| "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." |
| "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." |
I've had a Technorati link on the main page for some time now, but I just finished adding Technorati tag links to the individual posts. I used a modified form of this hack.
Update 2007-05-01: Oh no. The post keywords and the Technorati tags don't overlap. The tags are enabled, but I still have to add them to each post in order for them to show up. That's 589 posts I have to go through. Ugh.
I asked TypePad tech support if their database people could duplicate the keywords into the Technorati tags, with one or two SQL commands, but no dice. I'd write a Perl or PHP script, except I have no way to test it before running it, and it would probably violate the TypePad terms of service anyway.
Update 2007-05-12: Technorati tags are in place, after a week and a half.
I have three primary hacks on this weblog: topical icons, dynamic and persistent style sheets, and expanding/collapsing articles on the main page. I've already explained the topical icons here; this post will explain the style sheet magic.
On the TypePad server side, you need a Professional level account. No other level gives you the ability to manage templates and files directly.
On the browser side, this hack requires that the reader's browser have JavaScript and cookies enabled, and not flush the cookies when the browser is closed. Without cookies (flushed, or never set), the browser will default to the preferred stylesheet as soon as the cookie is lost. Firefox, Mozilla/Seamonkey, Opera, and (ugh) Internet Explorer can all handle these requirements. I believe Safari does, as well, but I have not used a Macintosh in ages. Comments on this post from Safari users are particularly welcome.
The first part of the hack is best explained in Paul Sowden's excellent article Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets at A List Apart. He uses JavaScript and the HTML DOM to switch styles, and cookies to make it all persistent.
I simply downloaded his JavaScript file, then uploaded it to my own domain's main directory through the Control Panel/Files interface. In order to centralize the main list of stylesheets, I created a template module called "cssmgr.tpl" containing the HTML stylesheet declarations (the "<link rel=..." elements) as well as including the JavaScript from Paul Sowden. I then added the following Movable Type tag to the <HEAD> element of each page template:
<$MTInclude module="cssmgr.tpl"$>
The template means I need to change just one list of stylesheets, rather than five, when I add a new style. I have delimited the included code with HTML comments, so you can see the contents of this module in the source of any page.
As a side note, I created my specific CSS files as index templates. This allows me to edit the files directly in TypePad's Weblogs/Design interface, rather than editing on my local machine and then uploading. This is simply my personal preference, but it means I must publish the template for any CSS changes to become visible. "Publish" in this case is an over-statement. With no Movable Type template tags in the CSS, these files are simply copied verbatim into the visible TypePad files.
Being a programmer, I took it a step further with a "Current Style:" indicator. The HTML for the indicator looks like this:
Current style:
<span id="silver"><b>Silver</b></span>
<span id="sandstone"><b>Sandstone</b></span>
<span id="phpbb"><b>Bulletin Board</b></span>
<span id="greys"><b>Greys</b></span>
Every style name is enclosed in a span element, with a unique ID for each span. Each stylesheet in turn has all of these ID's hidden via "display: none" except the one that applies. For example, the stylesheet for Greys contains the following CSS:
span#silver { display:none; }
span#sandstone { display:none; }
span#phpbb { display:none; }
span#greys { display:block; }When the Greys stylesheet is active, only the name "Greys" will show up in the status indicator; all other names are hidden.
Users of Mozilla/Seamonkey, Firefox, or Opera can choose alternate stylesheets directly from the browser menu: "View/Use Style" in Seamonkey, "View/Page Style" in Firefox, and "View/Style" in Opera. However, the majority of computers use Internet Explorer, which has no menu for choosing alternate style sheets.
Again, Paul Sowden's code to the rescue, coupled with a drop-down box:
<form name="styleform" action="0;">
<select name="stylename"
onchange="if (this.value!=0) setActiveStyleSheet(this.value);">
<option value="0">Change style:</option>
<option value="silver">Silver</option>
<option value="sandstone">Sandstone</option>
<option value="Bulletin Board">Bulletin Board</option>
<option value="Greys">Greys</option>
</select>
</form>
This creates the drop-down box directly in the page, for those browsers which don't include style-switching in the menu (ahem Micro$oft). For now, I include this drop-down box only on the main index page. I may someday include it on archive pages as well, which would make it an ideal candidate for another template module.
By putting all these ingredients together, I have a website with four different styles, accessible to nearly every web browser.
Comments are now numbered, with links available to each comment. The number itself is a link to its comment.
I've been seeing this "feature" here and there on various weblogs (mostly WordPress), and dang it, I just had to try it myself.
