Yay! Blog! v1.0
Category: Blogging n Web Stuff

I've been working on a new blog layout. Maybe it will be ready for an unveiling on New Year's Day!

I'm going to archive this blog and start fresh.

And for those of you who might be worried... the new blog will still have the cute LilyDawg banner!

I'm getting the bug to change the layout of my blog. Make. It. Stop.

I use Internet Explorer 6 most of the time. There's a weird little bug in it that doesn't happen for all people all the time that renders completely transparent gifs as broken images. Some websites use transparent gifs as spacers, and the bug really makes those sites look crappy. That's what happens at work. I have the start page set to our agency intranet, and it's just a mass of broken transparent gifs. Yuck.

I finally got so sick of it, that I downloaded Mozilla Firebird. Cool! I love it!

Some people praise the tabs, but that's not really why I like it. Until I really remember I'm tabbing instead of having several browser windows open, I'm inclined to close a window and lose all the sites I've "tabbed."

Anyway... I just like it 'cos, ummm, it *feels* cool. Or something.

UPDATE: I guess I have some kind of spyware/adware on my computer that targets Mozilla Firebird because every once in a while, it redirects to an advertisement. Even when I'm not surfing the internet... just testing a java servlet on my internal development server. I can't tell you how much that makes my blood boil.

I disabled anonymous commenting on all my blogs. I don't know why I never did it before... it's just asking for trouble. I got another insulting comment on Yay! Movies! where someone called me a Schmuck and got sarcastic with me. Must not be enough manners to go around, ya know? The sad thing is, he/she actually had some interesting input. It's just lost amid the childishness.

I also got quite a few spam comments on Yay! It's Pictures!, so I'm trying out MTBlacklist to blacklist spammers. I hope it works well.

I tried to install two different solutions for the blog comment spam problem. If you're not aware of it, spammers have now figured out how to use robots to spam comments in blogs. Effin' Scum.

The first solution I tried makes commenters enter a security code that's generated as a graphic on the comment entry page. Robots can't see the graphic, so they can't post. It no worky for me.

The second solution was a thing where you can train your blog to recognize spam and not allow it. I would have rather used to the first solution, but this was my backup plan. It no worky for me either.

My main job at work right now is programming. I sit and debug programs all day long. I just don't feel like spending the whole weekend doing the same thing. Maybe I can find another solution. But right now, I just want to eat some leftover chinese and watch TV.

I gotta toot my own horn! This weekend while I was watching my favorite football teams get slaughtered, I decided to do some java programming. I developed a little servlet to grade our web-based training exams at work.

Currently, the training exam grading process goes like this:

1. Carolyn receives an email with the student's answers.
2. She grades the exam.
3. She emails the student to tell them how they did.
4. If they passed, she creates a certificate of completion in MS Word.
5. She faxes the certificate to the student.
6. She files the certificate and confirmation.

After I put the program into production, the process will go like this:

1. Student submits the exam and is taken to a webpage with a printable certificate of completion if he/she passed or feedback on what he/she missed if not.
2. Information about the exam is timestamped and stored in a flat file.
3. Carolyn does nothing.

Woo-Hoo!! How's that for labor saving automation?!

I updated my RSS Feeds again once I figured out how to make the macros work. They're way way more awesome because the Blog feed now includes comments, the Song feed now includes all the streaming links for the songs, and the Pictures feed actually includes the pictures!! What a deal!!

You've got to use the RSS 2.0 feed to get the most out of all of them. I don't know why there are two versions. If someone else knows, please leave a comment.

Blog:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Songs:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Pictures:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Thanks to:
Jennifer
Kymberlie
Christine
Brad

BTW... Everything validates, but if you try the feeds out and see something screwy, will you let me know?

Okay... for all you power users of RSS, I've set up full text XML feeds for all three of my blogs. Thanks to Christine and Lisa the Unix Gal. Dang... I'm getting so nerdy. If you come here for less technical stuff, don't run off... I'll be back to my normal self soon. You know... when technology slows down a bit (yeah right!).

Anyway... I tried out the feeds in Newzcrawler. The XML for my picture blog works, but because I use a Brad Choate MTMacro to display the picture, the pictures don't up. *sigh* I think I'll just leave it the way it is, though. Maybe people will subscribe to the text and come visit if I write an intriguing description. hah!

