August 7, 2007

Tapping Out

My Blog has moved...(sort of)

In the beginning it seemed like I was raising the white flag and saying that the spammers have won. But the more I thought about it, the truth is that they haven't won, I'm just not participating in the fight directly, I'm paying someone else to do it.

I've moved my site from MovableType to LiveJournal because I have to many other things in my life that take priority to blogging and figuring out how to stop the next round of spam attacks. If you read my blog on the site, it'll still be there, though there will be some minor changes that I'll not below. If you subscribe to by RSS, then you'll want to change your feed to these: RSS Atom. (Sorry, it won't do this automatically)

I've embedded my LiveJournal into my blogsite so it still looks the same, but as I mentioned, there are changes.

The categories sidebar is gone
I may find a way to show my LJ Tags, but that's a real low priority
Search sidebar is gone
No sense searching sillypuppies for posts that are on LJ, right?
Last few comments and scrolled off side bars are gone
They come from the MT database

I liked the things that are gone, so I may look for a way to bring them back. I didn't want to make a full jump to LJ because I like having my own site and, more importantly, I like the other sidebars that I have here...like what I'm reading, listening too, and TiVo stuff.

So, there you have it....

Posted by Jesse at 2:18 PM

October 19, 2006

Yikes...$$$

I've been using Trumba as an online calendar in a web site that I am redesigning and it's worked rather nice. They had a free version and a premium version ($10 a mo. or $40 a year, not sure which). The reason I picked them is that they had widgets (they called it a spud) that allows you to display upcoming events on a separate page and link back to the event. (In the sidebar would be upcoming events, and a list view of the events and dates). Tons of sites do this so it can't be that hard. Even google calendar has this ability, but you're stuck with the sizes they have (22 px is the min width and that's too wide).

Trumba's been nice to offer their services for free, and as expected free has run out. They've upgraded and everything is customizable...it's very nice, but they've made a HUGE jump in price: $99.99 per month, yes, PER MONTH!

Needless to say, I can't use them anymore, so any suggestions on a decent looking calendar that has such a widget and will do CSV imports. Any other functions would be nice, but not necessary.

Posted by Jesse at 7:37 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2006

Dooooommmm

Download Squad
Even though Yahoo might have released IE7 a tad early, Microsoft still managed to get it officially out the door on their scheduled date of October 18th 2006, a mere 100 years since their last release.

I think I'll wait...the message about making sure I back up my files, turn of AV and antispyware is enough to make me stick with IE6, but I'll need IE7 to see how the web design work fares.

Posted by Jesse at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

What are you reading?

I've had to temporarialy remove the books I'm reading from my sidebar. I tried upgrading the MediaManager plugin and the MTAmazon plugin. Neither are stable versions and the result was losing the ability to pull information from Amazon. I tried rolling back to an older version of MTAmazon, but to no avail.

Posted by Jesse at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2005

Why MovableType

MovableType is just one of many blogging platforms available but I didn't choose it simply because of the software, but because of the interaction I had with the company - Six Apart. Before they bought LiveJournal, they were a good company...and with growth, they've still remembered their root.

To see a glimps of what I'm talking about, check out how they responded to the problems customers had with Typepad last month. You may not believe the screenshot.

Posted by Jesse at 2:48 PM | Comments (1)

November 25, 2005

Upgrading to Media Manager

The update is all but complete and I'll be able to remove BookQueue from my plugins soon. Media Manager has many more bells and whistles than BookQueue like the ability to have reviews (which I'll implement after I figure out the templates) and the ability to store items other than books.

The one thing I keep running into though is this error:

An error occurred:

Could not find Error retreiving Amazon info:  in  at lib/MediaManager/Util.pm line 66

While the misspelling would get to Teri, the error itself is little more than an annoyance and doesn't seem to prevent anything from happening other than the page load. I think it has something to do with the Amazon thumbnail - sometimes the most recent picture won't load after the error.

Posted by Jesse at 3:19 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2005

Media Manager

I'm in the process of updating my booklist software from BookQueue to Media Manager. Actually, Media Manager is an update to BookQueueToo, which I could never get to work because my ISP lacked one of the needed modules.

Media Manager is nice, but it's taken some effort to get it to work and when I find some more tinkering time, it'll take a while to get the templates to what I would like to have displayed. The biggest change is that MM ties the review post with the media entry, which allows you to have a scoring system and makes it a lot more easier to add the amazon image to your posts.

I did go through some pitfalls, which is to be expected with a Release Candidate. The documentation is a bit lacking. There's a few things you need to do, that were in the comments and blog, but not in the txt file:

Currently there's no way to tie in past reviews, but I'll force that through the DB when I start using the reviews. Unfortunately, until I can alter the templates, I won't use that feature.

Posted by Jesse at 6:28 PM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2005

MT Plugins

I've found some rather interesting MovableType plug-ins recently. And, for the first time in ages, I have 3 days off....all in a row! So I'll be using some of that time to enjoy family, some to rest, and some to play around with the blog a bit.

So if you notice weirdness over the next few days - it's just me tinkering with things.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Jesse at 8:55 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2005

Flickr or Album

Kevin has a photo album at http://www.sillypuppies.com/kevin/album/ It's not that difficult to put them up there, but it is a tad harder than flicker.

I'm thinking about using flickr from here out, but I'm not sure I can do a "For more pictures" link on the old album, or even if I need to. So, since most of you that read this would be the ones looking at the pictures, any thoughts?

Posted by Jesse at 9:02 PM | Comments (1)

September 17, 2005

Posting Tools

After searching the support boards for MovableType, I found this thread that discribes others having this problem. The fix it seems to getting your offline tools to work with MovableType 3.2 (I was getting the error that TStruct.GetInteger was not returning an integer) is to replace XMLRPCServer.pm

I'm not sure why they haven't posted a fix on the boards to make it easy to find. Maybe they will soon.

Posted by Jesse at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2005

Broken

Bah....I suppose no upgrade goes smoothly.

With the update I am now unable to use my offline blogging tool. Which, unfortunatly, is just about the only way I post. I've figured out some of the problem and I'll work on it more later...maybe it's something that can be solved.
However, I think it is time to look for a new tool. MTClient hasn't had anything posted on the site or in the forums since January and that doesn't bode well for it's future.

It also seems that my style sheet has been all messed up...that's a pain because I'm not sure I have a backup.

Update: I found a copy of the stylesheet in the blog database that was backed up before doing the upgrade. After removing the /n that were everywhere it worked fairly well...then when I figured out that SQL adds an extra \ to denote the character and made all the double slashes into singles, everything is back to notmal.

