Ennovy.org

I got Paul/Reedmaniac’s CSS Switcher plugin working. It’s a little cleaner than what I used before. You’ll most likely have to clean out your cookies on this domain because the new cookies are named differently. (I had 16 cookies set on this domain before I deleted them! Not all skin-related, though.)

I’m a bit annoyed at the fact I’ve gotten some spam that contains a screenshot of my site. (They offer to submit my site to search engines). I don’t quite like the idea of someone else keeping a screenshot of my site, especially a spammer.

I installed the Lucida Grande font for Windows today. It’s a Macintosh font. I’ve noticed a lot of sites using it now, before that I only saw the Verdana font. Very cool.

I’ve been trying to reduce my website space usage by deleting and sorting all of my images. I previously dumped my images in one folder, and gave them unrecognizable names such as icon1.gif, image52-a.gif, comment1.gif, comment2.gif, etc. It was very annoying having to load up each image to see what it was and then deciding whether or not I could delete it.

Thus I’ve been trying to find a naming system that I can use to easily identify images. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

As before, most of the images are stored in a folder called “img”. Any of the images placed in the folder are further organized into sub-folders. I have to separate content images and presentation images.

Content images are those images that I use within a weblog post. I usually post them up once and never re-use them anywhere else. All of these images are placed in a sub-folder. Originally I thought of prefixing each image name with the entry ID. For example, if I had a gif image of an apple, and the entry I posted it in had an entry ID of 1230, I’d name the file 1230_apple.gif. So, for every image in the folder, I’d be able to associate the image which post I used it in and what sort of image it was.  I’ve been naming the image this way when I was still using pM Pro. This method had a few drawbacks though. First, I had to figure out what the entry id was before I saved the image. I would make a post, keep it closed, and then make a note of its entry id, and then add the id prefix to the image, and then upload it, and then edit the post with the image name. The second drawback is that the entry id may change. I always thought it would be permanent, but then I switched from pM to EE and the entry ids didn’t end up matching. So now I’ve decided to just prefix the image with the entry date, instead. If I have a gif image of an avatar and I posted it today (June 9), I’d name it 060904_avatar.gif *. Even if I had several posts with several images on the same day it’d be easy enough to associate.

Presentation images are those images I use as part of the weblog. These include images I use in the site layout, images for bullets, and those orange and white RSS feed icons. These are separated again too, to those images that I use frequently and those that are specific to a certain site skin. I also have folders for emoticons, mood themes, and a folder that has images I link to from outside my domain.

One last point which is specific to EE and pMachine. I have the ability to use a variable to specify the image URL. In EE it’s {filedir_1} and in pMachine it’s %%dir[1]%%. If I have an image located at http://www.my-domain.com/img/log/file.gif, and the variable contains http://www.my-domain.com/img/log/. That makes it even easier to change the image location if I had to.

If any of you readers have any further suggestions, please let me know. It’d be neat to see how other people organize their images.

I still have to go back and rename all the content images that I had named using pMachine entry ids, but everything else is all organized now. I’ve deleted a lot of stuff and freed up a lot of space. Also I’m going to make sure that every single time I upload an image to use, I must take the time to give it a meaningful file name and upload it to the right place. If I leave it for another time, then it’s going to build up and I’ll have to spend a lot more time to sort it all out again.

* Edit: Hmmm maybe it’s better to name it 040609 instead so that the year goes first.

This is yet another site update post.

- I’ve finally set up member avatars. There’s a space in your member profile where you can put in the URL to your avatar. (That space has been there for a while, I’ve just never used it.) I’ve set the default size to be 50x50 pixels.
- Changed my mood theme images to my Six Feet Under ones. Their fourth season will start on June 13th, I’ve been waiting for it to start for so long!
- The member pages are kind of messy (especially the AIM and Yahoo popups). I tried getting it to match up with the rest of my site today, but I’ve already given up. There are too many style sheet rules to change. :p

I’ve got a “Now Playing” image running on my site. You can see it here or at its permanent location on my about me page. I’m using the AMIP plug-in for iTunes. I need to play around with the configuration some more. And I need to find a font that’ll display all the special characters. :p

I downloaded the latest build of Expression Engine, and put the uploaded files onto my server, and then for some reason my front page stopped working! I had it set up so I display content from different blogs on the front page, formatted differently depending on which blog it is. The front page will now temporarily just display entries from my main blog until I figure out how to fix it.

Incubus - Warning

The “skins” are working now. All it’s doing is applying a different stylesheet. I’m using this tutorial, which maybe I should have done from the start (would’ve saved me from all that trouble last night).  The downside is that there’s one extra click involved to get back to the main page.

I’ve been trying to get a CSS styleswitcher working on my site. I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble! I’ve tried three.

One worked great when I was offline but not when I tried to implement it on my site.
Another loaded way too slowly.
A third only worked sometimes and it didn’t work on subdomains.

I’m giving up for tonight.

Set up my calendar with overlib popups using Lynda’s excellent instructions. The only thing I don’t like about the calendar is that it’ll display entries posted on all blogs. I use a blog for some static content, so they show up in the calendar even though I don’t want them to. But there’s no way to get around this.