Finally, this site has clickable titles on article lists (main page, category archives, and date-based archives). I had delayed adding this feature, due to a CSS inheritance conflict. Thanks to the neat-o Firefox tool Firebug, I found where the "blogbody" class links' style was overriding the title links' style; a full document-object path to the links fixed the CSS.
I found a few image links that no longer had images. Their articles are fixed, with notes indicating that the images are lost.
There's no hope of getting them back. The source material is gone. Oh well.
Another touch-up for the site: Moving the mouse over some images no longer resizes the images' containing boxes, so text no longer re-flows.
For those who wonder, I had "border-style: solid" for the A:hover pseudo-class, but no corresponding border style for the non-hover case, which resulted in no border at all. Moving the mouse to an image caused the border to become active and visible, which resized the image box, which... caused a nuisance. It's now fixed.
I have two new bloggers on my roll: Photios and Spiced Sass. Welcome to both!
Yeah, I know, it's been almost a month since I posted anything. Lately, it seems that every time something important happens, any thoughts I have would not be original, unique, or otherwise worth posting.
However, I have scored a moderate personal coup, the results of which I will post sometime during the last week of this month (or very early next month, if time and tasks intervene).
Keep watching this space! (oh yeah, that'll bring in the viewers... ;-)
I will place no pink ribbon, pink logo, ping slogan, or any other pink on this website, even if October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I will do no such thing until there is an equal media blitz for Lung Cancer Awareness Month.
According to the American Cancer Society's own statistics, breast cancer is expected to claim over 40,000 women's lives in 2006, while lung cancer will take over 72,000 women's lives, making it almost twice as deadly as breast cancer for women.
I'll be blunt: If the Politically Correct crowd were truly worried about women's health, they would have a much stronger sense of proportion. As it is, their fixation on women's breasts undercuts their stated mission.
I have created a new weblog for my quick rants and gripes: The Chronic Complainer. My longer thoughts and essays will still come to this weblog. Hopefully, this will reduce the overall clutter.
I haven't been very diligent about keeping up the weblog. My heart just hasn't been in it.
Maybe a new main page design will help. I guess there's only one way to find out.
The site will remain up and running while I work on the new design.
Update 1:51am: I like this layout better.
It wasn't a jihadi who crippled Six Apart. It was a spammer trying to get BlueFrog to stop identifying him as a spammer.
What a moron. Such stupidity only confirms him as someone who should be forcibly removed from the Internet.
However, aarons.cc was hacked (again) by a jihadi coward, as indicated by the mass of Arabic on his main page and the "020" moniker.
As I type this, the Six Apart network is doing a Parkinson's dance: lots of spasms, but very little motion. It's probably a repeat of last week's web jihad, but on a wider scale.
Could it have something to do with those horrible (*cough*) cartoons?
Or could it have to do with the truth about the Iraq destroyers?
Maybe it has to do with exposing the practitioners of taqiyya. (Note that the explanation of taqiyya comes from a practicing Muslim!)
Nice try, assholes. We invented the Internet, and we know how to make it work, far better than you know how to destroy it. The truth of your deeds will out, and you cannot stop it.
I've cleaned up the navigation bars for the topical and monthly archives, to bring them under CSS control. I've also adjusted the validation and licensing badges.
I won't be doing an Easter posting this weekend. Tomorrow is Palm Sunday for the world's Eastern Orthodox.
I've enabled TypeKey as an optional feature for commenters. Anonymous comments are still allowed; just provide a bogus email. The user name is the important thing.
Based on some pretty solid business advice, I have placed all articles in the weblog under a modified Creative Commons Attribution2.5 license. The modification consists of releasing the articles for non-international reproduction in nations where Free Speech is suppressed. However, if I am quoted on another weblog, even one in Arabic, Turkish, or Farsi, I do expect attribution, even if it is only a link to the original text.
I'm done moving across the country. Not to fear, nothing has changed. CNN is still using the Olympics to make asinine comments about President Bush, so I'll still have plenty to comment on when the occasion presents itself.
This blog is going into hibernation. I will be making few, if any, posts; comments will be held for possibly two weeks, pending approval.
I will have sporadic Internet access at best, so don't expect to see anything big here, even if Ahmadi-nejad set off a nuke or five.
Google doesn't care about the topic of this blog. As proof, I offer starkly contrasting screenshots showing how the results are "sanitized" before sending through the Great Firewall. (Inspired by Al Charabiya's comment at Little Green Footballs.)
Also MIA from Google is their "we'll show you everything" statement. Rob at Say Anything has recovered it from Google's own cache. Technology is a double-edged sword, and Google is no exception.
If they no longer stand for the free flow of information, I will no longer use their site search. Can someone suggest a replacement search engine with similar capabilities?