Posted by Jesse at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

Keeping up with the Jones'

MovableType recently relased version 3.2 and after some Tom-follery with the files and permissions and a little bit of hunting to find out the the archive pathways have diffent restrictions from before, I've completed the upgrade process...the question now is will I be able to posts or will my templates be out of date....

So, if you see this, the upgrade was successful!

Posted by Jesse at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 5, 2005

Galleries

I'm looking at different programs to make it a but easier to keep up with the photos, particularly the one's in Kevin's album. I found this site which uses MT and various plug-ins, which is basically what I'm using now. It's a nice layout, but I'm not sure that I get the fascination with Disney signs.

Posted by Jesse at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)

September 4, 2005

My Web Host

On the administrator page of my hosting provider is a link that says something to the effect of "install applications" hovering hover it tells me that they are cgi scripts and the like...so I figured it was things like counters and mail forms. Things that I would generally not use or can do with ASP. And since I use Movable Type and do thing though ASP I never bothered to see what their applications could do.

The other day, for some reason I decided to take a peek at what all they had and was rather surprised. Not only did they have the counters and forms I expected, but they also had blog hosting packages, ticket systems, was to run classified ads, galleries, message boards, and a lot more. And not just one choice of each.

I've been considering learning and using some content management systems and they have a number of them listed...like wise with a photo gallery (something I haven't bothered with because the server side scripts wouldn't have been there. So to all you web heads out there....what's better:

CMS: Drupal, Geeklog, Mambo, Moodle, PostNuke, PHPWCMS, Typo3, or Xoops.
Gallery: 4Images, Coopermine, Gallery.

Your feedback is appreciated.

Posted by Jesse at 7:26 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2004

I wish, I wish, with all my heart....

MovableType has a clever little plug-in called MTAmazon that interfaces with the Amazon Web services allowing developers to pull information from Amazon. It's how I have reading list linked on the main page as well as in the books category. But it's capable of more, like pulling wishlists.

Personal web sites often contain a wishlist, like mine, to help make gift giving a bit easier for everyone - it's also a trend that retailers have started as well. The most notable one is Amazon's wish list. Rather than maintain 2 lists, I set out to see if I could use the MTAmazon plug in to tie my two lists into one, the results can be seen here.

It should have been a relatively simple task, but as with any coding project it wasn't.

I started by reading my wishlist into an html page and using an include on my wish list but that just looked like two list mushed together and, being a big geek, I wanted total integration.

The next step was the creation of a delimitated file so I could read and sort the entries easier. I created a CSV (and later just plain text) file as a template that would rebuild each time I post an entry. This way, anything added to or removed from my Amazon wish list was reflected on my wish list in a short time.

From here I tried several different was to use ASP to access the file. The easiest would have been to access the file like a database - but my host won't allow that, at least, not without an extra fee. So instead, I put the file into an array.

Once in the array, I sorted and then read the array into strings based on category (books, dvds, software and other) and cost. Once the information was in a string, I could add the information where ever was appropriate in the existing wish list. I was using a code I found on-line that would order the array by price, but found that it was deleting an item during sorting and decided not to tackle that.

The result is a nifty page that has fairly current pricing (both new and used) on many of the items I would like, as well as link to make them easy to order by mail.

There is one drawback though. Sometimes the XML coming from Amazon goes a bit wild and list things more than once, or passes everything in the list 5 or 10 times. I haven't figured out a way to work around that yet.

Posted by Jesse at 4:25 PM | Comments (0)

Fighting Back

MovableType release a small but critical upgrade just a few days ago that addressed server load issues when comment spammers hit. Comments that were moderated shouldn't have caused a page rebuild, but instead was, which meant when spammers hit, the servers were hit HARD. I have, of course upgraded. MT Blacklist was also upgraded as a result.

In addition, I've added MT-Approval a nifty plug-in that creates a hidden hash that must be passed to the server for the comment to be accepted - this means that all comments must be submitted using the comment form. That's not a problem for us humans since that's the way it's done anyhow. However, it does mean that you have to preview your comments first.

Finally, while I hate to do so, I've closed older posts and turned off trackbacks. I'd rather not do that, but I can't overload my host server, nor do I want to deal with the spam - so people that want to comment on something old will just have to send an e-mail, sorry.

The good news is that it's been a while since I've had any comment spam - hopefully it's a trend that will continue.

Posted by Jesse at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2004

Mandarin Revisited

Mid month I posted a link to the site Mandarin Design noting that it was a useful place to find CSS tips and develop a professional looking layout. However, after the owner of Mandarin posted a comment, I went back to my post and saw that I did not quite convey what I was trying to say - so I want to clarify.

First and foremost, I think this is a very useful site for layout. It is also quite helpful that they provide cut and past sections to help you plug in ideas without being a master programmer. However, I also commented that I didn't think that this site was useful for blogging. By that comment, I meant that it's one that would be great for the initial layout, but not one that you would turn to every few times you post - here's why:

A good rule of thumb with web design is "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Number 4 on Dean Peter's list of Seven Deadly Sins of Church Website Design talks about Gimmicks, Gizmos and animated GIFs and I agree that special effects are useful, but quit being effective if overdone. Many of the filters on Mandarin are neat, but have a potential to detract from what you are saying if not used in moderation. Remember the Blink Tag from the early days of the Web that would let you make text blink? It was so overused and improperly used that it became a turn off no matter how it was used - in fact, I think it may not even exist any more.

So, Mandarin is worth looking at - you'll find a lot of neat things you can do with design. But remember to use your new found powers for good - don't over do it.

Posted by Jesse at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2004

More About Comment Spam

There are several tools that I've looked at to fight comment spam and have had trouble getting some of them to work. The one move so far that has had the biggest effect was changing the name of the script that handles comments. I've done this before, but because there isn't a way to hide the URL, bots eventually pick it up. However, looking at today's log, it did keep quite a bit away.

Another tool that I looked at was the image thing that I mentioned yesterday, it's not as easy to get to work as I thought - blah. I also looked at a plugin called conversationkiller, which will auto close comments on old entries, but my host doesn't allow cronjobs. Actually, they allow scheduled scripts, but it runs a little differently, so the script doesn't work.

My last, and somewhat successful plug-in is called mt-close. It's a script that will close old comments, though it doesn't do it automatically and I'm having problems using it on the older blogs as they have so many open comments - I'll see how that pans out.

