Obsolete Your Idols

Hey, I finally took Tim's bait and got myself a tumblelog. I don't know what I'll actually do with it; so far I just seem to be using it to scare myself and scar others.

Its rss feed is stuffed into the landing page at the top of my [site] [manj] as well.

Oh, and I got myself a myspace account, too. No connection there, just catching up on things I did while I was fiddling around online.

Do I need a page to list all the places I am online, yet? Have I achieved Social Network Saturation? I've got my fingers in everybody's pie.

I managed to re-swipe enough of the Holesque Grail to get every element I really care about back on this page. Needs more work, certainly, if only so I can understand what's going on here.

If you look at the css I'm using, I recommend not using it yourself. You're better served swiping as I swoped.

... hey, they are right, this CSS is all messed up and I've been playing with the DOM Inspector Tool so why don't I just fix it up real quick like.

If you happened to look at it during this time frame (Hi Drew!) that would explain the extra junk look it had at the time and the still not-quite-right it shows but I'm too tired to keep fiddling with it.

The categorytree is a casualty of this, at least in my web browser. It's an element in the DOM. Firefox 1.5 won't display it for me. What. The. Felch.

Come back later, it might be easier on the eyes.

I took the opportunity while catching up on my email to replace my hand-rolled rss2html based twitter stream at the top of my site with an actual proper twitter provided badge.

Also, I watched The Fountain and it was ... another opportunity to watch Hugh Jackman struggle against death. It was a pretty okay movie.

Having gone through the effort to insure my Atom feed was valid, I've added a button down at the bottom linking to it.

Button is from antipixel with the Gimp having done the work of squishing the .psd file into a .png and cropping out just the piece I wanted.

So having started using the FatalsToEmail code I was receiving a disturbingly high number of similar seeming emails. They were all coming from the plugin which generates the atom feed for this blog, the aptly named atomfeed.

A little more digging showed it being croaking by the XML::Parser when it tried to parse some of the older posts. Well, more than some. An abundance. Which was a combination of my crappy use of HTML, some redundant markup from markdown processing which happens and the non-XHTML html youtube provides for embedding video.

That last part was solved with the kind assistance of the Flash Satay article which outlines the step by step transformation needed to turn an embed into an XHTML object.

I turned off the print to STDOUT part of FatalsToEmail long enough to validate every section of the blog against the w3c xhtml validator until it all passed and this has brought a lull to my barrage of emails generated from the valiant but quiting easily parsing by atomfeed of the crappy markup I and machines had written through the largely random near-constant visits to my site by indexing bots building every more elaborate query strings by aggregating tags from my tagcloud until their taglace is so tangled they choke on it.

I got tired of grubbing the apache error logs on this system for chaos so I have rolled out Randal Schwartz's FatalsToEmail module as an accessory to blosxom. You may have seen some server errors if you happened to hit the feed or site while I was fumbling around with that. Maintain low tones. Peace, be still. Shalom. And so on.

I've signed up to be an affiliate to my favorite Internet bookstore, Powells so I'll be changing some existing links to books I've talked about in the past to include my affiliate code.

If someone buys a book after following one of them, I get a cut of it.

Two things about commenting on this blog.

• if your comment never appears and it wasn't spam, it's a bug somewhere; I approve all non-spam comments
• I've toggled the bit to allow the use of markdown syntax in your comments as it's what I write the posts in

So if you've tried to comment before and failed, I suggest trying the Preview button and if it looks kosher, Post and if it doesn't show up in a day or so, fire me off an email or try commenting in some simpler syntax and try to let me know what character the comment handling plugin doesn't seem to like.

The site and blog are now both xhtml 1.0 strict valid. Try to contain your enthusiasm.

I kludged the blosxom.cgi script because it was capping the blog at $num_entries on every 'page' including the category and date subdirectory pages, not just the 'home' 'page'. I did horrible things including using a magic number but I'm pressed for time.

Enjoy the horrible antiquated past of this blog, before I learned it's better to post more less often than less more often. Or, [did I|is it]?

Continuing the very little momentum we've gained, here's a tiny bit of tag fodder for this blog to see if the pinging plugin does the trick.

I like cats, aliens, and coffee. Let's see if any of that registers or if it's too little signal and too much noise.

It's been a while since I tried out a new plugin for Blosxom but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about them and reading about them. So today's trial is the markdown utility, deployed as a plugin.

Can I Learn a New Syntax?

To tell the truth, I'm not sure, myself.

Yes, I Can!

At least, I hope so.

A few changes to simplify things for me and for the occasional readers.

The blog is now just a blog, and the site top is an aggregation of a few different RSS feeds, including that of the blog.

The goal here, as always, is to simplify the structure as much as possible.

The comment links I've had for awhile finally got use. By a comment spammer. So that's turned off for the time being.

The archives have been integrated, mostly in the right locations, timewise. There's still no navigation so you'll have to blunder through or guess correctly or in the unlikely event that you bookmarked anything, you can probably manually map it to what you're looking for.

Rolled out blosxom again this morning, on the new server (thanks, Randy!) with only configuration changes to the default script. With this new server, I've gone dynamic, since HTTP is no longer served via publicfile. Any previous bookmark is probably badly broken.

Your typical Blosxom post consists of a required title on the first line and any manner of text and HTML markup in the body.