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Alive Again

Submitted by escoles on Wed, 2006-07-05 23:25

As a phoenix once said: It's not the damage that hurts so much as knowing you'll go through it again.

So, here's the site. Again. I took it down in February because of problems with my hosting provider, and immediately got so busy with my new job that there wasn't time to put it back up again.

Since then, there have been major security flaws revealed in Drupal 4.6; so I knew that I'd have to upgrade the codebase. Fine, that's fine, I thought. No problem.

Well, I've been hacking away off and on at this for about two weeks. Just yesterday morning afternoon, I finally got a clean database update after many and various failures. Still missing a few things (like my old theme and the quotes module), but it shouldn't be too difficult to get that working. The trick will be to do it without screwing up the database. But more on that another time...

I Am Eric's Colophon

Submitted by escoles on Wed, 2004-06-16 10:56

This will be a page to track stuff I plan to change. It's in progress, right now. And almost certainly always will be.

Down In Back

Most dynamic pages at this site are served by Drupal 6.x. I evaluated and played with configuring a bunch of open-source CMS systems and picked Drupal because it was the one that seemed to have the cleanest code and the largest community of the smartest developers.

Drupal can be a bit difficult to configure for usability, though; it's got some nifty usability and information design features like baked-in taxonomy navigation and branch-level syndication feeds, but you have to make a lot of information-design decisions that you don't in simpler CMS systems.

Up In Front

As always, this site is coded with frank disregard for HTML validation or standards. I code what works to get the results I want, and I don't apologize for that. When it stops working, I'll stop coding it that way. It remains my experience that unless you're doing stuff that modifies the DOM in real time, validation is simply not cost effective.

I have been using table-less layouts for several years, though I often wonder why. My experience with them is that while in theory they can be made to do whatever you want without changing the code, in practice that way lies madness. Hence the endlessly precise instructions for how to create "holy grail" layouts or flexible layouts or what have you, most of which end up being very non-optimal from a usability/readability perspective...but as usual, I digress.

I also don't pay any attention to those much-too-detail-oriented types who draw distinctions between different types of dash. I don't have time for that crap. The content is what's important; typographic niceties like the difference between an em and an en dash are irrelevant to English grammar and style. And I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever that the "proper" use of em-dashes, use of right- and left-quotes, or "vertical rhythm" makes any difference in readability for anyone but typography fanatics.

That said, the current version of the site may in fact be running some variant of some module that attempts to filter content and insert "smart" quotes, em-dashes and the like, or may be using a theme that inserts fancy ampersands (e.g., does "&" look fancy to you?), because I sometimes use this site for testing stuff I use to implement other sites. It may in fact be using a Drupal theme that's designed to reproduce "vertical rhythm" (though failing badly at it). (Just for the record, I think "vertical rhythm" is a concept that makes a lot of sense in some very restricted contexts, and is a utter, total, complete waste of time in ordinary content-focused web pages.)

Up And Coming

Short term:

  • More integration with FeralRobots.net.
  • Facebook and Twitter integration.
  • Theme redesign. Again. Always.
  • Restore node-level syndication feeds and notifications. (Lost during the 4.4 to 4.5.1 update. Here I am in 6 and haven't re-configured for that, yet.)
  • Add related links.

Longer term:

  • Integrating Google Calendar.
  • Planning to add some kind of facility for single-story export to another Drupal site, so I can move things around between this site, Feral Robots and my clipboard site.

Sound and Fury in Cyberspace, Part XXXVI

Submitted by escoles on Wed, 2004-04-28 06:56

Apropos of nothing...

One of the things that continually and genuinely amazes me is that those who bring the most heat are often those least equipped to take it in return.

I've been online for... a while. Been in my share -- some would say, more than my share -- of flame wars.

But I haven't been online as long or as much as most. I am not of the digerati, and most likely never will be. (Too much of Groucho in me?) But even in my relatively lowly position in the online pecking order (my great claim to fame is probably that I once spent several weeks in the top-5 karma list at Plastic -- both a fleeting and a dubious honor...but I digress, as usual...) I've learned that if you bring the heat, you need to be prepared to take the heat.

So now I figure out how to do without the title....

Submitted by escoles on Mon, 2004-04-19 21:10

Did I really forget what a time-sink it is to have a website to call "yours"? Each time you want to do something, you have to figure out how to make it happen. You end up spending hours and hours without accomplishing the one thing you originally identified as central.

But Drupal does make me feel a bit like a kid in a candy store. It's even starting to look as though I won't have to entirely roll-my-own on importing old blog entries (though it will be interesting to see how the archive block behaves when confronted with a gap of two years...).

I'm also kind of charmed by the minimalism of this theme. Simple...clean...I'd like a little more, but on the other hand, it's just enough.

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