Site updates
Where I navel-gaze at the fun of my recent site updates.
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Happy Bir’day to Me!
Saturday was my bir’day! I’m a ripe young mumble-something years old, and I don’t feel like I’m getting old–I feel like I’m running out of time. Advertising that I didn’t want gifts (hello, getting rid of stuff) meant that the gifts I did get were thoughtful and amazing. A set of writing books covering memoirs, grants, motivation, and fiction–writing techniques. A shorthand manual. Weber and Neal Stephenson books. Amazing and creative fancy-pants yarn (color 12). I picked up yarn for a new project myself on Saturday–an afghan to be finished by Feb 13 and begun after I finish my current afghan. Greg, being Greg, picked a pretty, soft eggplant-colored yarn…
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Search-building: custom or Google
Until earlier this week, I had a lousy site search in place. It was one of Google’s Custom Search Engines, barely configured and only on its own page, due to it’s hefty (and blocking!) JavaScript. I’d long since disabled WordPress’s search since my stories aren’t being run in WordPress, and I didn’t feel like trying to chew on the internal search mechanisms to include the stories. Last week, I started playing around with a project to create my own (Python) site search, including a crawler and Whoosh-based search. I’d seen the implementation of a Lucene search in Zend go fairly easy-peasy, and liked the idea of a self-hosted search. Problem…
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OpenID: why is this so complicated?!
So, I set up a Google Profile in the hopes that I could centralize my identity on the intarwubs using this new-fangled OpenID thing. My first target was Yahoo(!). I know, Yahoo is so not cool, but the Charlotte Camarilla LARPs have their mailing lists there. (Side note: I would totally host and maintain forums on a server for them. Mailing lists are so 1998.). I just wanted to start to sign in with my Google info, because I hate making 15 different profiles. Even Facebook Connect would be fine. Turns out I’m stuck using my antiquated Yahoo(!) account for that (and Flickr). Of course, it wants to be my…
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Titles on links: straightening up
A combination of my recent job interview and reading Coding Horror reminded me that I’ve been slack on putting title attributes on my links here on the blagonet. The interview because it touched on accessibility, and Coding Horror because Atwood crosslinks a lot of his posts, but doesn’t give the name of the post in the title tag, which means I end up with 30 open tabs to blog entries that I couldn’t cherry-pick thanks to non-semantic URIs and no titles. I also don’t know which of Atwood’s links are internal or external without checking the URIs. Kinda frustrating. So I reactivated my External Links plugin (which puts that nice…
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Initial story management plugin done
My initial pass at the story management plugin is in place. It doesn’t do the fancy things I want it to do yet, but it can note the root page of a series, output a list of stories in story-date order on that root page, note the arcs, and give Next/Previous links using the actual story names in the individual stories. Not bad for about 3 hours of work. Especially having to code around my elbows in WP. Interesting note: PHP stores timestamps as integers, which means that to get dates beyond the year 2038, I used this nifty little Date class. Dropped in like a charm, doesn’t seem to…