Posted by Jesse at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2004

More Comment Spam

Another site that I manage was shut down because of comment spam. The attacks had gotten so bad that the hosts had to reboot the machine a few times overnight and finally just shut the site down. What a pain!

I don't want the same thing to happen here so I'm looking at a few different methods. One of which is to use a Captcha program, which will display a graphic and commenters will have to type the "code" that is displayed in the graphic. That's not a quick fix and I'm not even sure that I can use it. For now, my quick fix is to make everyone preview their posts before commenting and to change the name of the cgi that controls the comments.

I'm also going to work to see if I can hide the script name from web engines and I'll be using a plug-in to close older posts.

More from the front lines later...

Posted by Jesse at 11:40 AM | Comments (1)

December 15, 2004

CSS Tricks

Today's interesting CSS page comes from Mandarin Design. They have a large selection of CSS tips each with an example and cut and paste code. They also have a bit on filters - one I hope remains relatively silent. I suppose all of the filters could prove useful at come point (some more than others) but a few could prove more than annoying - like the blink tag.

Much of their website is laid out like a magazine and their tips reflect how to make that happen. It's not all that useful for blogging, but it could prove quite a good find for other design needs.

Posted by Jesse at 9:10 PM | Comments (1)

December 8, 2004

Less or More?

It's often thought that it's better to have more then to have less, but that's not always the case. Teri was going to Costco, our local warehouse store, to pick up a few things and I noted I was out of disposable razors and asked her to grab some for me. She came home with the smallest pack they had, 64 razors. Doesn't sound like a lot, but the only time I really use a bunch is in July when I have back to back camps, and I'll use 3 otherwise I use about 1 a month so 64 will last roughly 5 years. In the mean time, I have to store the razors, which will likely dump all over the place more than once and need to be picked up and of course, some will get lost.

I say that because having a bunch isn't necessarily a good thing, in fact, having less will sometimes give you more. When I began reading blogs and other websites, I had a list of about 10 (work related and for pleasure) that I visited each day. Enter RSS or site syndication and Awasu, my feed reader. Basically, my reader visits the site, gets a pared down version of what's on the site - just the content, not the design. I then can look at an even further pared down version, just the titles of new content and decide what I want to read. Less has blossomed into more - I now get content from more than 60 sites each day and it only takes a few moments to scan though and read what is helpful to me.

The reason I bring all of this up is not that 5 years of razors is too much or I want to encourage you to use Awasu, rather one of my favorite sites, blogs4God, is having a "dumping of the razors" problem. They began as a site that collected Christian blogs in an effort to give a focus to our voice in the blogosphere. The problem - as blogging grew, so did the number of entries (over 1300 now) - too many to be useful. Now, they're looking for a solution - a pairing down if you will.

They've offered up suggestions from starting over to shutting down. Personally, as exampled above, I like the thought of developing some sort of aggregated collection of sites, preferably one that's limited to sites that use RSS. This will not only ensure that there is less work to be done by the moderators (in the long run) but also that listed sites will be a more professional quality. I assume this because it'll take a little bit of effort on the part of the writer to make sure that their site uses XML and if they care enough for that, then they'll likely care enough to create decent posts. I believe that paring down will give the same effect for blogs4God that it did for me - more content and higher quality, but in a shorter time.

Of course, it could be over done and become a Christian Technorati. That may not be bad for some, but I find Technorati fairly useless when it comes to discovering emerging bloggers - or anything else useful for that matter.

While thinking about this, I realized this is an example of what I was talking about in "You're Not Lost" when I refered to the simultaneity of extremes. Moving to an XML/feed driven site is one extreme, shutting down is the other. Currently blogs4God is in the middle of the road and things in the middle of the road tend not to live long or look very good.

Lastly, if you happen to visit blogs4God forgive the look, Dean realizes that the site could use some work (it's been in the middle of the road for a while) and I'm sure site redesign will be on the table in conjunction with the data remodeling.

Posted by Jesse at 8:17 PM

December 4, 2004

You don't know the power

My site is rather simple, other than the blog, but it's a perfect testing ground. I've wanted to use a content management system for some of the pages that I've done, but those that I've made sites for have either chosen not to have management systems or couldn't afford them. Enter Movable Type.

Movable Type is not a CMS but it can work as one with a minor amount of effort. Brainstorms and Raves has a good selection of articles on creating an entire site using MT. Most helpful was Brad Choate's Doing your whole site with MT. I had to make some tweeks to be able to do what I wised, but I'm working to have all the static pages on Sillypuppies served by MT - it certainly makes for easier updates.

Currently all of the pages on my portion of the site /jesse/ are MT powered, including the includes in the sidebar. Using ASP, took a little bit of planning, but I'm able to added page specif ASP code as needed as well.

Here's what I did:

  1. Created a new Movable Type blog and named it “Static Content”.
  2. Deleted all the Index templates except the stylesheet.
  3. Created an index template containing a stylesheet for /jesse/
  4. Deleted all the archive templates, except for the Individual archive template.
  5. Made sure individual archives were enabled.
  6. Made the archive path the root directory of my web site.
  7. Created categories for each directory I want to create content for (category name = directory name)
  8. Used the following for the Individual Entry Archive filename template (specified on the “Archiving” page of your weblog configuration). Produces: “category/entry_title.html”:
    <$MTEntryCategory lower_case="1"$><MTIfNotEmpty var="EntryCategory">/</MTIfNotEmpty><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.asp
    This causes all of your entries to be saved using the Index template under the file name in the title field.

From there you can use the other fields as needed in your Index Template. I used the keywords for the meta data of keywords and the excerpt for the description meta data. Since I use ASP on some of my pages, had the Extended entry placed in the header allowing me to place code or additional styling in the head of the HTML document. I also used the MTModifiedOn plug-in to pull the modified date from the database and into the pages as an updated on timestamp.

All in all, a fairly easy way to use MT to power your whole site.

Posted by Jesse at 10:41 AM

November 27, 2004

You're Not Lost

If you were looking for "A Peek Inside Jesse's Head" you've found it - the peek can still be made, but the title's been changed to go with the new look.

Simultaneity - \Si`mul*ta*ne"i*ty\, n. existing at the same time

But it's also much more than that, it's extremes coexisting - not just coexisting but cooperating. A great image statement is that of a swing - you must lean back AND kick forward. The more you use these two opposites in tandem, the higher you go.

For a time, the bell curve was the natural distribution of things, however a large number of economic and social phenomena are following a different pattern, an inverted bell - a well curve. A curve where the extremes are growing and the middle shrinking. Take the recent election - people either loved Bush or hated Bush, there was little middle ground.

