Bloxor Hacks
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I’ve been recently hacking my local installation of bloxor to shreds. I made drag and drop work, and hacked the icon scheme. I’m still working on it, but I did manage to take this screen shot earlier which shows it in action. |
Typolution
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I just managed to port my entire website over to Typo today. I haven’t messed with the theme. So it’s the Typo-default as it stands now. What is interesting about this is that I’m running on Typo on Ruby on Rails on FastCGI on Apache on OS X! Typo has a very cool Wordpress database converter that “just worked” and moved my entire web site over to their database format in seconds. So, I can now hack at my entire website on Ruby on Rails on my Powerbook. The other cool thing about this is, I’m running the latest Rails RC and Typo head, and it all works. This really gives me confidence in their built-in test methodology. I can’t believe how far the intraweb has come. |
Involution.com Wordpress Theme v1.3
I just hacked up the CSS some more tonight to make it look shinier under OS X. I may try to hack some better looking fonts for Mac OS X-only using the centricle hacks. All of my Wordpress themes can be downloaded here.
Involution Wordpress Theme
Didn’t you always want your site to look like involution.com? Oh yes, now you can! I just GPL’d the theme. You can download it, and the previously released Linucon2 theme here. I added these to the Wordpress Codex themes wiki earlier today. Enjoy.
I’m really liking this reddit site. I yelled at them one time to fix their RSS feed, and, *GASP*, they listened! Usually, when I go off on one of my tirades people just laugh at me.
Ruby on Rails
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I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning the newest, shiny, whizbang/neato intraweb framework around, Ruby on Rails. Now, mind you, my entire site is running on PHP, and I’ve been programming in it since 1999, however, there’s some big problems with using it. It is possible to use it correctly, however, the path-of-least-resistance is to use it incorrectly. The big thing that didn’t even realize was a drawback is that all of the SQL is buried in the PHP code itself. The Ruby on Rails MVC model makes it easy to separate the SQL from the Ruby. So, development is very agile and adaptable. This allows you to make changing the database by adding tables or fields to an existing table very quick and painless. I’m currently using Wordpress and Gallery, however, there’s all kinds of naughty braindead code that I hate in these CMS systems. I really want to roll my own system because I’m stubborn and idiotic like that. Add to the fact that I’m severely unimpressed with Gallery2. Google freaking released an RSS plugin in their summer of code jamboree, and the gallery folks haven’t put it in the release yet. I looked at adding it myself, but the Gallery2 tables don’t have a “LastUpdated” field in the album title, and guess what it’s coded in? You got it, PHP. So, good luck finding every freaking query that refers to an album in all the core Gallery2 PHP and all of the plugins. The other thing that I’m really digging is the script.aculo.us stuff and the Prototype Javascript library. It makes it ridiculously easy to make it look like you know what your doing with Javascript. I have a test page up and running now using some of this stuff, however, it’s mostly useless, but keep your eyes peeled as I’ll probably be making Involution.com 7.0 completely run on Rails in the near future. |
Rsync
Rsync is a great tool that allows you to trade network bandwidth for CPU bandwidth. It’s great for keeping a mirrored directory current on a remote system. I’m currently using it to mirror involution.com two different machines in two different states to minimize the chances that I lose any of my hard work.
This is the command that I use for the backup:
rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite1:www/ rsync -ave ssh --include .htaccess /var/www/html/ tony@backupsite2:www/
It’s Done
Involution.com is now running on Wordpress. I’m not 100% happy with the CSS, but it looks fairly close to my original design. I didn’t hack the Wordpress PHP at all, so my installation is a clean 1.52 with an involution.com theme that I’ll GPL and post to codex once I’ve cleaned up a couple of things. Overall, I’m pretty happy with all of the cool stuff that’s possible with Wordpress and all of the plugins and themes that are available. I’ve retained livejournal mirroring, and added commenting, an Atom feed, and a more coherent HTML structure (have you ever looked at the old involution HTML?). Also, I’m messing around with k2 as well. I actually made a modified k2 theme this weekend, but I HATED it after I was done, and decided to retain the original involution.com look and feel while porting the back-end to Wordpress. I want to port some of the k2 code over to the involution theme, especially the AJAX commenting and searching… I’d also like to incorporate my bloxor and gallery into the main Wordpress CMS as well.
Thoughts on Opera
I tried Opera this morning, briefly. I wasn’t impressed with it at all. First off, it didn’t render my CSS button on the left pane correctly (it loads fine with IE and Firefox). Also, I really didn’t much care for the way that it handled RSS feeds. What’s the point of Opera anyway?
Referer Spam
How do I stop it? I’ve tried all kinds of Apache rewrite rules, applying various patches to awstats, etc, etc. Nothing seems to work. Anyone got any ideas?
