Media Blog

I started this blog many years ago for posting random things I came across or thought about.  I don’t really feel the need to be so choppy and random anymore and I’m sure you could tell by my lack of updates that the time for this blog was coming to an end.

I’ve started a Media Blog which will focus on TV, Books and Movies to start with.  I may eventually add magazines, music and podcasts to the list.

Everything’s basically set up, although I still have some work to do.  If you find anything’s not functional, let me know and I’ll try to correct it.

Upgrade to EE 1.4

I recently upgraded to EE 1.4 and it may be a while before I’m able to address any issues the upgrade may have caused.  My last upgrade went pretty smoothly, so I’m hoping this one will too.  This latest version has some very interesting features which I hope will help make my site a bit more efficient, and faster.

Blogathon!

Y’all, today is Blogathon!  I will be participating in a group blog with the Dream Team blogging for Doctors Without Borders, be sure to check it out!  Dreama will also be doing a Blogathon radio in the wee hours of the morning, but I’m a bit dense and don’t remember where to go for that.

Also be sure to check out Heather and Erin throughout the day along with anyone else who you know is participating.  Support them with your comments and company.  The worst thing about Blogathon is being all alone.

Avatars are Cool

I finally got around to incorporating avatars in the comments.  EE 1.3 has a ton of cool features such as avatars, signatures and private messages.  If you want, please add an avatar or choose one from the library (which is the default set and very small at the moment).  The maximum avatar size is 100 x 100, same as LJ icons.  Since I love LJ icons, I’ll probably take some from there (creating a credits page of course) to use in sets for avatar choices here.

I’ve left a comment on this post so you can see how it looks.  Update your profile and then let me know what you think!

About Blogathon

I’m very excited to announce that I will be participating in Blogathon this year as part of a group effort.  We’re blogging for Doctors Without Borders (more info...)

If you’d like to sponsor us, please make a pledge on the Blogathon site.  You’ll make the payment directy to Doctors Without Borders after the Blogathon, August 6th.  Information about how to make the payment will be e-mailed to you - it should be pretty simple.

I’ll post this again the day of blogathon: Here’s where we’ll be blogging.

Little Bitty Break

I’m probably going to take the week off posting here or in my journal.  This goes for Big Brother related entries as well, which I may eventually move to its own page otherwise the blog is going to become a Big Brother blog (not that I really care).

I just don’t feel too much like writing lately. 

Aggravation!

I’m trying to fiddle around with Ajax to create a “spoiler” option where you have to click to get spoiler information.  I could use other methods of javascript to do this, but why not fiddle around with a new toy?

I’m trying to employ this Rico Accordion method, but it’s quickly becoming very irritating.

I stripped everything down to its simplest elements.  I copied the prototype.js and rico.js to my server and linked to it appropriately in the page header.  I copied the code exactly as it displays on the demo page.

And yet still, it DOESN’T WORK.  On the very off chance that any of my readers are familiar with Ajax, what the HELL am I doing wrong?  The piss poor documentation over at Rico is really frustrating.

Blog Explosion Links: 07/07/05

It’s time for another round of collected links!  As always, check out the full list of previously linked blog here.

All blog linked include the description they’ve entered on BlogExplosion.