Life itself is all about the union of opposites - how do we bridge the extremes that we are meant to be. No one wants an average employee, a middle-of-the-road husband, or a run of the mill father. I am asked to be the best father I can be, the best husband I can be, and the best minister I can be - yet often these extremes do not cooperate, my life goal is not to being these extremes into an average, but to maintain the extremes and build a bridge between them.

This blog, is a peek into making that happen. I talk about Kevin, my marriage, my ministry, my job, and my free time. I don't pretend to have all the answers - indeed, I miss many of them. I'm on a journey just like everyone else.

Posted by Jesse at 5:34 PM

November 18, 2004

Free Advertising

At least, that's what a lot of spammers think that about blogs, a way to get their link count up. While this, in part, is Google's fault, bloggers can not relay on Google to fix the problem.

For MovableType users, MT-Blacklist is key. I believe I talked about this plugg-in when I first installed it. However, it's undergone some changes since the release of MovableType 3.0D and is more impressive then ever. Thanks to blacklist, you'll seldom see span hit my pages.

Blacklist has had a number of impressive updates, including the ability automatically link to the central blacklist and exchanges information with that list, ensuring that the blogging community shares blacklisted URLs.

One of the best features is that blacklist will cause comments on older posts (which is where most of the spam hits) to be set to moderated - it also allows me to choose how many URLs can be included in a comment before it's set to moderate. Thanks to that, I'm able to delete them without anyone ever seeing them Another big improvement is that I no longer have add one URL at a time to the blacklist, blacklist will now mass add and repair comments.

While it also looks alot better, not everything is perfect with MT-Blacklist, the biggest downside is that the documents are not finished so I don't know if I can safely import old spam URLs, of course, that's not a big thing since they will be available at some point.

As for installation, it's so simple that each time I've installed it I've wondered if I missed a step or something. If you run MT 3+, get this plug-in!

Posted by Jesse at 8:16 PM

November 15, 2004

Just a Link

Evolt.org is a publisher of various web articles - nothing super outstanding, but it did have two articles that I wanted to make note of, mostly so I could find them later on.

First is Ten CSS tricks you may not know and points out some CSS shortcuts and ideas that are useful to remember.

The other is Regular Expression Basics. I've used regular expressions for some of the back-end parts of the the blogs and I'm having a little bit of a problem understanding how to get things to work. It's not so much having a problem knowing how it works, just having a problem getting a handle on the odd rules. This article would serve as a much needed reminder at times.

Posted by Jesse at 8:34 PM

November 2, 2004

Changes & Upgrades

Turns out that 2 of the plug-ins that I use, Notifier & Blacklist don't get along. Blacklist helps prevent comment spam by keeping track of URLs that are included in comment spam and blocking entries containing those URLs. Further, it ties together much of the MT community by sharing blocked URLs. The other plug-in, Notifier, allows you to subscribe to comments so that you will be e-mailed when someone comments to a post that you've commented on.

Sorry, I hate spam more than I want you to be able to subscribe so I'm going with Blacklist - Comment notification will return when it's updated and they work together.

In other upgrade news, Teri's blog has been updated and redesigned and is working well. Still need to update the rest of the blogs.

Work Needing Done:

Posted by Jesse at 9:10 PM

November 1, 2004

Let the Games Begin

Sillypuppies' blogs have been updated to MovableType 3.121! I know that Teri's been waiting for the upgrade and I won't mind playing with some of the new features.

I've still got to upgrade most of the plugins - especially the Blacklist (for spam).

Also to be tested is the comments and trackback features to make sure that the changes that I made in the old version have properly ported to the new version. Should have everything checked out by the end of the evening, but if you notice anything weird, please let me know.

Work Needing Done:

Posted by Jesse at 4:51 PM

October 30, 2004

Closer to Upgrading

I've successfully upgraded one of the sites I maintain to MovableType 3.12 and if all goes well I'll be upgrading this one as well. The upgrade is a snap and the instructions ae simple to follow. I still have to test the plug-ins that I use to see if they need to be upgraded - and I use more plug-ins on this site than anywhere else so things could still go wrong. In addition to all that, I have also made a lot of customizations to my blog. Teri's should upgrade very well, and Kevin's should be simple.

Time will tell.

Posted by Jesse at 7:49 PM

October 18, 2004

Upgrading MT

Part of the benefits of being a part of the Six Apart Professionals Network is a free copy of the personal edition of MovableType 3.11. As I noted before I'm undecided about upgrading, but I did some testing to find out how difficult it would be.

I still have our old server set up on my home sever and ran through the upgrade process. During the upgrade to 3.0 and then again during 3.11 the script began by stating:

**** WARNING: Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at D:\wwwroot\sillypuppies\cgi-bin\mt\lib/MT/ConfigMgr.pm line 170, line 24.
It may be because I'm running it on a windows machine and something needs to be set differently. Anyhow, the upgrade worked fine, even with that warning.

I like the new interface, very sleek very clean. The new layout also provides better access to the management functions and better lists all aspects of database - posts, comments, commenters, trackbacks and more. The single click rebuild is also a nice feature. It'll let you update the template and rather than rebuilding the site, you can rebuild just the pages that would be affected by the new template.

The downside of the upgrade would be that I've customized much of my blog and Kevin's album is pretty much a hack, so there'd be some work in redoing those sites. My site wouldn't break, I'd just have to work to take advantage some some of the new offerings. On the other hand, I have not idea what would happen to the album.

Rather than thinking upgrade, I should be focusing on my mid-term and getting that monkey off my back...we'll see.

Posted by Jesse at 9:33 PM

October 15, 2004

Pondering an upgrade

Some time ago I ranted about the fact that SixApart started charging for their blogging software, MovableType. It wasn't that they started charging that bothered me, but the price. Anyhow, it turns out, as I thought it might that the price was for a developers version - the regular version came out a few months later and at much more reasonable prices.

Anyhow, I still haven't upgraded. For what we use the software for, we could upgrade for free, or maybe for a very minor charge - so the cost isn't the factor. The deal is, I don't want to just up and upgrade without first knowing what I am getting into, so I'll want to set it up on a different server first, then upgrade here. That's a bit of work and I'm not sure I want to go through with it.

The problem is, some of the plug-ins that are starting to come out would be nice to have, and no surprise, 3.0 is more developer friendly so they only work with that version. Of course, that also makes me wonder if the current plug-ins and tools (like the one I'm using to post this) will be upward compatible - for most, I think not.

