Weekend Construction Update

Feb 042007
 

ScaffoldingWell it’s been a fun weekend spent working on Radical Wacko.  I’ve been wanting to be a bit more active on the site for awhile now, but technology was holding me back.  After a couple of years of tinkering, hacking and patching, the site had become an almost unmaintainable mess.  Even my WordPress installation had started giving me trouble with unexpected plugin errors.  I was scared of making the simplest of updates on the fear that the thing might finally just break down completely.  Additionally, a bunch of legacy code was laying around doing nothing but cluttering up the place.  Therefore, it felt like the perfect opportunity for some real house cleaning.

This design is actually going to take place in a couple of steps.  The first one was to clean out the entire site.  I wanted to simplify the site structure and the technology being used.  The site is now completely powered by WordPress which should make things a lot easier to maintain.  I moved the blog out to the front page and then spent way too many hours going through all 700 posts and cleaning up bad links.  It was a bunch of fun, I can tell you.

The next step will be to design a new theme for the site.  For the time being, I’m using a slightly modified version of the Braille theme which will work pretty good for the time being.  In any case, I’m looking forward to working on the site again.  Let me know what you think . . .

The Era of Flickr is Upon Us

Dec 102005
 

It is always sad when it comes time to kill code that you worked hard to create.  When I first built the galleries here on RadicalWacko, gallery code libraries were cumbersome and services like Flickr were nothing more that a gleam in the eye of some entrepreneurs.  However times change and it’s good to try to keep up with them.  I was spending a large amount of time (something that is in very short supply these days) updating my galleries with new pictures.  The entire system was pretty slick for a custom built job, but still it took to many steps to get stuff published. 

So, I started to look for alternatives.  I found a great plugin for WordPress called FAlbum that will build custom gallery pages from your Flickr library.  I spent an hour this evening messing around with it and now have a system ready to go.  The layout isn’t perfect, but that will have to wait till some of that elusive time stuff becomes availible.  However, I hope you will find the features that have been added more than make up for the less that perfect look.  Please update your links to point to the new galleries and let me know what you think.

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New Stalker Tools

Feb 282005
 

I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.

The other side advantage of the service is that I can now provide you another tool to track this boring computer nerd. You can now see the last 5 tracks that I’ve played on the right hand frame. So for all of you that have way too much spare time, stalk away. BTW, I’m really disturbed by a few of you people who watch the webcam for hours on end. Trust me, nothing exciting will ever happen there. ;)

Update (02/28/2005, 6:00PM): The moment I announce this little change, the feed goes down. I’ll update when the song list is back up and running.

Update (03/01/2005, 5:50 PM): OK, looks the server is back up and running. Enjoy.

Feeds are Back

Feb 172005
 

Thanks to the excellent help of the guys over at WordPress, the feeds are back. Besides this little set back, 1.5 is a great product. The theme system alone is enough to make it worth while. I’m still evaluating looking at a .NET product, such as DasBlog, so that I would be in a better position to edit the system, but for the time being I’m shelving any conversion for the time being.

All problems aside though, if you are a PHP developer, I would highly recommend using WordPress 1.5. It’s a great product.

Blog Issues

Feb 172005
 

Sorry folks, but there are some blog issues I’m working through right now. While the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 seemed to go fine, all of my RSS feeds are returning 404 errors. My php skills are very poor so it may take me awhile to get them back up and running. If I can’t, I’ll have to switch of a .NET blog engine where I can understand the source code. ;)

I hope to have everything back to normal by this weekend.

Google Enters the Comment Spam War

Jan 182005
 

This is kinda amusing to me because my buddy Peter and I were just talking this morning about how it was inevitable that Google would have to weigh in on the comment spam plague. Today they announced on their blog that they will be implementing an “nofollow” tag that will allow you to block links on your site from being used for ranking purposes on Google. The same rule applies to MSN and Yahoo searches. From the blog post:

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

[Via: Google Blog]

All I can say is thank goodness. Maybe it’ll at least slightly reduce the 300+ comment spams this site gets a day, although to keep beating a dead horse, the great product Spam Karma has been blocking them all. I’m also glad to see that my blogging engine, WordPress is already on the case.

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