• Stupid Beautiful Lies - “An outlet for a twenty-something musician hidden deep inside Canada. Upon the sudden discovery of a clock-hand and what seems to be the intent of continuous motion, this easily frightened “artist” now sheds permanent daylight on the gears inside his head."
• Diner Bitch - “Jersey girl, twentysomething, cynicism and sarcasm are my friends."
• Recipes - “A place to store some of the recipes I like. Some are from my grandmother, and my mother. These are amish -mash of Greek recipes, those (whichever ethnicity) from scratch, and some using shortcuts (like prepared items and canned goods)."
• Bryanboy: Le Superstar Fabuleux - “Adventures of the new-moneyed classless bitch from hell. Shopping. Clubbing. Travelling. Verbal Diarrhea. Vulgarity at its finest."
• The Matthew Never Knew - “ The Matthew Never Knew blog allows you to know Matthew at a level you never knew before. 94!” (Editor’s note: Previously mentioned in Battle of the Blogs is Rigged)
• Pratie Place - “Great molasses explosion of 1919; mariachi music; Yiddish expressions; Iz and his baritone ukulele; Tyler Thompson sings Chinese opera; hospital dieticians who give salisbury steaks covered with ikky brown gravy to children; the ‘Stalin World’ theme park."
• Kat’s Thunk Chunks - “...and other petty crap. Full of a whole lot of nothing with a sprinkle of something thrown in for extra flavor. See if you can follow along on my rabbit trails. Life is all about the journey, not the destination. What odd thought have I had today?"
• Bubblehead - “Prepare to dive… “
• Fashionable Chaos - “Meet Penny Pressed, InternetSuperheroine , specializing in fighting crimes against humanity, fashion and upholstery. Her powers: capturing hearts, erasing permanent stains, and neglecting to mention time served at a university started by a televangelist."
• Wooden Fish - “A personal blog with beautifully written entries ranging from personal life to current events, movie reviews to politics, prose to technology news, and many other areas. From time to time, it also offers cool wallpapers for download. I hope you like it."

In case I’ve never mentioned it before, here’s how I gather links to share with y’all:  Whenever I have a moment to surf around BlogExplosion, I will.  When I see a link I like, I blogmark it for later posting on this site.  When I’m ready to make a post like this, I go to my blogmarks and select, “Show unused blogmarks only”.  I look through my list and click on the sites I want to share at the time of the post.  Blogmarks are kept in the order they’re blogmarked so I’ll usually follow that order, but sometimes there are gems I want to share ASAP. Once I click on the site, it will no longer show up when I click on “Show unusedblogmarks only” so I’ll have an easy way of knowing which sites I’ve posted and which are still waiting.  I don’t use the blogmarks for any other reason.

I really need to make these posts more frequent because I still have 30 blogmarks I haven’t shared with you and the list is just going to keep growing! 

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I really love BlogExplosion. There are a few crap sites floating around out there, but I’ve found some of the most remarkable content through this system! :D

More on EE 1.3

I still haven’t gotten to play around much with the newest version of Expression Engine (I plan to add avatars to comments soon) but I did want to comment on a few little things.

This upgrade has been the most painless upgrade I’ve experienced so far with EE!  They did beta testing a little differently this time around and either that method worked much, much better or they simply had fewer bugs.  Normally I have to struggle with fixing something after an upgrade, but this time - not a single problem!

I’ve tried out the spell checker fairly extensively with journal entries and it rocks my socks off!  I don’t know how they worked their magic voodoo so well, but it’s the best spell checking system I’ve seen since Google.  In fact, it’s very much like Google.  I’d like if the questionable words were a little more apparent (they’re simply underlined with a dotted red line) but I suspect there’s some CSS I can tweak somewhere to get it to appear bold and red if I want.  Is this the first blogging CMS with spell checking built in?

There have been reports that my Amazon API plugin is borked with some changes they’ve made.  Paul wrote to me and said he thinks he fixed the problem and uploaded a new zip file to the plugin site, so if you’re having problems with that, go to download the version on the plugin site and see if that fixes it. 

Personally, I’ve abandoned the plugin since it made it take WAY too long to load my pages and I didn’t have the time or patience (or knowledge) to figure out how to fix that.  The only thing I really care about getting from Amazon is the image and referral link which I can easily do using just the ASIN/ISBN.  It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever be updating the Amazon API again.  Luckily, there’s a version for PHP 5 so maybe everyone can eventually switch to that. 

I’m thinking of writing a few EE tutorials for the site, if only to keep track of a few things I’ve done here.  Is there anything you see I’ve done that you’re interested in knowing how to do?  Let me know and I’ll write a tutorial for it!

Upgrade to EE 1.3

I just upgraded to EE version 1.3, but I probably won’t have any time to work on problems if there are any until Tuesday.  So please let me know if you run across something that’s working a little wonky.

I know the smiley options are a little weird right now.  I always forget I should not replace the emoticons.php file.  Blah!

Blog Explosion Links: 06/25/05

It’s time for another round of collected links!  As always, check out the full list of previously linked blogs here.

All blogs linked include the description they’ve entered on BlogExplosion.

