The life and times of a fallen hacker
Archive for the ‘blog’ Category.
The entire 2800+ entry breadth of this blog is now available in WordPress, properly categorized, all shiny and nice.
The effort begun in August took quite a bit more time than expected.
To celebrate the union under one umbrella I’m going to watch a bit of House and quaff a well-deserved glass of metaxa, just the thing to spark up a dark October evening.
There are now 5 months / 271 entries left in the effort to move all blog content into Wordpress.
And a definite need for some category-shuffling once the content is all snug and safe in the database. I’m not thoroughly happy with the categorization right now. Some of them have grown way too big, and it’s time to slice and dice their entries into carefully divided subcategories. And correspondlingly there are some pairs of groups whose division inbetween seems very artificial (and the categories themselves have not gathered that much content thus far).
Some examples:
And some entirely new categories might appear as well: such as liveblogging (even though those events are rare indeed).
That’s the plan. And it will still take a a while to implement.
R&A and life in general have taken their toll in the de-archival process.
With the addition of the entries from february 2007, there’s now ten months left.
And I definitely aim to be done with the lot in a week or two.
The blog restoration project has progressed nicely.
There’s just a year’s worth of stream of consciousness left to be transferred to WordPress. The twelve months of 2007 to be exact.
The perl-script used to do the conversion bears serious scars from variously malformed entries, but all in all has been a great help in the effort. The last year ought to be easier, as I revamped the publishing system around the new year of 2006.
But the 2007 is by far the most prolific year, the months are just packed with entries, so it’ll be a while before the work is complete.
The blog restoration project has now progressed well into the 2006, just past the blog’s second anniversary.
One of the non-migrated things is the previous comment system, the few hundred comments written in during the reign of commenting externalized to haloscan will disappear, given time. Until the service provider decides to pull the plug on them, the old comments will of course be available in the old archives.
The restoration work is thankfully no longer manual. I modified the RSS-generator to understand even the semantically not so well put-together HTML of pre-2007 entries, and thus far it has been performing very well.
However, the import-functionality of Wordpress is by no means perfect. It’s unable to handle categories, and picking them off the list does take a while. There’s no facility to configure the author of the imported posts. Defaulting to admin can, obviously, be subverted by removing that account entirely, in which case any update to an entry (say, for adding the category-information) marks the entry having been written by the user.
A lot of the links have expired during the years. I’ve fixed some, but in most cases just noted on a per-entry basis that there’s nothing to be expected in clicking on them.
20 months to go. Perfect coverage is still a good while away.
The 2004-2007 restoration project has now gone on for about two weeks. And it has thus far accomplished a year’s retrieval of posts from the lost bookshelves of history.
The first year requires the least amount of manual work - there’s not that many photographs, cunning visual effects or pretty much anything beyond good old plain text and links.
Hopefully though the forthcoming years submit to being semi-automatically imported. Even if the engine is able to gulp an RSS feed of appropriate entries, there are still details that need to be edited (like categories, which the mechanism doesn’t seem to be able to convert on the fly).
There’s been a considerable amount of broken links in the first 320-odd entries. I’ve fixed some, but some seem gone forever.
In addition I thought about adding a director’s commentary-equivalent sidetrack to some of the entries. Though on some I find it rather hard to figure out what exactly I was thinking (and those are not only the entries written under the influence of hefty medication during the epic flu of february 2005).
So, twelve months in, 34 to go. It’ll be a while.
Upon somewhat well-deserved abuse heaped on to this blog due the heft of the previous theme, I changed to a more minimalistic affair.
The main visible change is the lack of a randomized header image, but I’m pretty sure that the selection wasn’t really attracting anyone here. The other big change is the fluid nature of the layout - certainly a change from the exactly 900 pixels wide design previously.
This is Fluid Blue by Srini. The CSS seems to be simple and pleasant, and only a couple of changes were needed to facilitate the layout choices undertaken previously.
The theme doesn’t contain support for asides, so installed asideshop to take care of the shorter posts. I’m not truly happy with their layout yet. And all in all, I’ll probably get rid of the entry-specific timestamps.
Please report mistakes, design oddities and any resistance to change as comments or via e-mail.
EDIT 16.8.2008: OK, so the asideshop is not really working. Time to fix the aside-ness of an entry within the theme itself.
EDIT 16.8.2008, like, later: The asides should now work as expected.
Finally went ahead and updated the engine to the newest version. Complain in comments or via e-mail if things seem wrong, misplaced or uglier than usual.
As indicated in the archives in the sidebar, I’ve begun to integrate old blog entries into the wordpress-hosted database.
There are a few reasons for this. The current monthly archives are not optimized for findability.
Especially during the first years the engine was not really optimalfunctional, and as such there are somewhat serious issues with the quality of the pages. And while the lack of support for categories in the old engine may seem like a small thing, it comes in very useful as the number of entries grows (and at 2500+ right now, it’s rather a sore spot).
The first entries have been manually transferred, I’m pretty sure the latter content can be imported automagically via the help of a precision-aimed RSS-generator.
I won’t delete the old archives, and existing URIs should be as valid as before. Also the images will be available in the current locations.
There’s no real ETA for the process.
Woo, this blog just got its very first award. Thanks to skrubu for the recognition.
