Recent Entries in Movable Type

Taking all my Zuckervati blogs and merging them up in the dot-com domain. Hopefully, this will make it a bit easier for me and for anyone trying to navigate the pages.

Here is some text... Working on merging the various blogs together into one mega-blog with an easy URL.

Here's a picture:

Here's some text in a blockquote:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin hendrerit turpis id sapien blandit malesuada. Morbi massa nunc, eleifend sed ullamcorper ut, consequat scelerisque sapien. Aliquam pharetra mi vitae metus lacinia quis varius nisi tristique. Integer nec dolor sed eros bibendum euismod. Donec nec augue at risus placerat condimentum eu ut massa. Phasellus sit amet libero ut ante facilisis dictum vel eu lacus.

Just trying on a few new styles. Sprucing up the old place, so to speak.

And here's a picture of a keyboard to prove it.

Seriously, though. I suck at blogging these days.

Trying to get the moblogging operational again. This was a fun part of the blog.

Had to replace the cd-rom drive, but otherwise, it's totally schway.

Had a massive motherboard failure on my box, which was essentially a desktop machine crammed into a 4-u rack mount chassis. I originally thought the power supply was dead, but when I replaced the unit, the machine still wouldn't start. Turned out the board was completely fried, though not the fault of the hosting provider, I assume, despite the fact that a number of servers in the same cabinet are stricken with a tendency to all crash simultaneously.

So, to keep the site up, at least in a zombie state (with no updates since December), I piggy-backed the whole shebang on another nearby server which has had no crashes in the last year.

I've also found another, this time more professional, server: a gently-used IBM x345 box with several built-in redundancies, which should keep the websites going fine.

I'm still working through some configuration twists and turns, but we should be back to normal in a little while.

I've been online for better than 10 years now, so it's safe to assume I'm here for the foreseeable future.

No beard, no 'mo. Just my usual handsome self.

This reCAPTCHA code is getting harder and harder to fill in. Found this in my comments section.

So .... does it want me to solve for x?

Found another probem with the Post Office plugin for Movable Type: you can't include any kind of punctuation characters in the subject line of your email message/entry title, otherwise it will munge the image file name that goes along with it.

Granted, the Post Office plugin isn't to blame for this, since it won't rename the image at all; this was functionality I had to add in later. So, really, it's my own fault.

Well, it's fixed now. Weird chars are replaced with underscores.

Now that I have the old-timey image thing tuned, let's try making it look like a Polaroid picture.

I miss Polaroids.

Trying to reduce the image size and geometry from 580k and 2048x1536 to under 100k and no bigger than 500x500.

More testing of sending an image through the Post Office plugin for
Movable Type. Trying to resize the picture and make it look like an old
photo.

Testing sending an image through the Post Office plugin for Movable Type.
Renaming the image to the message subject line/entry title, and adding a
.png extension.

Testing again, this time with the homegrown script.

Testing out a post-via-email plugin.

I've been using the MT-Twitter plugin for a while now, so that when updating the MissingLinks page, a corresponding twitter posting is made. It used to be using bit.ly to shorten the URLs (prior to the big server crash, I was using icanhaz.com, but lost all my code when the RAID controller on the server failed). Sometime in mid-November, the bit.ly URLs just disappeared, making me thing something went wrong on twitter's API. Either that, or something went wrong on my server, which I hadn't even touched that month.

So, I looked around for some suitable Perl code to re-introduce the bit.ly API calls that mysteriously went missing. The answer was a chunk of code from openclue.org (now apparently defunct). I'm reposting it here, so it might help someone out (myself included -- I'm backing stuff up properly now).

The twitter.pl script just needs a few extra lines. I inserted this code just after the "my $intro" line in the _update_twitter function:

my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url_response =
    $bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
my $small_url;
if($url_response->is_success) {
   $small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
   $small_url = $obj->permalink;
}

Then you have to update the part of the script which creates the twitter message. Replace the original $text string with the $small_url string:

# my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $obj->permalink;
my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $small_url;

Presumably, you can use any URL shortener API you want -- just insert the proper API call. Or, if you're enterprising, make your own URL shortener. That way, you own all the links.

Someone even came up with an idea to use .htaccess 301 redirects to bounce a link ending with <mt:EntryID> to the proper <$mt:EntryLink$>. Of course, this really only works if your domain name is short to begin with.

Having the worst time with stylesheets today. I don't know what I did, but I did some adjustments while fine-tuning the new blog layout, and I made a mess of the whole thing. Well, only on Opera and Firefox; IE seems to think everything's fine.

I'm using the Movable Type wtt (wide, thin, thin) column layout, and the two right columns, the primary and secondary sidebars, are dropping to the bottom of the page, below the end of the wide column. Normally, this means that the width of the page isn't wide enough for the columns, but that's not the problem today. I've been over every line of stylesheet, and can't seem to sort it out properly. I've got two examples of the exact same page -- it's fine before I rebuild it, and it's broken after I rebuild. Should be easy to sort out, no? Well, it's going to take some time, but I want to be sure it's working before I try to rebuild the entire site.

And why is IE working, anyway? It's probably because it violates so many CSS standards, that it doesn't even notice the problem. Oh, and what's worse ... it's only with the MissingLinks page. The BlogZucker pages appear to be fine. That may help narrow down the problem, since it's the same stylesheet on both blogs. Maybe it's not a stylesheet problem, per se.

(sigh) Just be sure to use IE when viewing this site for the next little while. It should look ok.

Going to run some tests with Chrome and Safari, and see if they're also broken.

Update: Turns out there was an extra <div> tag in my comments template. One of the things about MT4.x is that you don't create a page template anymore ... you create a wrapper template, which then includes perhaps dozens of smaller module templates. I had to load the page in a browser, count the number of <div> tags, and make sure they all had matching closing tags. Then I had to go into each module and figure out where the extra tag was.

Glad that's fixed now.

Just checking to see if this pops up in twitter. Lost all of my proprietary link-building code from the old machine. (sigh).

Testing MT upgrade with flickr - Uploaded by Zuckervati.

Huh. Nope. Pretty sure this is actually working.