Perhaps I should wait until school is out before even considering a move...

Posted by Jesse at 11:09 PM

September 20, 2004

In Search of Fame

Okay, I'm not really in search of fame. I just finished reading Scobleizer's post on "How Will Your Blog get Discovered" and to be honest, while those look like good ways to get your blog 'discovered' I'm not writting in hopes of generating alot of site traffic, I do it because I like writing out my thoughts so friends and family can read them - getting additional audience is a bonus.

However, his article did trigger the desire to find out who's linked here, and to start pinging some of the blog search engines like Technorati and weblogs.com. I did a quick search and found other there are links from people I don't know, so I'd like to invite everyone that reads to drop a comment here and let me see your blog or journal if you have one, or just say "Hi" if you don't.

Posted by Jesse at 8:18 PM

August 28, 2004

Free Subscriptions

I've made some more updates to the blog. Now, thanks to MT-Notifier there can be a bit more of a conversation on entries rather than just comments. No, when you make a comment, there is a checked box at the bottom of the form. If you want to see what others write, leave it checked and you will be subbed to the thread. If you don't want to be subbed, just uncheck the box.

Two other things: When you get the comments , there will be a link to unsub. And, there's a box at the bottom of the individual entries that will allow you to sub without commenting.

Posted by Jesse at 1:54 PM

August 18, 2004

Whatcha' Reading?

Awasu has the ability to create reports on the feeds that you receive and I spent the evening figuring out how to take the list of sites I read and update my long outdated Blogroll on the main page. I toyed with putting the XML feeds along with the links but it skewed the look of the site so I'll have to work on that later.

Awasu is a great reader and is making improvements with each release. The latest release added atom feeds and improved the reporting that can be done. Using the templates and the auto FTP feature, I'm now able to update - automatically or manually - my Blogroll so everyone can see what I'm reading. Currently, the sites are being sorted alphabetically, but at times I may sort by date of new content.

Read on to see how this is done...

I may have complicated the process a bit since I have some feeds (like my own) that I did not want on the blogroll. Here's a step by step for achieving an auto updated roll.

Go to Tools/Options.
Click on Search and then add a Channel category called Non-Blogroll.
Click Ok to go back to the main Awasu screen.

Right click on a channel in the Control Center that you do not want published.
Select Channel Categories and select Non-Blogroll.
Repeat this for all channels that you do not want to have listed.

Go to View/Channel Filters.
Add a new filter called Blogroll.
Select filter by none.
Add the Channel categories Non-Blogroll and click the box that says Show non-matching channels instead.
Sort by: will determine the order your blog roll is displayed.
Click Ok and return to the Main Awasu screen.

Click on View/Channel Reports
Create a report called My Blogroll
Set the channel filter to Bloggroll and include all items.
Use the default template, or create your own.
Check the box to send results to FTP server and click on configure.
The server should be your ftp server (ftp://www.mydomain.com)
The URL should be the directory where the uploaded file will go (httpdocs/me/blog/blogroll.html)
Then enter your account and password information.
Set the auto generate to a setting of your preference. Disabled will send a report any time you generate a report.
Click ok to return to main Awasu Screen. A report will be generated.

Last step. On your blog, use a server side include to include the file that you sent when your blog is displayed.

Posted by Jesse at 9:46 AM

August 16, 2004

Pesky Spammers

I've tried to reduce the amount of comment spam that our blogs get without interfering with how our blogs act and without making it any harder on our readers. Unfortunately, that hasn't been enough. I've implemented several of the suggestions mentioned on Learning MT which should help reduce our spam. Basically we're now using suggestions 1-4 and 6.

Some of the change will not be noticed by our readers, but there are several that you may notice, and your feedback is most welcome. First, when reading comments from the home page, it will no longer use a pop-up. Instead it will take you to the entries page and to the comment section. No big deal, who likes pop-ups anyhow.

The biggest change is that you are now required to preview your entry before submitting a comment. I know that this can be a pain, and if our comments suddenly drop off, I'll remove the requirement - but it is one of the best tools I have against spambots.

Posted by Jesse at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)

July 8, 2004

Seperation made easy

One of the hardest parts of designing a page that separates content from style is laying out the page with CSS. I have yet to find a tool that will do proper WYSIWYG editing so I usually update the CSS reload the page, updates some more, over and over - quite a pain.

Today I saw Gadgetopia touting the merits of the Web Developer extension for Firefox so I thought I would give it a chance. I downloaded FireFox then loaded up the extension and tried it out. Wow...

Load up a page and open the CSS sidebar. Any changes you make on the sidebar are immediately applied to the web page. You can then cut and paste or save directly from the page. Simply wonderful.

Posted by Jesse at 11:46 PM

June 21, 2004

A bit of help

As you could see in "A Bit of Programming" I'm trying to add some code that will make it easier for Teri and I to do our bloging. In particular, Teri wants to be able to show pictures without needing to know how to program in HTML.

Currently to show a picture we have to type:

<img src="http://www.sillypuppies.com/jesse/blog/images/name.jpg" alt = "whatever" />

Now, using the RegEx plug-in we can use:

<photo image="name.jpg" title="whatever">

I know that doesn't seem like much, but using the code to do that, I can later cause those entries to be formated with DIVs or other styling without modifying the photo tag.

The expression that I'm using to make this happen is:

<MTAddRegex name="photo">s|<photo image="(\w+\.\w{3})" title="(.+)">|<img src="http://www.sillypuppies.com/jesse/blog/images/$1" alt = "$2" />|g</MTAddRegex>

The .+ in the expression seems to bog things down so I would like to use something else but I don't know the language well. If anyone would like to let me know how to get numbers, letters and spaces with something other than .+ leave a comment (please!). I'd also enjoy knowing if there is any wildcard that covers everything (including symbols like %?").

Posted by Jesse at 1:51 PM

June 20, 2004

A bit of programming

I'm working on a template mod so you may see some weird stuff in this entry and the entry may change several times over the next day.

Test

Test

If anyone knows anything about RegEx, I'd love to know where to learn more, particularly how to get infor from a string rather than just match it.

Posted by Jesse at 10:21 PM

June 7, 2004

Blog Reading Request

If you read this blog often then you know that I use an RSS reader. I'm a big fan of Awasu, it's allowed me to speed up my reading of various blogs and sites and not I can skim through most of the sites I read in a very short time.

