Site updates

Where I navel-gaze at the fun of my recent site updates.

  • Uncategorized

    More on the story engine

    I started working up the story engine last night in Ruby. Greg suggested that XSLT would be perfect for it if I stored my stories as XML. Do a simple transformation, and voila, a story in XHTML with layout and everything. I was hoping I could knock it out in a single evening. Turns out Ruby and XSLT are two more separate critters than I thought — there’s no default library to handle it, and the three or so available are older and lack documentation. Better yet, the one easily available as a gem doesn’t use Ruby’s nice REXML, it uses LibXML. Combine all that with never having used XSLT…

  • On Life and Love

    New! Improved!

    As I mentioned on my much-unused LiveJournal page, I’m going to start crossposting. There are a good number of people that I’m acquainted with that use “LJ Friends” to view blogs; these folks don’t use RSS (aside from what I can guess is on the backend of LJ Friends) and have to visit my site manually to see my content. Thanks to LiveJournal Crossposter, a plugin for WordPress, I should be able to post on both places simultaneously with little additional work for me. Vive le LJ!

  • Uncategorized

    Downgrade failure.

    I don’t care much for WordPress 2.0. It’s pretty and sleek, but there’s an as-yet-unsolved issue with WordPress hijacking access attempts to directories that shouldn’t be covered by mod_rewrite and have authentication settings on them via .htaccess. Result: lots of 404 errors when attempting to get to my statistics and my personal radio. That’s not the only thing that’s broken in WP 2.0, but that’s the only problem I’ve run across, aside from my general dislike of the WYSIWYG editor. So I tried to downgrade to WordPress 1.5.2. Unfortunately, it borked my database a bit. I re-upgraded to 2.0 and tried to downgrade again. Failure. Now I’m back to WP…

  • Uncategorized

    Yay for lunch.

    Things are coming together a little better on the redesign. I installed WordPress in such a way as it’s managing all my content now, even though I haven’t moved all my content into the database yet. I decided to keep the purple. Note that I moved off the posts from the Physical Matters category–most people aren’t going to care about that stuff. It’s not out of the RSS feed yet, but it won’t show up here. See Physical Matters for that. That’ll be polished off later today, most likely. Everything in the design is still a little rough, but I wanted to finally just get something up, because I’ve been…

  • Uncategorized

    Quickie.

    Did a quick and dirty rehashing of things around here. This is all you get today, because I am le tired. More tomorrow.