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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

TagCloud

TagCloud seems pretty cool.  You add RSS feeds and it creates a popular tag list based on frequently found words in that feed.  You can create one for your own site, or create one for the sites you like to visit.  I have one based on my RSS feeds down at the bottom of this page. 

I’m still waiting to see if it indexes old entries so they’ll still count toward the popular tags once they fall off the RSS feed.  I’ll monitor it for about a week to see what’s up.  If it only generates tags based on the current feed, I’ll have to do something about it.

Feedburner

On a slightly less offensive note, I’m now using Feedburner for the RSS 2.0 opion, so if you’re subscribed to that feed, you’ll start seeing my Furl links come through as well.  I have a PHP redirect going on from the rss_2.0 url to the feedburner page, so I’m hoping that works.

I’ll eventually do that Atom one like that too, I guess, although I don’t think it matters with feedburner.

Update: I’m so already loving Feedburner.  I had no idea so many people subscribed to my RSS feed via other clients.  I’ve only ever counted the few subscribers on Bloglines.  I love how it tells you the entry click-through!  Very exciting!

New Design

Okay, I have a new design up and hopefully I’ve worked out most of the kinks already.  If you’re not using the latest version of your preferred browser and this site looks funky… sorry.  There’s a reason why updating is necessary.

Let me know what you think. 

Category RSS Feeds

Interested in only some of what I have to say?  You can now subscribe to RSS feeds per category.  So if you only care about my movie reviews, you can subscribe solely to my movie reviews!  Click on the individual category for the RSS/Atom links.

Bloglines Woes

Bloglines isn’t updating my RSS feeds for some reason.  Not showing that there’s a problem with them or anything - just no updates through Bloglines since 3/23.  So if you’re seeing this… you’re probably not using Bloglines. 

I sent an email off to Bloglines, but I’m sort of doubting they’ll get around to looking at the actual issue any time soon.  We’ll see!

Update: About two hours later I received the following email from Bloglines. 

Hello:

Thank you for writing to Bloglines.

We have reset the feed mentioned in your email below. If it does not update within the next few hours, please get back to us so that can further investigate the situation. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.

Thank you again for writing, and enjoy using Bloglines!

Unexpectedly good customer service!  It’s still not showing up as updated, but I’m surprised by the quick “personal” attention.

I told you I’d be back

I still have some things to sort out, but I knew I’d be back into the world of blogging sooner or later.

Although I think I do it fairly well, I hate designing so I tweaked one of the lovely Expression Engine Templates to make it a little more personal.  I really like it. 

And yes, for the umpteenth time, I’m starting over fresh from scratch.  I’d like to export all my old blog entries out of [[ExpressionEngine|EE]] entirely because it seems to be clogging up the database and might even be making site loading slower.

I don’t know, we’ll see.

My Tag Cloud