I currently subscribe to 32 channels, which are 95% blogs, a few article collections, and two lists of free stuff. Out of those, I can breeze through the updates on all but 3 or 4 - on those I often have to visit their site. The problem is that they send only an exerpt of the post (40 or so words), which is usually not enough to figure out what they are talking about.

Many blog packages have the feature to send out XML excerpts rather than the full posts and a few send excerpts by default - it's annoying. The only reason to send an excerpt is to MAKE people come to your site. Unless you are selling something there really is no reason to draw someone there. Sure, you worked hard on your design, but blogs are about what you say, not how your page looks - send out the entire message. If you don't want to send your message out, then disable the RSS feed.

I realize that there are probably more than a few that don't realize this is the default and would consider correcting it, but don't know what they're doing.....I think I'll drop some e-mails suggesting they fix the ones I read.

There is, however a place for excerpts. When your post begins to be too much to read in one sitting, it's not really something to be syndicated. A few of my San Diego posts are of that nature. Additionally, HealYourChurchWebsite does a very good job of knowing when to make the break between what should be sent (the body) and what should be on just the web site (the extra text). In those cases, you're really not using the excerpt feature of the blogging software so in all, I still say...

Get rid of the excerpt feature or make it something you have to pay for.

Posted by Jesse at 12:15 AM | Comments (2)

May 15, 2004

More on MT

I got a note today from 6A saying that they are sorry that they have not communicated well, unfortunately, the e-mail didn't answer any of the questions in my last entry. I'm still confused as to weather this release and pricing structure is what we can expect from now on.

On the upside, the muddied waters are clearing a bit and it's becoming more widely understood that this is a developer release much like OSX when it was released to the developer community. That means general users should not upgrade. The high prices are aimed at corperations looking to build on a CMS platform and when looked at in that light, the prices aren't that high.

However, for the general user, the question still hasn't been answered....what will the price structure look like when July comes around?

Posted by Jesse at 10:58 AM

May 14, 2004

Lessons Learned: Uproar of the MT Community

There are a few things to be learned by the pricing structure that was released yesterday by Six Apart.

First, know your user base.

Like I said yesterday, I completely understand the fact that 6A needs to make money, as do all companies, but it's important to understand your market. The pricing structure that they set up are clearly geared toward corporations, but it seems that they failed to understand that the people that work for those companies are the same people that they are upsetting with the news release - and upset people don't recommend the products that upset them.

Second, don't jump the gun.

Lots of people are spouting off in response to the message about the new prices, but they may be under false ideas. The version that was released yesterday was MT 3.0 Developer Edition - that last part was missed by most - Developer Edition. According to PC World:

"We'll still have a fully functional free version for personal use," adds Chief Executive Officer Mena Trott. A personal version that includes technical support from Six Apart costs $45.

The article is a tad confusing since it also list other pricing structures. I've been to the web site and there is no $45 version, but the article does say:

Six Apart plans to offer a general release of Movable Type within two months, when it will also announce winners of its add-on development contest.

Additionally the CEOs post says:

With the new licenses going in effect today we will continue our tradition of offering a fully functional free version, there will also be a large variety of paid licenses that come with the structured support that we never felt that we could give our donors enough of. We're bringing in a help ticket system for paid licensees as well a company maintained knowledge base.

It seems that the "Developer" release may be just that and a general release will come later...we'll see come July.

Next, integrity is still important.

I was rather please to find out that there is another outcry coming from the MT community. In her post, the CEO said:

We're big on honor at Six Apart. We haven't built in any nagware for license violations or phone home mechanisms. We trust our users' good judgment and intentions. We intend to use our good judgment in being flexible about enforcing these limits.

Many have taken this as an implication that while there are license agreements there will not be any policing of general users. Go ahead and violate, we'll let you know if you go to far. The good news: People are upset by this. The users do not want to violate the agreement, they'd rather pay. I don't think that's what they intended to say, but I'm glad to see that honesty is still out there somewhere.

Further, less is more.

When communicating to a group about your product, you need to assume that the group WILL NOT read what you've written, they'll skim it; write accordingly. I've reread the post - well, scanned again - that talks about the pricing structure. I've also read other people's thoughts and it's apparent that either the original post was changed or not read, I'm going to assume not read. In addition to the pricing/general release issue above, some have said that 6A should have taken some surveys of the community or asked for feedback from the community. In her post Mena says:

You'll see from the pricing chart that the cost of offered licenses vary based on the number of authors and weblogs people plan to have. Based on surveys and user feedback, we are fairly comfortable these licenses will meet the needs of over 85% percent of our current users.

Rather than writing 17 paragraphs about the new pricing, 6A would have been better off breaking that post into sections with sub-headings. That way people could find the information that they are looking for rather than having their assumptions fill in the blanks of their skimming efforts.

Finally, be clear about your intentions.

I've written this post with the assumption that there will be a general release version coming in July, but I'm still not clear if that will happen. The MovableType web site looks as though they are completely committed to everyone upgrading to 3.0D, but some of the posts don't appear to say that. The front page was redone in such a way that the the support forums and the general release download (2.661) are next to impossible to find for a new user. That's fine if the intention is for new users to start using the developer edition, but that doesn't seem to be the message that they're sending out. Their words say one thing, their web site implies another. All I know for sure is that I am not the only one that is confused.

I think that 6A could have benefited by working with a marketing firm for the release of this pricing structure and I think that the user community (especially those that have already made a change based on yesterdays announcement) could benefit by having some patience. Hopefully this post will help some learn from the mistakes in the MT world, I know it's reinforced some things that I've learned and will help me keep these ideas at the forefront when marketing anything to anyone.

Posted by Jesse at 5:25 PM | Comments (1)

May 13, 2004

Onward and Upward leaves many people out

I've been using MovableType as the blogging tool of choice for about 2 years. All the blogs on sillypuppies uses it and I've been working on a design for our church's web site that would use some of it's features. It's been a great tool and has a terrific user base that supports each other very well.

Six Apart, the makers of MT are in it for the money, that's understandable. They've benefited from a grass roots support that enjoyed their product and I doubt that anyone thought that they would be able to upgrade for free forever. Eventually, as with all companies wishing to make money, they would need to charge for their product. As I discovered this morning on SEB, that day has come.

However, the pricing structure set up by Six Apart means that many of the grass roots people will be looking elsewhere. I've thought about donating for MT and indeed, I would pay a reasonable price. However, I blog as a hobby, I make no money through the site, and I really don't even have that large of a readership - but to continue with MT in the way I use it now, I'd need to pay for the lower level commercial version which is $299.95! Excuse me? $300? No thanks. In all honesty, I could probably get away with cutting something out and using the personal version which is only $99.95 but that still makes many of the other blogging engines out their look more inviting.