The songs XML feeds are awesome!! They show credits, download links (if available) and lyrics. They drop the streaming links off, though. I'm running those through macros, but I figure people using the news crawler to watch for updates will be visiting the website itself anyway. I hope.

Alrighty... tomorrow I get back to being a different kind of artist... recording!

Here are the XML feeds if you're interested:

Blog:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Songs:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Pictures:
RSS 1.0: - validate
RSS 2.0: - validate

Thanks to tima thinking outloud for making a Moveable Type script that will rebuild a selected template without me having to go in and click buttons. I set up a cron job on my server to run the mt-rebuild script to update the Featured Songs of the Day in the middle of the night.

Woo-Hoo!

There's more stuff on the tima site that I need to check out. But first, I'm going to have a Coke float with chocolate ice cream!

I've been getting a lot of traffic here lately. The John Cusack Fan Club linked to my John Cusack movies page. That's way cool. I've got some more John Cusack movies to watch and write lame stuff about, but I've been sidetracked by the Dune mini-serieses (is that the plural of series?) and the "Kolchak: The Nightstalker" marathons.

And on a stranger note, my blog was assigned reading for Barclay Barrios' Cyber-Lit class at Rutgers University on April 1. (Hello students! How are things in Jersey?) Wil Wheaton's blog and Jason's Blog were also assigned. I've known about this for a long time due to my vast intelligence network website referral log, but I kinda wanted to put it out of my mind. Such pressure, you know!

Anyhoo... Could this be my 15 minutes of fame?

Things I dislike about some blogs I started to write this yesterday and it was just a big ball of negativity, so I deleted it. But it's still bugging me, so I think I need to get it out. I hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings if they do these things, but really... it's not about you, it's about me and what I dislike about some blogs.

I don't like it...

• when the posts are stuck in a tiny i-frame... It makes me feel claustrophobic. Why have a blog and stick the content into a little tiny window?
• when the focal point of the cursor changes when you pass it over a link... like an upside down arrow (focal point changes from top left of the cursor to bottom right) or a cross (changes from top left to center) or whatever. I don't think I mind a cursor being something other than the pointy hand. It's when the focal point changes that I get discombobulated.
• when cursors have a lot of stuff floating around them... I had some colorful stars following my cursor around on some of my webpages for a while. But it got old quick. Those giant clocks are the most annoying of all. Brilliant programming... annoying implementation.

I've been working my butt of this weekend with the conversion to Moveable Type! I assigned Titles and Categories to over 400 entries in Yay! It's a Blog! from the time I got up yesterday to the time I forced myself away from the computer last night. But it was worth it because now you can browse the blog by category.

I tell ya... it's hard to assign categories! And it made me realize how much this blog has changed since I started it last April. I started it to document things going on with my music. Like when a song got featured somewhere or was high on a chart. Stuff that I'm sure is not of much interest to anyone but me. But then I started talking about stuff going on in my life. Like about my puppy dog and the movies I'm watching and whatever else pops in my head. It's fun to see the evolution.

I also added a feature that posts the titles of the last 5 posts on my homepage. See! Is that cool or what? I couldn't do that with Blogger very easily.

I still have a long way to go transferring the comments from the old system to this system. I've transferred everything over up to October.

The coolest thing I installed was MTMacro. That's what generates the smilies in my posts and in the comments. It also makes some of the other things I do over and over a lot easier to deal with. Like when I want to link to my picture blog, all I have to do is type those three words (my picture blog) run together and it creates a link that looks like this: my picture blog. I don't have to put in the "a href" code or the URL. Just the three words run together.

I want to do a lot more of the MTMacro stuff, but I'm not sure how much is too much. I'm afraid it might bog things down. We'll see....

Alrighty! Yay! It's a Blog is now driven by Moveable Type. Whew! I found a few bugs in the transfer, but I'll work on those over the next few weeks. I'll also be transferring the comments over from the old comment providers.

Does everything look okay? Are you comfortable with the change?

I'm excited because I can do smilies real easy in my posts. See....



Woo-Hoo!

There are exciting things happening here at Yay! It's a Blog. I've successfully installed Moveable Type on the ssmrocks server and will begin transferring to the new publishing engine soon. What will it mean to you, my faithful readers?

