The short answer is, it broke.
I'm not entirely sure what happened. I think part of the GeekLog installation the site was running on got corrupted during the migration to the new server several months back, but I'm not certain. I went to use part of the site I hadn't used since before then, and it wouldn't work at all. I tried updating to a newer version of GeekLog and that only made things worse.
At this point, I had two options at this point. I could either trying rebuilding the installation from the existing data using GeekLog, or I could rebuild the whole site from something else. I've gone with the latter.
However, this time around, I building the site software up from scratch using CakePHP. I've been itching to play with their 1.2 beta version for awhile now anyway. The 1.1 version serves as the foundation a few sites I've written, but the beta has some new toys for me.
So far, I've gotten very basic entry functionality up and running, as well as the list of links. I'm hoping to have the comments, files and gallery added within the next month, as I get time to add them. We'll see how that goes.
And for the record, I haven't written any of the admin interface for the site yet. I'm posting this entry directly into the database.
Currently, I have four RSS and Atom feeds set up for this site:
- An RSS 2.0 feed for general use.
- An Atom 1.0 feed for general use.
- An RSS 0.9 feed for LiveJournal.com.
- An Atom 1.0 feed for comments (mostly so I can see all the comments in Bloglines).
For some reason, the RSS 2.0 feed wasn’t updating properly. I noticed because Bloglines wasn’t showing any of my posts for today. When I opened the feed in IE7, it kept giving me an error. It took me a few minutes to notice the More Information link on the error page that actually showed what was wrong. It was having trouble with some of the characters in the feed.
I’ve been using Word to type my longer posts, so I thought I’d go fix those characters, like the single quote, that were giving it problems by using Notepad. After fixing a couple of posts that way, I started to look at the other feeds that were working.
Apparently, the default feed in GeekLog, which I’ve only slightly modified, is set to UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding. When you add a new feed, it defaults to ISO-8859-1, which is the standard we’ve had for years. It was the encoding for the higher characters (anything above standard ASCII) that was giving it trouble. It worries me that it was working before, but I’ve got it switched to ISO-8859-1 and it’s working fine.
I just added a few pictures I found on thefunniest.info to the Humor gallery. The site is a fun little toy. But try not to waste too much time on it.
TheFunniest.info is a project to try to find the funniest image in the world, using voting and some algorithms.
I've been working on some layout changes for the site. I'm getting closer to what I want, but it's still missing something. Then, once I'm happy with the look, I'm planning on going back and simplifying and correcting the underlying HTML code. Currently, it's a huge mess. If you view the source for the page, you'll see how ugly it really is.
I think I really like the header this way better. It seems much cleaner. I could never get the tear to look clean without severely modifying the way it's coded. And I honestly didn't feel like doing that yet.
Today, I finally got around to fixing several things that were wrong with this site. I should be able to prevent all the spam comments that kept cropping up now. Also, I've installed a different gallery software since the GeekLog integration for Gallery 2 is horrible.
This time, I'm using Media Gallery, which is the same software I'm using on Fenux vs. the Iron Kingdoms. I've got most of the pictures back up now, as well as a few that didn't make it the last time.
I'm also going back and cleaning up old entries and topics so that the site has better focus. I think the idea of keeping a couple sites will let me focus each one on a different set of topics. And on that note, I've migrated some recent entries from my LiveJournal account to the site because they really belonged here to begin with.
"Hi, my name is Desktop Search, and I'm a memory hog."
"Hi, Desktop Search!"
I uninstalled the stupid search applications that had been imposed on me by the Office 2007 Beta and the Google Desktop whatchamacallits. My computer is running much smoother now. Stupid memory hogs.
Sometimes I can't help myself. Fenux vs. the Iron Kingdoms is now up and running. All of my WarMachine and Hordes goodies will be going there.
With that in mind, that site will probably end up being a lot more active than this one.
This was too good not to share with others that don't read SlashDot (which usually includes me).
From Free software? You can't just give it away:
A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.
I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).
Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:
"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.
"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."
I felt somewhat unnerved at being held responsible for the disintegration of the UK anti-piracy system. Who would have thought giving away software could cause such difficulties?
Mozilla (and Firefox as a derivative work) are released (mostly) under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The MPL falls somewhere between a GPL (somewhat restrictive, non commercial) and the BSD license (less restrictive than a regular copyright). As a side note, I like the AFL (Academic Free License) which is a BSD-style license. I've released a couple of programs under the AFL.
From Timeline and Risk: How to Piss Off Your Software Developers
I believe that software developers strive to do the best work they can. Most programmers will fight tooth and nail, work evenings and weekends, and scale Mt. Everest on their hands to make sure they don't let their team down. I am, of course, speaking of teams that don't have morale problems. While I acknowledge that they exist, they're not the focus of this article.
(This isn't the point of the main article, but it illustrates the point I'm bringing up. The article itself was interesting and applies in other industries as well.)
Joel's take on a programmer's life is a little different, but I think related.
What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I've realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I've found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I've always been one of the most productive members of the team. That's probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won't reduce a team's output.
But it's not the days when I "only" get two hours of work done that worry me. It's the days when I can't do anything.
After some thought, I may have figured out my problem with productivity. I'm a solo programmer; I don't have a team to give me hell when I slack off. Or it could just be that I'm a little bipolar and it varies with my mood. It's probably both.