While there will still be a free version, it will by much more limited than the past versions. I won't be upgrading to 3.0 or participating in the beta program. I have the latest free, unlimited version (2.661) and was going to put a link to it, but I don't think I should. Instead, grab it off their site while you can and if the link disappears, e-mail me and I'll send you a copy if I still have it.

If you know of a good engine at a reasonable price, let me know. I don't think I'll be moving soon, but the day will come when a move is necessary.

Posted by Jesse at 11:52 AM | Comments (2)

TiVo, Work & Web Musings

Valid XHTML 1.0!

I started the evening thinking that I could get rid of some of the URL shortcuts that are cluttering my desk waiting for me to look at them and wound up making my blog home page validate to XHTML 1.0. I started off with a few hundred errors and brought it down a few at a time. After about 2 hours, I can now say that this page validates.....Yeah, I agree, so what - perhaps it will help someone that wants to read this page in an alternate browser.

I'm up late because of enjoying one of the perks of my job. I need to be at a meeting tomorrow night from 7 until 9ish, so I'm not going in until after lunch (I'll zip home for dinner like I usually do for lunch). It'll be nice to be home with Kevin and Teri for a bit before going in and it'll help ease not being at home in the evening.

Lastly, in case you are wondering, TiVo is great. We just caught up on 4 weeks of Third Watch to finish up the season and we'll be able to do that with a few other shows as well. It's nice not to have to wait out the story lines to shows as the head into the summer.

Well, I need to get my butt to bed, even if I don't have to go in at a regular time, Kevin will still be waking at his usual time.

Posted by Jesse at 12:13 AM

May 5, 2004

House Cleaning

I've done some touch up work on the blog, all pertaining to the sidebar. The most notable is the new design - I think it makes for a cleaner look.

A while back I made the URLs easier to read for the entire blog and a little while later I discovered that it messed up the "recent comments" section. Thanks to Learning Movable Type I've finally found the code to fix the problem.

I've also shortened the list of recently scrolled off. I'm not updating as often right now and some of the old posts there are pretty old - no need to keep them in the spotlight.

And, lastly, I've cleaned up and updated the TiVo list...and yes, I know that there are some things on the bottom of the list that aren't on TV anymore, but they are still on my Season Pass List - after all, SpyTV has resurfaced so anything is possible.

Oh, and another last thing....I've removed the related entries section from the individual posts. I don't think many people saw them and it turns out the entries were not all that related, so until another time (perhaps).

Posted by Jesse at 10:39 PM

March 31, 2004

Offline Blogging

I'm writing this with MTClient, a client that should allow me to type in a post and add it to my blog the next time I am near a connection. It's not that big of a deal since I am almost always near a net connection, but it could have it uses.

The spell check feature is really nice, almost to the point where I could use this rather than going to the web to do my updates.

Posted by Jesse at 11:29 PM

March 22, 2004

Blog Updates

I've made a few minor updates to the blog.

  1. Changed the Comments (0) line to be more inviting and a little smarter. Now it counts the comments when there are some, it asks you add your comment when there isn't.
  2. Added a line on the individual and monthly entries to link back to the entries category.
  3. Made the URLs more friendly, including the category and monthly archives. (They are no longer something like http://www.sillypuppies.com/jesse/blog/archives/001176.html instead that entry would be http://www.sillypuppies.com/jesse/blog/archives/20040321_overruled.asp)
I thought about adding a per-category RSS feed but I don't think that's somthing that's needed at this point. It will be useful and has been added to the church's site.

Posted by Jesse at 10:19 PM | Comments (1)

March 17, 2004

Customizing Movable Type

I'm working on our church's website and want to use Movable Type for the youth section to allow the youth leaders to update information for parents, ect. I'm also looking at various ways to allow others to update their sections as well.

Anyhow, in creating the youth section (which is still under construction), I came across a way to add rss feeds from the categories in MT - it's a great help!

Creating categorized RSS feeds using Movable Type
I love Movable Type's customization features. I just used this to auto-generate RSS feeds per category, and link to these feeds from the main page. I previously had one custom RSS template for javablogs.com, but this is a much better solution.

Posted by Jesse at 2:27 PM

March 15, 2004

Links to the Right

I'm still keeping a list of blogs that I read on my Blogroll, but I don't use it anymore. Having found RSS I use Awasu to read and and enjoy blogs, news, comics and more. However, this isn't about plugging awasu again, I thought I would share a link.

I recently stumbled across Randomize, the journal of Steve Tallent. His blog is a nice mix of technology, politics, religion, and personal entries.

I'm always looking for a new blog to read, so if you know of one, let me know!

Posted by Jesse at 8:56 PM

March 12, 2004

Slightly new Google

Google's preparing to put on a new face. It's been selecting random people to try out the new interface, but thanks in no small part to the blogging community, Jesse Ruderman invites us to Experience Google's new look.

He's set up a bookmarklet that lets you toggle between the new look and the old look. I think it's an improvement, but it's still not HTML complient - maybe one day.

Posted by Jesse at 12:37 PM

March 10, 2004

How to Speed Read the 'net

I realize that I've been pushing RSS lately, but it is well deserved. Slate has now published an article on readers that's not filled with techno-geek speak which should help RSS gain more popularity in the mainstream.

How To Speed-Read the Net

RSS ("Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary," depending on whom you ask) has three distinct advantages over Web browsing and e-mail, the two most popular ways to read news online. First, no ads or graphics clutter the headlines and article summaries...

Second, an RSS reader automatically updates itself with the latest items from the sites you tell it to watch, so it's always fresh... Lastly, you can include customized RSS "feeds" that cull material from multiple news sources into a single data stream.

Posted by Jesse at 10:59 PM

March 8, 2004

TiVo for the Web

In early February, my entry on Information Overload made a small mention of Awasu, my RSS tool, but I didn't go into much detail. RSS is quickly becoming the next big think and I have to agree with Robert Scoble who says, in the article below, "If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time."

RSS isn't mainstream yet, and many sites still need to add XML abilities before the frustration element us completely eliminated, but there is enough information available via RSS that it is well worth your time to find out what I am talking about.

Simply put, RSS is a way of syndicating information. Many of the larger sites have such syndication available, as do most blogs and journals. Your reader will go out to each of the sites that you subscribe to and pull down the latest headlines or entries.

