Category: Site News
Posted by Jay at 3:02 pm
As it turns out, one of the challenges of a shared blog/homepage is the potential for divergent ideas regarding the look and feel. I’ve therefore added a bit of functionality to allow each user to choose from a variety of styles for the site. Just select a style from the list at the top of the navigation column to the right, and as long as you allow cookies, the style will stay with you throughout the site. Though the list of supported styles equals 2 right now, keep a close watch because “Blue & Green” will be released shortly.
Posted by Jay at 1:38 pm
You may have thought Movable Type had shut down my blog… actually, I’ve been working away at porting Theologia to MT. I decided to take the opportunity to finally learn CSS. Which of course made the whole porting activity about 10 times more challenging.
But it’s done now. Let me know if your browser goofs up the new layout.
Posted by Jay at 12:21 pm
I’ve decided to port to Movable Type given it’s ongoing support and recent addition of categories. It doesn’t matter all that much for cogito ergo blog, but my cms is quite central to Theologia and other work I may do. Thus, I’m using my blog as a means of cutting my teeth on MT.
I’ve still got a ways to go on the format, etc. I decided to do this initial port using a default template.
March 22nd, 2002
I’m back
Posted by Jay at 1:42 pm
It looks like the craziness that resulted from the network upgrade has finally come to an end. I’ve got Theologia patched back up, everything’s running smoothly, life is good.
Posted by Jay at 11:04 am
I host hornes.org on Jumpline.com, who recently did a massive upgrade across their entire system. New mail services, new account management, new backbone connectivity, new servers, etc. They did not send out any advance warning… they just did it. The first sign of trouble was when they restored a two-week old view of our content after the upgrade. Then the email woes began, followed by the disk allocation problems, followed by multiple restorations of the site content to various backups, each time wiping out any new content posted.
It has not been pleasant. However, the new services are excellent, and the servers run significantly faster, and the price remains terrific. I have been holding off on any new blog posts since it was likely that they would be wiped out anyway. Hopefully, the pain is behind us.
Posted by Jay at 11:49 pm
Theologia has been ported to Greymatter. I used the opportunity to upgrade the navigation system and make a few changes here and there, but it is largely the same site. The only real change from the normal Greymatter blog was the incorporation of categories with alphabetized listings… I sort of kludged it together with a rather short Perl script and the use of the Extended Text field in the Greymatter entry template.
The upside of all this is that our regular posters (mainly my brother, Mark) can submit their own material. All I have to do is run a script and it’s all there. The next and final step will be to call my script from within the Greymatter code. So hopefully you will start to see more consistent posting of content once everyone gets the hang of it.
Posted by Jay at 11:32 am
For those who care, I am currently in the process of porting Theologia to Greymatter. Why does this (grey)matter? Well, though there are numerous content management systems out there, Greymatter is well supported and, more importantly, my brother and I are both using it already. And it’s free. And it’s Perl. Though I am one of those worthless manager types now, I used to do real work and at one point was fairly proficient at Perl (I even have the clipping from PC Magazine on a short write-up that mentioned a site for which I had written a 10k line Perl engine… not that we went anywhere with it). I can still hack out some Perl if needed, so I prefer my freeware coded in Perl than, say, Python.
Anyway, the benefit to the consumer will hopefully be much more frequent updates to the content. I’m writing a script right now that will present the content alphabetized by title and organized by category. Then I’ll have to go crazy on the templates. And then we launch with a platform that is no longer dependent on me loading my brother’s pre-coded papers, updating each index, and then publishing the changes.
Posted by Jay at 10:43 pm
Okay… I’ve switched over to the Greymatter blog I’ve been putting together behind the scenes. Here’s the caveats: I ported the comments but the dates are goofed up; the comments template is not yet complete… there may be others.
Posted by Jay at 9:50 pm
In case it isn’t obvious, I’m transitioning to a new format. I’ll try to keep it legible while I work out the kinks.
Posted by Jay at 2:10 pm
Okay, everything seems to be in good working order. Comments, archives, it’s all up and running.
Posted by Jay at 11:46 am
I am switching to dotcomments for my feedback. It stores the comments locally, so even if it doesn’t provide an elegant interface, at least I will have some control over the comments. Seems prudent. However, it will probably be a short time until I work out the kinks. Right now, it insists on claiming their are 22 comments against any post that has no comments.
Posted by Jay at 10:17 pm
Reblogger seems to be down… send me an email if it you know it is working and I’ve simply goofed up the code on my page.
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