• Mrs. Mogul - “A New York gal’s daily account of keeping sane while living in London. Tea or Coffee? “

• 63 Days - “My adventures into the Utah desert as a teenager were just that. An adventure. Read on. “

• The Message Whore - “Ever wonder what all those products labeled “NEW!” or “Improved” are actually like? Well let us waste our money before you and find out. Reviews done several times a week (if we are not napping) and usually contain bleeding edge food and consumer goods.”

• Three Angels Gormet - “Daily food tips, product news, and food related articles from the Three Angels Gourmet Co., makers of ‘heavenly gourmet mixes’”

• Game Coder - “Brand Gamblin - former video game programmer - shares his views on gaming yesterday, today, and in the future. “

BlogExplosion also added two new features this week, Member Directories and The Podcast Directory.  So far, it looks like only a few casts are listed, but this directory makes finding and listening to a podcast SO VERY EASY!  I only hope more people with casts use the directory.

This is why I love technology

Remember when publishing a story on the internet took not only the time to actually write, but also code and upload that file via FTP?  And don’t forget updating the previous entry, archive and index with links to the new entry.  Wow.  I really just wouldn’t have the patience for that today and bless the people who do still handcode all their entries.

Remember when new designs involved re-coding tens of pages or potentially hundreds of pages if you wanted to redesign your entire archives?

Remember when Server Side Includes were the new, cool technology enabling you to dynamically insert chunks of code into your webpages? 

Ahhhh, how far the internet has come!  No wonder everyone and his pet donkey has a blog nowadays - it’s so absurdly easy compared to when we started our web presence.

I just made a change to all the titles on my individual blog entries.  A change that would have been ridiculous to even consider back in the day because who wants to open each and every file, make the change, save the file and upload it to the server?  A change that would have probably taken days to execute if I had to update each blog entry.

It took me two seconds.

This is why I love technology.

Battle of the Blogs is Rigged

Okay, there’s just something very odd about BlogExplosion‘s newest game, Battle of the Blogs.  I think there must be some way to rig it or something.  I’m not really bothered that absolutely everyone beats my blog.

I am sort of bothered that this one beat my blog with at least 5 votes.  They had 5 votes before I even had one.

(Note: I actually like his blog and have it blogmarked.  His design is a little 1996 though and with the quick voting you need to do in BotB, there’s not much time to absorb content)

Should Be Faster

I hope this doesn’t cause any problems, but I started caching a lot of information on this site: the sidebars, the header and footer and the stylesheet.  Doing so seems to have cut loading times down to 2-3 seconds instead of the 5-7 seconds it was averaging before.  Let me know if you experience any weird problems.

Also, I took another look at my design in IE and the sidebar was appearing all the way down at the bottom.  Sigh.  IE is a thorn in my side!  Why do you people keep using that piece of crap!

I reduced the width of the right sidebar by one pixel and it seems to have fixed the problem without causing additional problems in Firefox, so I’ll just hope that fixes the problem.

Blog Explosion Links: 06/12/05

Here’s some more links because there is just so much cool stuff out there!  I so highly worth checking out these quality sites:

• The Writer’s Buzz - “The place to promote your blogs, novels, poems, etc. Informative articles on writing, marketing, ebooks, infoproducts, etc. Become a member and promote all of your writing today!"
• What A Long Strange Trip it Has Been - “History Of Lingerie & Bra Sizing and Resolving Bra Fitting Problems & History of Corsets and Bustiers & Bridal Lingerie Considerations & New Scans & Lingerie Shopping On~Line."
• Tom’s Astronomy Blog - “A site about space observations, planets, comets, asteroids, galaxies, space news, wallpaper, online books etc… New content added all the time!"
• Sane Thoughts of a Crazy Guy - “ Humorous views on life past and present by a 30 year old married man with daughter and pooch."
• Runs With Scissors - “ Far too much writing, far too many photos—describing a life split between northern Vermont and Madrid, Spain."

I still have plenty of unused blogmarks left to share, there’s just SO much good stuff, I want to make sure I don’t overwhelm you with links.

As always, you can view the complete list of these BlogExplosion spotlight blogs by visiting this page

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