January 2004 Archives

View from my futon

Well, I’m finally starting to get settled into my new pad. I’m still working out some storage issues, but I think things are starting to come together quite nicely. I will post more pictures as I get the rest of the room worked out.

I’m safe in Boston, but my website is down

I made it Boston just fine, and even slept a little on the flight. My new apartment is runnin’ like a dream.

My website, however, is not runnin’ like a dream at all. In fact, my webhost is not being very dreamy about the whole situation either. Last night when I discovered the problem (all php files are dead). They sent me an email explaining what the problem was and giving me a temporary fix. I tried the fix in a few places, and while it gets php to start working again, it seems to break a few of my scripts. I decided to just leave things alone, expecting to find everything working again when I woke up today.

To my shock, I woke up this morning to find that nothing has changed at all. This comes 12 hours after they told me what to problem was!!!!!!! I’m actually paying for this service, wtf!

Phoned in @ 01:36:07 on Saturday

Lots of small updates to slowchildren.com

I spent the whole day working on my website. I’m such a goober. I didn’t even leave my bedroom until 5:00pm.

I polished up threads a bit, making page loads much faster. I cleaned up my css code a bit. I updated the ‘archives’ section of this site, changing it from this to this (props to the girlie). I also changed the ‘Monthly Archives’ list into a menu. This kind of goes against my purist belief on how html should be used…but then the list was taking up too much vertical real-estate. Finally, I created a google search form (neat, huh?).

Ooh, and I almost forgot: remember the other day when I was talking all that junk about RSS? Well, the program I’ve been using to parse the feeds is called feedsplitter. I’ve been playing around with that a lot and made a couple of suggestions to the author. Guess what? He not only liked my idea, he listed my name in the source code! That’s a first for me…I don’t even list my name in my own code.

It’s amazing how much work I can get done, when I’m supposed to be packing for school.

WWWBoard part II: “threads”

Okay, I finally got off my tush and rebuilt the old wwwboard (which was lost with the old site). It still needs a lot of spit and polish, but it’s functional now. I think there’s no better way to figure out what needs to be fixed, than to just let people start testing it out.

On the old site, I built my wwwboard script from scratch. For this one, I started with a script called Tribby Board. I liked it because it was simple. I gutted most of the dated 2001 code (yuck, tables!) and tried to quickly integrate it into my site’s look and feel (ie: sloppy). I also created an RSS feed, which I use to list the most recent updates in the sidebar. You can use it to syndicate the latest posts with a program like NetNewWire.

I’ve decided to title this new version “threads,” because it’s a threaded discussion group. I might try to even package up what I’ve done and release it, since there doesn’t seem to be any modern WWWBoard style scripts out there.