blogwaffe

I know no one else cares, but my server is now running WordPress 1.3-alpha-5. A developer would surely disagree, but the code seems fairly stable (as in “not about to self immolate”, not as in “no longer changing”), so I think things should all theoretically work. On my end, though, I’m not 100% sure I’ve got all my bits in place, so let me know if something explodes.

Perhaps I was a bit offensive. Certainly not my intention. I thought it moste amusing. Our Mr. Harris was meant to take it good naturedly, but if he’s suffered for it, I apologize. As well to the people at blogcoven for possibly driving away a perfectly good (as in entertaining) reader. I suppose I should have at least waited until someone else had posted. But I couldn’t resist. “Huge, catchy hooks”. It’s now my new catch phrase. If he comes back, I’ll give him a hearty *slap* on the back.

I have been admonished for having a slow site. I don’t access it much from outside my apartment, so I was unaware of the annoyance. I knew that the photos were slow to load; I’ve been thinking about preloading them ahead of time, but I’m not sure about the best way to do that. Photos may just have to be slow.

The more important issue is the images loaded in my css. They take too long. I’ve been thinking about reworking the style of the site, anyway. Perhaps I’ll try to get something a bit less bandwidth intensive. The real problem is that I’m doing my own hosting over a cable modem: not much uploading bandwidth. I’ll look into other possibilities, but I’m cheap.

As a stopgap, I’ll change a few links and have caltech host all my images, so at least those will load a bit faster.

I’ve also just finished importaing all my old .in need of a life. entries to this site. Many of the links are likely broken. I will not be fixing them. Deal with it.

I got spammed.

I don’t mean that some previously clean email account got those first couple emails that cause people to cower in terror before the inevitable flood of enlargements, pharmaceuticals, and money makers. Though, as an aside, that just happened yesterday.

No, I mean my blog got hit. Not hard, but even one unwanted comment would be enough. I got six. The offending omments all got caught by wordpress‘s coment moderation filters, but I wanted more. So I futzed around a bit with the code and installed a more powerful moderation plug-in. Hopefully, since the number of hits this site gets is minimal, no one will want to take the time to figure out how to circumvent these new methods I’m using. But I’ll be watching.

Trying out Latexrender and its wordpress plugin. [tex]\displaystyle \pi = \sum _{k=0} ^{\infty} \dfrac{1}{16^k} \left[\dfrac{4}{8k+1}-\dfrac{2}{8k+4}-\dfrac{1}{8k+5}-\dfrac{1}{8k+6}
ight][/tex]

Finally got around to generalizing my little side popper app so it can deal with text input from blog entries as well as the wp-people data I designed it for. Check it [SIDE=/I appeared magically! And I didn’t screw up any funny characters! €! euro!/]out[/SIDE]. Still needs work, though: it can only handle straight text, not general HTML, and I’ll need it to if I want to use it for the picture album idea I have.

It’s decided; the best idea for a blog ever goes to one \_jeff_{krimmel} for his coverage of his Madden 2004 football double elimination tournament. Others may have had similar ideas in the past, but Jeff’s is the first I’ve seen, so he get’s it: the honour of an oh-oh-ficial blogwaffe shoutout.

He starts off with a good description of the situation and continues with an in depth commentary on each of the games he’s played. Humble enough to admit and explain his limitations, but still very concerned about the outcomes of the games. And who wouldn’t be? He’s got a lot riding on this. Like getting Ariele pissed off that he’s spending too much time with Madden.

Minus a few tweaks, I’ve finally got everything settled on my server. It was actually all surprisingly easy considering I had no idea what I was doing. Now that I’m hosting my own site, I have more control and can offer more functionality. It’s amazing how much better a truly database driven website can be over a “flat” design.

Excuse the mess while I change bloggin engines. Should be back to normal… sometime.
Theold site is (more or less) archived here

New domain: www.blogwaffe.com
New webserver: my old laptop
New blogging engine: … patience