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Archive for the 'LinkStew' Category
As part of the migration, I decided move Links To from being a separate column of links to being small entries commingled with regular entries, Kottke style. I actually copied the format and code of Photo Matt's (The author of WordPress!) "Asides." This has the advantages of freeing up room for other layout options (and more importantly, letting me move to two columns) and allowing me to post small thoughts without the overhead of having a meaningful title. The upshot of this is, if you're subscribing to the "Links To" feed, stop; It's gone.
Welcome to Linkstew point oh. After years of maintaining my own blogging software, it's finally time to let that dream die. Besides reinventing the wheel, I was missing out on newfangled blog features like trackbacks, multiple feed formats, and posting APIs.
When I started online journaling way back in high school, it was just some static html. This grew into a series server side includes, which later became some php templates. There was a moment when I realized "hey, this is one of those 'buhlog' things... I should see what tools other people are using." So I checked out some site called "blogger" I'd been hearing about, but at that point blogger was only a few months old, and I was already doing things blogger couldn't (and it turns out wouldn't do for years to come) like categories. Later I evaluated Greymatter (remember that thing?) and later still I evaluated Moveable Type, but each time there was something I didn't like.
So I went through a few big code iterations, and learned how to do a lot of things the hard way, and did some neat stuff, and it was probably a good learning exercise. But, Linkstew's code has long been neglected, and I was never going to get around to doing everything I wanted to the site. Heck, I figured that out with In Passing years ago.
So without giving it too much thought, I decided to switch to WordPress. I've had a basic migration of Linkstew in WordPress sitting around for a few months, and yeah, there were things I didn't like about it, but last night I decided to just bite the bullet and get it over with. My primary interfaces to Linkstew were highly polished to suit my taste over the course of years, so it's unreasonable to expect that a tool like WordPress is going to be exactly what I was hoping for. Just because "I don't like the category management interface" and "I don't like PHP" is no reason to miss out on everything that a community supported open source software package has to offer.
Besides, maybe I can write a plugin to do more tag-like category management and share it for everyone's benefit.
There are almost certainly broken bits. If you notice anything, let me know. Here's a list of what I know is wrong:
- The picture blog was last in the migration. I'm going to investigate ways to avoid reinventing this wheel before I add it back.
The rss feed and the /noid/ links should still work, but I couldn't get mod_rewrite to work for those URLs, and instead I made some small 301 redirect scripts to handle each case.- I fixed mod_rewrite so these now return 200s, but later I plan to switch them back to being 301s.- The current layout is transitional. I don't intend to recreate the old design, but I have ideas for what I want to do that I didn't want to hold up the migration for.
Links to categories with spaces would appear to be broken.- There's something wrong with quotes in the RSS feed.
I've been tinkering with a ton of stuff this weekend, but about the only visible result of all of this is that photos from the "Photo Log" album in my gallery will now show up inline on Linkstew.
If you want to leave a comment on a picture, click through to the gallery (the thumbnail is a link) and leave the comment there. Maybe later I'll try to make comment counts and links show up inline...
For my next trick I'll need to make new albums show up, but that shouldn't be too hard based on the work I've done, though I've still got a long way to go before I finish converting Linkstew into what I realized it needs to be.
(It would also appear that I made the stupid thing slower, but my timing data doesn't suggest that the gallery integration is the problem. I'll investigate later.)
I need a way to microblog my brainstormy little ideas. Subject lines are too much overhead. Categories are too much overhead. The Stew isn't living up to its name.
I got bored the other day, and made this two letter Scrabble word trainer to help refresh my memory of the 96 two letter scrabble words.
I'm pretty happy with the final result, and think it should be pretty easy to use. The form field should auto focus, so you should be able to type in a bunch of two letter words, hit enter, and then type more words to add to your collection until you either know all 96, or until you give up and ask for help.
If you have any suggestions for improvement, let me know.
After spending the last week working on JavaScript craziness at work, I felt inspired to come home and do something on my own site with it. Now don't get me wrong: I still generally dislike the way JavaScript is used on your average site, but I'm beginning to respect that it's capable of adding useful interactive elements to a site while keeping the site entirely accessible for someone who has JavaScript disabled.
So for my first trick, I turned the "8 years of Linkstew" list into a much smaller widget which only displays one year upon loading, and then allows you to view other years as necessary. And if you have JavaScript disabled, you see all of the years expanded out without a problem, because it's the JavaScript that collapses the tables on load in the first place.
Before you oh and ah too much, I should qualify that this functionality was based on a heavily modified version of PPK's Quirksmode site navigation widget.
I wasn't entirely sure of what the best navigation paradigm was, so I made some toggles for you to play with the options. I think I like the "click to select" + "one year selected at a time," but if you have a strong alternate opinion, please let me know:
That said, there are also still some known issues to work out:
- A lot of the particulars are hard coded right now. I plan to make it a little more generalized so I can reuse the functionality on other parts of the site. So if you're thinking to yourself "hey, that's cool, I want that!" I'd recommend not stealing it yet.
- It's ugly! I'm still working on the styling, but that's probably going to end up being a part of a bigger project to restyle the whole site.
- In Mozilla (but not Firefox!) each month link is taking up the entire width of the widget, so it makes a straight vertical list of months instead of a 3 x 4 grid. It definitely has something to do with display: block, but that it does the right thing in FireFox really confuses me.
- In IE Mac, the JavaScript fires and collapses the tables, but the CSS stuff doesn't happen right at all, so it looks really weird. I probably need to hide the JavaScript activation from that browser.
- Maybe I'm crazy, but Mar, May and Jun 2004 seem to have a light gray background, but that doesn't render in any other browser and Mozilla's DOM inspector isn't telling me anything different for those cells than Jan, Feb and Apr.