• All comments will disappear until I manually move them over
• New comments will be more stable
• Entries will be archived by category (and date!)
• Okay... I can't think of anything else

Mostly it will make my life easier. Instead of being dependent on Blogger, Haloscan, BlogExtra and my webhost. I'll only be dependent on my webhost. My brain is reeling at the new opportunities. Macros and syndication and all those MT Template tags that I don't know how to use but must be good for something cool. I'm experiencing WEB GEEK OVERLOAD!! Mwuhahahahahahha! Anyway... I've already moved my picture blog over to Moveable Type. It's working good. My favorite thing about it is that I can archive the pictures by category now. I think I'll geek out playing with that one for a while, so I can figure out all the wrong things to do before I attempt to move Yay! It's a Blog over.

I just read over at Peppermint Tina's place that Google bought out Pyra (the people who own Blogger). My first reaction was simply "Hmmm... I hope it doesn't change things too much. Unless it makes things better. That would be cool." My second thought was, "Sheesh... I hope I don't have to witness a bunch of long drawn out temper tantrums from bloggers like I witness from artists everytime an online music distributor changes something." But maybe bloggers are more mature than those artists. I think they are. At least the ones who I follow are.

I had to laugh... I was clicking my random blog link and found a blog that was talking about blogging rules, A-list blogs and B-list blogs. It discussed how B-list bloggers will try to conform to A-list blog rules even though they still might not get included in the A-list, blah blah blah.

For me, there are no A-list blogs and B-list blogs. There are only blogs I like, blogs I don't like, and blogs in between (take them or leave them). You can bet that the blog that was talking about A-lists and B-lists fall into the "blogs I don't like" category. hah!

I've been clicking the Random Blog link today. It's interesting to see all kindsa different things. I even clicked and found my picture blog. I found some blogs in different languages. And some were in English, but I couldn't understand a word!

I've been working on a new website for Raspberry Silk this week. I've got it finished. Well... as finished as any website ever is. ha! I'm sure I'll be tweaking it forever and a day. But the basic stuff is there. I also updated the MP3.com page to match the design. I haven't really wanted to work on it since Milo quit the band and handed it all over to me. But I learned some new stuff about style sheets recently and figured it was the best thing to practice with. It was a blank slate as far as design, and most of the content was already there, so that made it fun. Please check out the Raspberry Silk Homepage.

I've been having a hard time with my blog today. I mean from a technical standpoint. The template got screwed up twice. I suspect it's because of the Netscape I downloaded. Grrrrrrr....... I've been avoiding Netscape. But my old Netscape at work quit working, so I decided to upgrade it. Since I do html coding, I need to test in different browsers. I haven't been doing that at home because, well.. I guess I'm just a rebel or something.

Anyway... Netscape is very unforgiving when it comes to sloppy html coding or a server that's not set up correctly with it's MIME types or whatever. There are purists who believe that Netscape is better because of that. It forces people to code things perfectly. I would usually be in that camp... who wants slop? But Cripes... html isn't just for professionals anymore... it's for everyday people. With Internet Explorer, a simple little error in the code is okay. With Netscape, a simple error can screw up everything! Like in a stylesheet, you're supposed to use a colon. I accidently used an equal sign for my link colors. That works in Explorer, but not in Netscape.

So what is it that Explorer does that makes things work that don't work in Netscape. And why doesn't Netscape do that, too? Sheesh. Loosen up!

Anyway... I'm pretty sure I opened my blog template in Netscape first thing this morning and that screwed it up. It actually deleted bits of code! I got it all fixed again and not realizing that Netscape did it, I opened the template again later. Same thing! It deleted the same code that it had deleted earlier. So there's some systematic thing that happens with Netscape. I'm not opening it in Netscape again. Stupid Netscape.

What's Your Soup Name? Mine's Kim "Cheesy French Onion" Novak.

I got a new job recently. I'm a Java programming apprentice. I'll be doing other web-related stuff, too, but right now I'm concentrating on learning Java. Today I made my first java applet that actually worked. Please try it out: My First Java Applet. I also have a cool fireworks applet that I didn't code, but I put it on my site: Fireworks.

Here's one of my favorite websites. Wil Wheaton's personal website. He's a funny guy. I always liked Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Stand By Me was an awesome movie. He's was pretty serious in those shows. He's not nearly as serious in real life.