Voder-Vocoder

New phone number as of now:

239-313-9375

I moved my blog over to WordPress, which I have been meaning to do for years. It’s finally come along to the point where it is fairly usable.

Update. I’ve put a lot of effort into writing a decent Wordpress theme for this site. I’m debating releasing this theme back to the community, versus keeping it all to myself.

Yesterday I worked on the comments page. The layout is somewhat reminiscent of the Livejournal comments layout. I am making use of Gravatars for user icons. So if you make a comment and want a fancy icon, be sure to use the same email as you use for your Gravatar account. For those worried about spam-bots harvesting your email from my comments page, don’t worry: the Gravatar icon encodes you email in a MD5 one-way function.

I also went through all 614 imported posts and validated the HTML and verified that the import didn’t screw up the post too much. That took a long time, but it was necessary. I think I had a lot of invalid HTML out there before the import.

I also wrote a .htaccess file to redirect every one of my old archive pages to the new archive pages. This was necessary because I intend permanent links to be permanent.

Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:03:42 -0500

Hello,

Effective immediately, I will be using h3 at halcanary dot org as my
primary email address. Please update your address books accordingly.
Thank you.

On a personal note to those I haven’t talked to in a while, my life is
as boring as ever. There are many of you I have not heard from in
some time. You know how to find me.

–
Hal Canary
608-347-5844
http://halcanary.org/

How to find me on the five big instant messaging protocols:

jabber: halcanary@jabber.org

aim: halwcanary

icq: 19505175

yahoo: halcanary

msn: halhalhalhalhalhal@hotmail.com

WARNING: Metablogging is always stupid. Do not continue reading this post.

Reasons to contiue using movable type:

1. Already installed and working
2. Does everything I want it to.
3. Like its template system.

Reasons to dump movable type:

1. Free as in beer (v2.64), not as in speech.
2. Version 2.x no longer supported. Version 3.x not free. (I fell for the BitKeeper Trap!)
3. Comment Spam issue.
4. Do I really need a forsaken database? It complicates backup. I’d rather have a load of flat files tied together with php scripts.

You may or may not have noticed that I have started cross-posting a subset of the WoHC Log to Livejournal. There are a lot of people who simply refuse to read or comment on a post that isn’t on Lj. Some of these people are my friends. I guess that’s why I have gaim set up for four different accounts on four different instant messaging protocols (jabber/icq/aim/yahoo).

Some topics will not be cross-posted. In general, the more geeky a subject is, the less likely it is to be cross-posted.

I’m going to stop blohgging first thing in the morning. It tends to be too weird. And incomprehensible.

To make Movabletype’s RSS-feed work the way mine does, replace

<description>
<$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1" $>
</description>

with

<description>
<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1" $>
</description>

Here are the templates used by this site.

I went through and made a bunch of changes to wohc this weekend. First, I finally switched over to movable type. Then I marked all code on the site with a suitable license. Then I added a FAQ and site map.

Wonderfully wasted time.

By the way, any of my friends who want to use this space to blog are welcome. One caveat, though: I’m not hosting any static files.

I’m also going to streamline [s]ome of the back-engine of the site, too. Stop using cookies+ecmascript to do the stylesheet changes, instead just specify a few alternate stylesheets. I’ve already moved the blog submission form to a htaccess-controlled directory.

Here’s my rss feed. It seems to be working. I don’t know if anyone else would even want to use it, but I will probably use this data to make a blog summary page.