- I haven't actually tested it in Win IE yet, because I don't have it on hand. If there are any problems, let me know?
- Opera 7.5 works fine for once.
So go use it and let me know what you think! Gratuitous? Useful way to save space? Fun to play with it?
Links To is a little more than three months old now, and for all that time the only way to read my comments on the links is to either subscribe to the Links To RSS feed, or to view the source of the web page and read the comments. But today, I finally got around to implementing a better solution.
Just hover your mouse over the links in the Links To column, and my comments should pop up in a nice transparent yellow box (code thanks to NSLog();). Unless you're using Mac IE, in which case they pop up as a tooltip that gets truncated after a hundred or so characters.
Actually, I've only tested it in Safari, Mozilla/Camino, and Mac IE so far -- Windows testing will have to wait until Monday Tuesday (a holiday! hot damn!).
So, I ask you all: is this a usable way to display that text?
So I had this little problem: Every time I wanted to add an entry to Linkstew, I had to come up with a title and pick some topics in addition to writing the content, and I had to worry about how every entry was going to affect the stew. Which, in short, kept me from blogging all of the little links I read and the little thoughts I had to share. Sometimes they would show up in entries like this, but usually they were lost.
But somehow, rewriting one of my admin scripts tonight led me to a solution that I'm really excited about. Look over there on the right, and you'll see the new "Links To" section.
Links To will contain links to articles I've read lately, and to books I'm reading, and to movies I've seen, and music I'm listening to, and games I'm playing, and so on. The main point is to just collect and share links, but I'll add a sentence or two of commentary on each item (especially on the books/music/movies). I might also post linkless items there from time to time, if I just have a sentence I want to share or something.
It's also got its own RSS feed, so you can subscribe to it separately. Actually, with an RSS reader is probably the best way to read Links To, because you can read my commentary in your reader and the RSS links point directly to the article without involving a middle man. Basically, it's a feed of links with a little commentary.
(Actually, right now the RSS feed is the only way to see my commentary on the links. This will be changing soon, though.)
While Links To is a freer format than the main blog, I built with exactly the same engine, so it got comments and categories for free. I don't really plan to implement "related links to" (mainly because I'm already having enough trouble figuring out where to display all of the content I have), but if you want to comment on a link, you can. Additionally, Links To will be archived right next to the main content both by date and by category.
But while all of this is exciting, adding Links To only hammered home the fact that I'm going to have to do some sort redesign to really accomodate all of this. Right now, for example, my commentary on each Links To item isn't available with a web browser at all. I did a lot of cleaning up of my CSS tonight, but I've got a lot more to straighten up before I can even worry about redesigning.
So, if you have comments/ideas/suggestions about Links To, let me know!
God this entry is awful -- I wanted to talk about how much of a pain having to title blog posts is, and how hopefully Links To will free me from being such a perfectionist, and how now the main content will probably be devoted to longer content and not updated as often and Links To will be updated more often, and more -- but I'm too tired to coherently say all of that, and I felt like I had to explain what exactly "Links To" is... I should rewrite this entry later.
Or I should leave it as my first step towards not being such a perfectionist in my posting. Ha!
Argh. So I was working with my database this morning, and I accidentally did an update comments set date='blah'; and very notably left off the where cid=d clause. So it said it updated thousands of records, I cursed, and I immediately typed rollback; to which mysql replied:
ERROR 1196: Warning: Some non-transactional changed tables couldn't be rolled back
I cursed again, and reminded myself "No problem, that's why I keep nightly database backups."
Only when I looked, it turns out I was never backing up the comments table. So now I'm in limbo waiting for dreamhost to reply and let me know if they actually make backups and can give me a copy of the table... If they can't, I'm going to have to have to get very personal with the google cache of Linkstew...
So, for now, this means that if you're looking at old entries, all of the dates for the comments aren't just going to be wrong, they're all going to be the same. Blah. Talk about a bad way to start a day.
update: Okay, they restored the table from backup for me, even though I asked them to give me a copy of the dump so I could restore it myself... Unfortunately, this means if you left a comment between 2003-04-28 22:52:18 and 2003-04-30 16:00ish, it was lost. That was at least one comment that I know of... Blah. Oh well. It's not like I'm that popular or anything. =)
I finished the conversion of Linkstew to use all CSS tonight. With no more ugly tables to worry about, the code is significantly cleaner, it'll be easier to make changes in the future, and hey, it even still validates!
It looks good to go in Safari and Mozilla and IE 5, but there's something kinda weird going on with OmniWeb... But I'm not sure if I'm going to worry about it, because OmniWeb has other problems. Anyway, if you see any problems in any other browsers, let me know?
And now, I feel safe adding another bullet point to my resume.
Next up: convert my resume to LaTeX, to refresh my LaTeX skills so I can feel justified in adding that to my resume.
My original intentions tonight had been to play with my RSS feed. Instead, I got distracted by playing with CSS for parts of my page layout and I never even actually touched the RSS files.
So, I moved a few things around, and the entire header and center column of posts is now completely laid out using CSS and is table free. It even validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional right now...
I've only really tested it in Safari and Mozilla, but that means that there's at least one browser on every platform that it'll look acceptable in... Regardless, since I'm leaning towards rebuilding everything with CSS, let me know if you have other layout suggestions for me to play with while I'm at it.
Still todo:
- Make the sidebars layout using all CSS, and get rid of tables completely (probably with the exception of the calendar tables).
- Make my posting engine smartly handle ampersands, escaping them into html entities if I enter any unescaped &s.
- Clean up my rendering code once the all CSS version is in place.
- Actually play with the RSS feeds.
- And then I can start adding some features that I've been meaning to add.