And while I’m not a big fan of chain letters and such, not listing seven yet unrewarded blogs would be rather antisocial. So here goes: Katuoja, /var/log/orava, ylitalot.net/com, Überkuul, Symbiatch, A Heartbreaking Blog of Staggering Genius and ButtUgly. And obviously all the blogs on the roll in the sidebar (some of which are on summer hiatus) come highly recommended as well.
Stay tuned for the inevitable update to the brand-spanking new version.
And based on the short video extolling the virtues of the new version, it does have some significant goodies: Gears integration and version control are the two biggest guns, and the introduction of captions for the images may decrease the need for tinkering.
The European Union, according to a report by the Cultural Committee looks to regulate blogging.
The chief reasons for the surging desire to control are “malicious intents” and “hidden agendas” of the bloggers.
I can safely say that this very blog has neither - and really not that much of an intent or an agenda in general. All content is available under a CC-license, and certainly I don’t feel that I’m actually threatening any media empires with my wantonly provided free content.
[ via Butt-Ugly and Piraattiliitto. ]
According to Wordle, this is what this blog (as it stands today) is made out of:
Categories massaged with a tiny perl script and fed into the tool.
The image lies a bit, since the hierarchical categories are not properly used (to be perfect, this should use a .misc-equivalent for the things that do not fall into any existing subcategory).
Added widgets to the sideboard to deal with licensing of content of the blog, movies in theatres, upcoming things in general and links to the world outside this blog.
The last of the list is missing a couple of expected entries. Since I don’t really listen to music on computers and my iPod is pretty much used only at work, the likes of last.fm doesn’t make much sense right now. My Flickr-account has a grand total of ONE picture, but that’s to be rectified this summer by taking the service into use as photographic backup.
I don’t think of myself as a professional blogger, nor do I expect to make any money with this. Nonetheless a well-thought out set of clues on blog-improvement does bear further investigation.
Let’s see, what kinds of additional pages does the artice suggest:
1. About page - to be repaired ASAP. This is in pretty terrible shape all right.
2. Contact page - to be added. Conspicuously missing.
3. Press page - will remain absent. This blog has been quoted ONCE in the press.
4. Disclaimer page - TBC. I added a CC-license to the sidebar last week, and I don’t think that I’ve got much to disclaim anyhow.
5. FAQ page - present, but seriously outdated.
6. Subscribe page - not needed, I think. The links are present in the sidebar (and any modern web browser knows how to interact with feeds).
7. Advertise with us-page - not needed, this is an ad-free zone.
8. Series page: compliation - I don’t really do series. The venerable “reading Sandman” got sidetracked by the arrival of the Absolute edition.
9. Series page: central - see above.
10. Affiliate pre-sell page - see #7, above.
11. Services page - this website doesn’t really offer any services worth mentioning.
12. Key information page - that’d be the FAQ page, m’m, just take a left at #5, please.
13. Landing page - again, no ads, no need to provide a landing strip.
14. Sneeze page - that’d be the “best of”-sidebar widget. Might consider expanding this to a page of its own. And definitely have to pull in the choicest cuts from the first three years anyway.
15. Testimonial page - nope, this blog isn’t a sales-channel, so there won’t be any testimonials around.
16. Event-specific page - nope, no events worth mentioning lately.
17. 404 page - missing in action, and will be provided, as the theme-specific one is kind of lame.
18. Special projects - nothing to feature, at least yet. If any of the ongoing therapy projects results in anything delivery-worthy, they will obviously get pages of their own.
19. Guest blogger-page - no guest bloggers (or even candidates for such).
20. Archives-page - present.
#. Privacy-page - probably worthwhile, but hasn’t been an issue.
#. Comments-policy - probably worthwhile, but hasn’t been an issue. Spam is mercilessly deleted (thanks to Akismet’s vigilance), everything else is published.
#. Links-page - yeah yeah, my blogroll is on the feeble side. I don’t feel comfortable exposing my entire collection of feeds, so this will remain a collection of friends blogs. But collections of good links might be publishable as individual pages in the future.
So, out of 23 suggestions, there’s a nice bit of housekeeping work to be done in the future: two new pages, and three to be updated.
Note to self (and other users of Welho’s Motorola modems): sometimes spiky bits get lodged sideways, and need to be shaken out by powering down the device for several minutes.
Let the ranting continue.
Welho’s pipes seem to be seriously clogged this evening.
Have the grannies of Haaga discovered the wonderland of warezed Jamie Oliver books?
Or there something even more sinister going on?
This entry is the 2500th of this blog, and 339th written with the new engine.
The number of entries is pretty much the only meaningful statistic currently, I’m still figuring out what’s actually wrong with Google Analytics on this blog - somehow it seems to capture traffic only on the old entries.
The ratio of proper comments to spam is frighteningly low.
Either preserved pork has really increased in number lately, or the old version of this blog escaped on account of some bad recon.
The completely reworked image uploader of WordPress 2.5 seems to be seriously broken.
The flash-based tool fails miserably, and the error messages (especially on screen) do not help much.
Thankfully I’m not the only one suffering from this fault, and even more thankfully, a plugin that replaces the tool with a traditional HTML-form has already been released. The plugin doesn’t work perfectly either, but as long as it stores the images properly, any faults can be fixed in markup.
Other than that, the new version of the engine seems to be OK (and the draft-manager has definitely been fixed, which is nice).
