Category: Site Updates

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In hopes of bringing in some more readers, I signed up with BlogExplosion yesterday. I’ve spent some time last night and tonight surfing through their system, and I’ve seen some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some infuriating blogs. (Politics… why did it have to be politics…)

If you’re coming here through BlogExplosion, feel free to skim for 30 seconds or explore as much as you want. This is the group-blog of a twentysomething married couple in California who enjoy computers, sci-fi and fantasy, and comics (OK, one of us likes comics). Each of us has other, non-blog stuff online as well.

Enjoy your visit!

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Well, I signed up with Gravatar, mainly so I could test the plugin.

Basically the idea is that you can define an avatar that will follow you around the Internet, anywhere you post. All that’s necessary is for the site you’re commenting on to be Gravatar-enabled at the time someone visits.

The one thing I’m not entirely thrilled about is that it uses your email address as the basis for your ID. They really didn’t have many options to choose from, since most blog comment forms only have space for your name (not always unique), email address, and website (not everyone has one). To avoid publishing addresses accidentally, they one-way encrypt it using MD5. (MD5 is a hash function, so while you can have two systems generate an MD5 signature from the same data to see if it matches, you can’t restore the original from the signature.)

If you’re interested in Gravatars, head over to their site, see if you agree with their policies, and if you enter your email address when commenting (don’t worry, current and future WordPress versions never display it outside of the admin area), your avatar will show up next to your comments.

Anyway, once I had gravatars showing up, I had to find a layout that (a) looked good and (b) worked in IE. (Yes, that again.) Continue reading →

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On an ideal Web, pages would stay put and links would never change. Of course, anyone who has been on the Internet long enough knows just how far away this ideal is. Commercial sites go out of business, personal sites move from school to school to ISP to ISP, news articles get moved into archives or deleted, and so on.

There are two sides to fighting link rot. The first is to design your own site with URLs that make sense, that you won’t find yourself changing a few months or years down the road. If you have to move something, use a redirect code so that people and spiders will automatically reach the new location.

The other side to the fight is periodically checking all the links on your site to make sure they still go where you expect.

So how do you handle online journals? Obviously they’re websites, so from that standpoint you should at least try to keep the links current. But on the blogging side, there are problems with this, in particular the school of thought that you should never revise a blog entry (also discussed in Weblog Ethics). Continue reading →

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The B2 /Cafelog project is evolving into WordPress. I finally got around to updating the software, and I’ve run into a few problems with some of my customizations. Mainly there’s no “On This Page” list on the sidebar, but if you notice anything else odd or broken-looking, comment on it here!

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For a while now I’ve been thinking of setting up something where I can just post random thoughts or opinion pieces without taking the time to write an HTML page and update bunches of links. Some sort of blogging software seemed ideal, so I looked at a few, noticed they all seemed to use MySQL, and left it for a while.

Well, I moved the site to a Linux server a few weeks ago, and so I started looking again. And since Katie’s site is currently under the same domain name, we both figured it would be cool to have something we could both post to.

I settled on b2 (shortly before the site ran out of bandwidth), mainly because it was simple, it used PHP, and it allowed me to set up more than one user.

Welcome to Ramblings!