Yahoo! News - Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing

For an average Internet user who regularly visits about 50 Web sites, rather than have to go visit those 50 sites wouldn't it be cool if those sites could somehow visit you? And not only that, but if they could also tell you when they've changed?

For instance, I currently read about 16 blogs, 2 newszines, 3 comics, and keep tabs on a site that publishes regular articles. In my RSS reader, I can read all the blogs and both zines without leaving the application. I can either quickly scan the entries/headlines and jump to what I want to read, or read the entries. For the comics I read, I'm able to combine them into one feed so I don't have to go to three places to read them. The article repository doesn’t use RSS, but my reader is able to tell me when they've updated their page.

The down side is that not everyone implements RSS on their site and those that do don't always do it the same way. For example, some of the blogs I get will feed the entire entry, others only send an excerpt. Either way, I can decide much faster about reading the information.

RSS is likely to be the TiVo of websites allowing you to down load what you want and read it when you want without ever leaving your desktop.

Posted by Jesse at 2:16 PM

March 2, 2004

Accesskey Addition

A little while back I mentioned that I would be making some improvements to the site when I had a chance. One of the small, yet big, improvements is the addition of accesskeys.

Accesskeys are an addition to HTML to allow people with limited mobility that have a hard time controlling a mouse to click on links. Tabbing through is an option, but on large pages it can be combersome.

Accesskeys are also useful to people who have no problems with mice, repetative strain or the like. In fact, as with many keyboard shortcuts, they can lead to faster navigation in some cases.

I'll be adding more as I see a need for them, or some are suggested, but for now, I've added one for the Blog Home page (B) and one for search (S). The side bar will list new ones as they are added.

If you would like to add accesskeys to your site, A List Apart has a good article with tips and other info.

Posted by Jesse at 9:27 PM

February 26, 2004

RSS Changes

I changed my RSS feed from excerpts to full feeds. Sorry if you recieved a complete re-issue of past postings.

I'll be making other updates areound here as time permits, but that should be the only time the feed changes.

Posted by Jesse at 1:30 PM

January 21, 2004

And so it begins

A few months ago in Expired Meat Stinks where I encouraged the fight of spam, particularly comment spam. Of course, I didn't take my own advice and yesterday one of the blogs on this system received comment spam. I've deleted the offending URL, but the comment itself was left for the author to choose to keep or remove.

Today, I've added MT-Blacklist to the site and that should help in the battle. If you use MovableType, I highly recommend adding the black list. It's incredibly easy to install and configure, further it's easy to update and puts the burden of work on the spammer rather than the blocker.

Posted by Jesse at 10:44 AM

January 20, 2004

Neat Tool

If you have ever wanted to add an Favorite Icon to your site (the icons that appear in the browser address bar and favorites list) you may have found that it can be a pain to find the tools to create the icon files.

Now, thanks to this site it's simple. Just upload your graphics file and download the icon. They even include the html tag if you need to know how to use it.

Posted by Jesse at 2:26 PM

November 20, 2003

Expired Meat stinks

I'm not sure that it will do any good, but I like the way this guy thinks and I'm glad he's gotten others on board.

Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group

Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.

I'm sick of spam, but mostly it's because it costs money to wade through it. Either for filters or for time spent. I currently get over 200 e-mails each and very day, maybe 30 are actually something I want to read. I'd love a free filter tool that does what I need, but so far I haven't found one. I used the free trial of InBoxer and I'm thinking of plunking down the money for it.

E-mail spam is one thing, but Comment Spam? That's worse than newsgroup spam. Not that many people read comments, all it does is waste space for a chance that someone will see that your annoying. Simply put, Comment Spam is asinine.

Thankfully, the folks that use MovableType are constantly working on keeping spam out of their comments. One of which is MT-Blacklist. Whatever your choice, whatever your blog software, fight back.

Posted by Jesse at 10:15 PM

November 1, 2003

Web Form Spell Checker

I don't recall exactly where I picked this up, but here's a Javascript that will check the spelling of any web form that you are using.

It uses the MS Word dictionary, so you have to have word.
Simply make a link to the js file from your browser (the links toolbar in IE). Then after filling in a form, highlight the portion of text that you want to have checked, and click the link. The script will open Word, check the spelling, make changes as you direct and request to copy the changes back to your form.

Posted by Jesse at 10:09 PM | Comments (2)

October 17, 2003

More PhotoLog stuff

Quixotic Pixels has a section about adding random photos to the bottom of the page, like on Kevin's photo log. However, they use PHP, which I am rather unfamiliar with. Since I like ASP much better, I took a shot at doing the same thing using that language and after a few shots came up with the following:

Make a connection to your database (for mySQL)

Set Conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
Conn.Open "driver={MySQL};server=localhost;database=DBNAME","USERID","PASSWORD"

Substitute the correct entry for anything in CAPS. Also, be sure to use the correct blog ID in the sql statement if you have mroe than one blog on your site.

archive_url="YOUR ARCHIVE URL"
blogurl="YOUR BLOG URL"

sql= "SELECT entry_text_more, entry_id, entry_title FROM mt_entry WHERE (entry_blog_id=1) and (entry_status=2) ORDER by rand(now()) LIMIT 5"

Set rs = Conn.Execute(sql)

if Err.Number <> 0 then
     Response.Redirect "error.asp" 'if you have an error page
end if

Do While NOT rs.eof

     padded = "000000" & rs("entry_id")
     padded = right(padded, 6)

     response.write("<a href='" & archive_url & padded & ".html'>")
     response.write("<img src='" & rs("entry_text_more") & "-thumb.jpg' class='littlepic'")
     response.write("alt='" & rs("entry_title") & "'></a>")

     rs.movenext
Loop

rs.Close

Set rs = nothing

Conn.Close


Posted by Jesse at 2:43 PM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2003

Photo Logs

I set up Kevin's photo log using the tutorial at Quixotic Pixels. The tutorial was great, but uploading one picture at a time is tedious.

Using MT's import function seems much easier, so I wrote a script that would pull the title, date, and comments from the photos and place them in a text file for import.

Comments would be appreciated.

Posted by Jesse at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

August 16, 2003

Style Sheet Irritation

Sigh....
I know the site looks a lot better, but take a look on the right hand side...
Just above the search, and below the powered by should be all white, I just can't figure it out.
The left side is floated, which is probably why but still....

Edit: Fixed above the search, but I'd still like the left hand side to extend to the bottom.

Posted by Jesse at 12:19 AM