKERS WOULD BE HANGING AROUND THAT WINDOW!
