RadicalWacko February 26th, 2007
Well, I toiled and toiled to make a completely personal design for the new RadicalWacko. It turns out that CSS is a pain with so many tricks, hacks and caveats that it makes me truly wonder about the value of table-less layouts. Take, for example, this “simple” explanation of the so called “Holy Grail Layout“. It almost seems that tables aren’t such a bad thing after all. However, who am I to buck popular opinion?
So, instead of trying to redesign the wheel with simple stone tools, this design is based upon a great fluid layout called FallSeason. In the end I’m glad I started with some expert advice and I’m pretty happy with the results. So, I hope you like it, because I’m not redesigning it again for awhile. ;)
RadicalWacko February 4th, 2007
Well 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 . . .
RadicalWacko February 3rd, 2007
The site will be going down this weekend for a complete redesign. I’ll post again when the upgrade is complete.
RadicalWacko December 10th, 2005
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.
Technorati Tags : Flickr, Galleries, Wordpress
RadicalWacko February 28th, 2005
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.
RadicalWacko December 6th, 2004
As you may have noticed, I’ve released a correction to the background image so that the prominent repeat lines are no longer visible. Thanks to Andy Sheppard for the fix, though I have to say the simplicity of the fix makes me feel real stupid. (See Previous Post)
RadicalWacko November 29th, 2004
One of the other features I forgot to mention that is returning with the new site is real time comments. I had turned on comment moderation when the comment spammers started bombarding my site. In the last couple of weeks, even that has gotten out of hand, with spammers requiring me to clean out over 100 comments a day.
So I started doing some research and found a couple of great plugins called Kitten’s Spam Words and Kitten’s Spaminator both written oddly enough by Kitten of mookitty.co.uk. SpamWords makes it much easier to train Wordpress 1.2+ to block spam messages by allowing you to “mark messages as spam” which adds their email address, IP Address and URL to the blocked word list. The Spaminator combines two spam blocking/retribution concepts (Tar Pit and Three Strikes) to help block spam from even getting into your system and to punish those who try. With the use of these products, I have effectively cut down my total incoming comment spam to 5 moderated messages. None got through the screen to the actual site! Not to mention, by using the SpamWords plugin I will continue to improve the effectiveness of the Spaminator by providing it a better word list to select strikes from.
So if your blogging via WordPress and dealing with the plague that is comment spam, check these two products out. They are the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in this war in quite some time.
[Watching: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]
RadicalWacko November 26th, 2004
Well, the new site is up and for the most part working. I know that I haven’t been updating the site much which is primarily due to an egregious oversight on my part. When I was transferring over to my new laptop, I inadvertently lost all of the source code and custom software for the last version of the site. Besides, the old site had a lot of quirks and was becoming increasingly hard to take care of. So I’ve taken upon myself to design my own site for the first time in a great many years.
I have really paired down this version of the site to its bare necessities. Really, many of the sections on the old website should have been stored in the blog. So I’ve moved all of the old essays and movie reviews over to the blog. I’ve also removed the guestbook which is better served by the comments section on the blog. Finally, I’ve tried to incorporate a design that works in all browsers accurately which the old one was atrociously poor at.
However, I should say that the site is not entirely completed. You won’t see any large number of image galleries showing up because I still have to complete my image resizing and uploading tool. However, it’s a good start.
I want to give thanks to my colleague Jason Zimdars whose website ThinkCage.com filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge of style sheets.
Hope you like the new look. Let me know what you think and come back for some more frequent updates.
RadicalWacko November 24th, 2004
The site will be down intermittantly tonight as I release the new version of RadicalWacko.
RadicalWacko September 8th, 2004
After a very long absence, the webcam is back up and running. More posting soon.
