Author: jon

Ok, so in just a few hours after my last post, I did some more research into various weblog and BBS software, and got Movabletype installed on my server. It’s a very cool piece of software. I didn’t realize. It’s not all that different from iBlog–though it definitely has a lot more “bells and whistles.” The authoring software just runs on the server as a set of perl scripts instead of on your local machine. But then it generates all the pages. I was thinking it was going to rely more on pages that we generated “on the fly”. That’s how a PHP-based system like Geeklog would work.

So this is good. I should have a pretty darn fast site with the most of the content on the pages being hard coded. All of those slow downs I experienced because of offsite content generation won’t exist because it will be handled by my own server. Plus with full pages of HTML existing on my site, there shouldn’t be any problems with search engines.

I’ve already managed to get all of my posts converted over. There’s still quite a bit of work to do though. I have to get my templates working so that I have my “Halloween” style back. Plus I have to figure out if there are any plugins I want to install to add even more functionality to my site. And I have to go and make up some document referrers to point the old pages to the new ones, and a good “404 page not found” to help people transition over to the new version.

This is gross. My eyes are screwed up as it is. I got my first pair of glasses in the 3rd grade. There is NO way I’m going to put “jewelry” in the “mucous membrane” of my eyeball!

Bob Dylan is not a good looking man. I’m sorry. “Blood On The Tracks” is one of the all-time greatest albums. I have a ton of respect for the man. But he should not be juxtaposed with girls in their underwear.

Sometimes it would be much easier if I could just accept things they way they are.

I’ve really enjoyed my time getting back into web development on this site. I like being able to type up a little something, click the “Post” button and away it goes to my homepage.

But I’ve found certain things to be rather frustrating. This program that I’m using, iBlog, is great if you just want to type in some text or post a simple image. But if you want to get your hands dirty with a little more HTML like a bulleted list or a blockquote or whatnot, it’s a bit difficult. You have to add extra tags around the HTML. And all the HTML has to be on one line with no returns. Plus iBlog isn’t so great in it’s Rich Text to HTML conversion. Instead of putting <p> and </p> tags around paragraphs, it uses two line breaks. <br /><br /> This isn’t the best form and then when you add in block HTML which has its own line returns built in like lists or blockquotes, you get 2 blank lines instead of one between paragraphs. So then you have to delete the extra returns between paragraphs. And that in conjunction with HTML with no line returns makes very unreadable text.

Plus I have extra features of my site added by outside providers. My search engine is by Freefind. Comments are by Haloscan. The Blog Roll is by Blogrolling, and I’m listed at Technorati. Several of these services use outside Javascript so if their site is down or particularly slow, my site doesn’t work well.

So of course I’ve been investigating other methods of running my weblog. Mac OS X is pretty cool in that it is a UNIX operating system. It comes with Apache web server and PHP already installed. So today I upgraded my PHP to the latest version and installed MySQL and I’ve been playing around with other ways of running my site. I’m thinking about using Geeklog. It’s still going to require a lot of testing but it seems promising so far. By using that instead of iBlog, I’ll be able to handle searches and comments on my own site. And quickly adding new bits of data like additions to a Blog Roll are very easy.

I haven’t decided definitely on what I’m going to do. I also want to look at phpBB, and I should also check out Movabletype–though that one is perl-based. We’ll see. I’m sure whatever I choose, a new roll out would still be several weeks away. So like I said, it would be much easier if I could just accept things the way they are.

Everyone and their brother is talking about the fact that 10 years ago today, Kurt Cobain killed himself. You can check out Wil Wheaton’s take on it or numerous other writers over at Black Table.

I do remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard that Kurt was dead. I was in college trying to sleep after a late night party. It’s almost funny that I made my post yesterday about how much I didn’t like Daylight Saving Time. How difficult it was to cope with that missing hour.

April 5, 1994 I was trying really hard to cope with that missing hour, even if it was a few days before, and was losing badly. Back then I was the master of the snooze alarm. I could manage to hit snooze for 7 minute snatches of sleep for two hours straight. I don’t know how my roommate put up with me.

In those brief glimpses of semi-lucidity in between the blissful dark, I dreamed that Kurt was dead. When I finally decided to give up the charade and enter waking life, I continued to have the strangest feeling that Kurt was gone. I told myself it was just a dream and ignored it.

Of course the first conversation I had with someone started out with “Did you hear…” and I realized that I had actually heard from my clock radio that he had taken his own life. It was a surreal moment–bordering on deja vu. Even if it was only caused by lack of sleep.

I didn’t think much about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana at that time. I had burned out on them after the “Nevermind” deluge, and I steadfastly pretended they didn’t exist. But something about his death, the near-dream-state during which I found out about it, gnawed at me.

I was about six months later that the “Unplugged” album was released. The first time I heard his acoustic version of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World”, I knew I had to buy that CD. An idea had been gestating in the back of my mind for months, and it hit me when I sat down and listened to the entire album. Nirvana was a great band. I had not allowed myself to pay attention to them because of all the hype that surrounded them, and so I missed out while he was still with us.

Note to self: Don’t stay up half the night watching movies when you’re going into Daylight Saving Time. Losing that hour is killer.

I love Standard Time. Gaining an extra hour is like finding five bucks in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while.

Daylight Saving Time is setup to happen at 2am in the U.S. because most people are at home asleep or at least in bed at that time. When I was in college I had a late-night freeform radio show and the going into and out of DST was always an interesting experience. People who had a show that went on the air at 2am on the first Sunday in April would not be able to broadcast that week. The time just disappeared. October was the really unusual time because we had to decide what to do with that extra hour.

I wish we could always gain an hour. It would be like getting a free gift every six months.