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Death Cab for WordPress

Submitted by samr7 on Wed, 2005-05-25 04:16.

That's right, WordPress is out of my life now. It did the job while it had the job, but now it just looks like a shoddy implementation of a category of fad software. It has been replaced with Drupal. Notice the seamlessly integrated image galleries, and the newer, slicker captcha. Someday if I ever do movie or book reviews, Drupal will have a special node type for them.

Sure, it's all written in PHP, the simple, short-learning-curve programming language that reigns supreme and has become "the VB of the Internet" as Nathan calls it. I still haven't bothered even trying any Web gizmos built on other platforms. PHP does the job, and I probably won't feel any more macho, righteous, or warm and fuzzy inside using another tool. :-)

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New Photo Gallery

Submitted by samr7 on Tue, 2005-04-26 09:23.

A new photo gallery application, along with a bunch of new photos have been posted. Take a look. I also got a new digital camera, and have been (laughably) experimenting with depth of field and its artistic uses.
[image:461 size=preview]

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Comment Spam

Submitted by samr7 on Thu, 2005-03-31 13:11.

I got some comment spam this morning! Try googling for a site called makec.net. It has the basic appearance of a blog site, but the nonsensical content looks like a concatenation of random well-formed sentences, just like the comment that was posted to my site. It seems to have lots of results on public search engines, clearly an attempt to affect search results. The whois result points to a company called domainsbyproxy.com, which appears to specialize in concealing the identity of the real registrant.

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Fun With Photo Albums

Submitted by samr7 on Thu, 2005-03-31 00:25.

I tried installing a really simple, stupid photo gallery application, Simple PHP Gallery. It works. It even appears to be "integrated" with Word Press. For now at least, it's accessible through the "Photos" link at the top of this page. I have a limited set of photos up now. Check it out and let me know!

In terms of implementation, this app is lousy. Its metadata consists of an arbitrary filesystem directory structure, and some icky .ini files that it maintains. It doesn't use the database. It doesn't offer any interface for uploading, editing metadata, or any form customization. It doesn't support any standard blog features like comments or RSS. It had to be hacked to work with Word Press 1.5. It had to be hacked to avoid displaying the Word Press sidebar when also displaying an image wider than the main column. I had to rename a bunch of files to get rid of %-symbols and &-symbols, because they aren't handled correctly. It seems likely to be full of security holes.

This app seems great for cases where one wishes to post a large unsorted collection of photos on to their home page, wants a reasonable-looking frontend, and doesn't care about descriptions or comments.

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Generic Enough?

Submitted by samr7 on Tue, 2005-03-29 13:31.

This is my home page now, and I'm trying it on for size. It has a really generic title, "Least Significant Bits." Last night Andi suggested "Sam's Lamp" which has stuck with me as a distinct possibility. The current title has won out for the time being, however.

This format is only being tried on for size. Its genericness is its least comfortable trait. If it feels wrong after a few days, it'll change.

Built with Word Press, a popular commodity blogging package, and a slightly customized but otherwise commodity theme, I'm hoping that it adheres to some formula for a semi-stylish home page / blog. I also installed and toyed with b2evolution, which apparently derives from the same "b2" code base as Word Press, and appears to be a greatly cleaned up implementation. However, its features over Word Press aren't that compelling, and its user base and availability of themes is lacking. Nathan suggested some Perl-based blogware yesterday, like Movable Type and Blosxom, which I'll eventually have to try, but first need to become comfortable with mod_perl. There is also a fairly comprehensive list of blogware packages.

Andi and Paul also gave some great ideas for normal home page material, some things they want to try, some that I want to try at some point too:

  • Movie / music reviews. Nathan had the idea of a "CHS" / Can't Hit Shit rating for movies with gunfire. Paul was full of ideas for units of rating: espresso shots, biplanes, wings sounded halfway interesting
  • Recipes. Matt and Ashley have a big collection. Andi wants more. Nathan tends to have recipes printed from other sites, suggesting that linking might be good here. I need to learn how to cook.
  • Gallery of photos. There's a nice generic-looking package called gallery, which Gentoo even has an ebuild for.
  • Photo of the day. A camera phone might help here, but cell phones are evil!

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