I also used some of the dingbat fonts to make some icons. I love the entire font set, so I might convert some more of them and make some more clickable emotions!

I installed a few plugins today, I’ve listed the ones I used in my about page. I was looking at the source code for the plugins, and wow there’s a lot of talented programmers out there! I could barely follow along with the code.

I did write my own little plugin, nothing too complicated as the others I’m using though. It counts the number of times I’ve used a mood in my posts and displays the top moods. You can see it in action in the sidebar on this page. Right now “geeky” is my most popular mood, I’ve used it 32 times. I knew that would be the top result even before I wrote the plugin, because a lot of my posts are geek-related.

The site where I got gaming wallpapers is not working anymore, but I did find another site which has almost the same thing. The Online Video Game Atlas has these screenshots of games on the Super NES, much like the ones used in the video game wallpapers site. I could easily be able to convert some of those to a wallpaper.

If you are reading this post, I’ve finally converted my blog into using Expression Engine. I’m just so excited that it’s ready! I have most likely made some mistake somewhere, so if you find it, let me know.

A lot of the old content is gone now. There’s still on the server, so if you have the specific URL you can still access them. (Including my pMachine weblog, it’s still at index.php!) I’ll move those pages around soon. My history blog (the one with screenshots from my old sites) is not gone, I haven’t finished it yet. It’s mostly for me anyway so I don’t think anyone will miss it. The thing I’m going to miss the most from my old site though is the skinning option.

But, there’s a brand new look. This main blog, my links blog, and my words blog have all been updated. Notice the similarities? That’s the closest I’m going to get to skinning for now. I did the style sheets in this order - main blog, links blog, words blog. But now I like my words blog layout the best; it’s the simplest one of them all. I’ll give it a few days and see which one I’d like for my main blog layout. (Best viewed in a Mozilla based browser)

Other admin stuff
- I’ve gotten rid of that whole “private entries” thing. These days any “private” posts I have go into my LiveJournal.
- Old members have been successfully imported, so you don’t have to re-register
- Any one can comment on my blog now. I’ll see how that goes, if I have a lot of problems with comments then I’ll make it registration only again.
- RSS feed is now located here

The entry I wrote on converting Expression Engine is extremely long, so I put it in its own post.

Well I am slowly making my way into learning Expression Engine now. For me the learning curve was pretty steep. At first it was increasing at a high increasing rate, but now I’ve got to the point where it’s increasing at a decreasing rate. Once I get to the peak I think I’ll be ok. (I hope I’m making sense, I’m trying to talk math but haven’t taken any math/calculus course for three years, and I forget that kind of stuff really fast).

I got a reply from my email about donating something to pMachine. Here’s what they said:

Thanks, that’s very sweet of you, but you don’t have to do that.  It’s
our gift.  We’re getting lots of positive comments in people’s blogs so
we’ll benefit as more people hear about EE.  I appreciate your offer
but we’re happy just knowing you like it.

Hmm. That sucks, because I was prepared to give something back, but I guess what I can do now is give positive comments about EE in my blog.

I imported all of my pMachine entries into EE last night. Which was not a good move, because I think it’ll be a few days before I move to EE officially. I’ll have to move these last few entries over manually.

I wrote down some of my thoughts into a file as I was going about doing the importing and tweaking etc. It’s getting quite long already. I think when I’m done I’ll post it. I know a few months ago when I got the trial version I said I’d write up a review, and although I started that, I never got around to finishing it. So this time around I’ll be able to post something.

OK, the new (and improved!) version of my Portal is up and running. I got to say, the magpie rss parser is really easy to use. What I had problems with was not using it, but writing up the database backend for loading feeds, categories, blogrolls, etc.

I tried to implement a blogroll type thing, where I’d check the publish date on each site’s rss feed and be able to tell which one sites had recently updated. The cookbook on their site even had some code for that. But I didn’t get too far, because there were too many differences in the way that the date is presented (e.g. this and this). I don’t think it’s worth it (for me) to figure it out ... or is it? I’ll think about that some more.

I learned a bit more of php and mysql from this project. For example, I didn’t even know about the implode function before this - I wrote my own function doing the exact same thing. I also learned I have still got problems figuring out regular expressions, so I avoided them entirely. So, although my little portal is nothing near scripts like feed on feeds it does what I need it to do and it was a good learning experience.

Oh and one last thing, it sucks that MySQL doesn’t offer support for foreign keys except for InnoDB.

A couple of things I should have up here soon:

- Photos. I took some photos of my bedroom with my dad’s camera. (Doesn’t sound too exciting, but I’ll talk about it some more in another post.) The thing is, I’m still debating how to post them. I’m thinking of a) setting up another weblog/photolog using pMachine, b) singapore again, c) photostack or d) posting them in this main blog.
- Portal. I said that I’d revamp it, and it’s 95% finished. Just some more testing/styling to do.
- Blatherskite. I’m going to have to redo this entirely so that it’ll become more of a linklog than a weblog, if that makes any sense. I’m getting tired of the way I have it set up right now.

And that’s it for now! I feel kind of silly now posting updates on what I’m going to be posting pretty soon, but .... I’ve written it already.