I did a boo-boo. I exported the weblog, deleted the entries, then re-imported, and it wiped out a bunch of images. I'm working to repair the damage right now.
TrackBacks are back, and daily archives are gone. I hardly ever saw hits for them anyway.
The re-design proceeds apace. It isn't as complicated (yet) as I expected it would be.
Update 2006-01-17 3:00pm PST: I took the site down for some off-line changes. Everything seems to have returned to normal (if there is such a thing here).
I intend to roll out a new navigation system for the weblog, sometime this week. It will have a categorized tree menu system, providing simplified access to topical and monthly archives (daily archives will be dropped). The current style sheets will still be supported, in expanded form, to accomodate the new system.
I am developing the new system on a hidden TypePad blog (kudos to TypePad for allowing multiple blogs), and the new design will be copied over all at once.
My life has moved in lurches, jerks, and yanks recently, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. I realized about a month ago that the priorities I had two years ago are not the priorities I have now. As a result, my life will be taking a new direction next month.
It's odd how my life stages are so strongly delimited. Any event I remember from my life is in the context of where I lived and where I worked. Those two things, put together, always give me a fairly narrow time frame. That may be something else that's about to change.
In the meantime, I've added another blogroll link: Pull Up a Chair and Call the Cat a Bastard. Warning: she's one of those. Yeah, one of those. Eewwwwwwww! If you want, just pull a "reverse-Playboy": read it for the pictures.
Please help me in return. If you found a posting useful, enlightening, provocative, or whatever, I would appreciate a little bit in return.
The main page has a tip jar link in the second column, and the individual entries have tip jar links between the entries and the comments.
I'm about to make this a commercial venture. If the design looks funny, please bear with me while I re-configure.
Posting will be somewhere between "light" and "non-existent" over the next week. If you post a comment, it may take hours or days to see it published.
Comments in individual posting pages are now optional, and hidden by default.
"Professional Victim Watch" will highlight people who use an ostensible "oppression" for litigious or other self-serving purposes. I have some examples already in the archives, to be re-classified.
The icon: "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"
The columns are narrower now. On a 19-inch monitor, having a posting column over 12 inches just didn't cut it. An individual article ran 15 inches. The new format is much more readable, for all styles.
I have a new design, available on the top right of the main page. It's called "Greys," having colors only in images. All text and backgrounds are web-safe greys, and it still manages to come off with some style. The used space is more narrow now, which makes entries easier to read.
I also removed my TTLB status, as it wrecked the main page's XHTML 1.0 validation.
It's been too long since I posted here. I've had a lot to say, but I've preferred to say it with a counter-protest poster:
FREE SPEECH IN
USA AND IRAQ
THANK YOU GWB
THANK YOU SOLDIERS
After that, my life has been in some turmoil lately, of a kind that I won't post on here. I'll just summarize the thoughts in my head:
I think I'll do a new site design. It's been a while.
I haven't said anything for a couple weeks, because I didn't think making political fodder out of Hurricane Katrina was a good idea. Yeah, I've expressed some pretty low opinions on this weblog, but even I have my limits. Some others don't.
But today is September 11th. Adam Gadahn has made another "threatening" tape on behalf of al-Qaeda, with all the skill of a 10th-grade acting student.
People ask how I can support George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Here's the short list of reasons:
Saddam Hussein had no interest in being a sane player on the world stage. He built his house of cards, and it all came tumbling down on 11 September 2001. Good riddance, asshole.
I heard about Steven Vincent's murder last week. It escaped my mind that he was the In the Red Zone guy.
I'll leave the blogroll link up for a while longer. His reporting was excellent, his work was an honor to his profession, and someone may yet be able to fill his shoes.
I've been too quiet lately. My company is getting ready to move, and the weather here has been warm, and I haven't been thinking of anything significant and original, and and and...
If "I Am, Therefore I Think," I should start proving it. Otherwise, I might have to start questioning my own existence.
A new link in my Blogroll: In the Red Zone. He is in Iraq, and reporting on what he really sees. Yet another voice, telling the reality, not the New York Times-distilled version of the poor little insurgent.
(Via LGF.)
I got listed on Technorati.
And through Technorati, I noticed a couple external links.
thekulp.com linked.
And Little Bits and Pieces has blogrolled me!
Dudes, you are so on my blogroll!
OK, </fanboy mode> off.
I've cleaned up the Silver style, so that the silver gradient remains symmetric when the mouse pointer hovers over a link. All styles are adjusted so that tall images don't cause problems in adjacent articles.
I've disabled comments on all posts up to January 2005, and TrackBacks are totally disabled. The only TrackBack pings that touch this blog come from spammers.
As if weblogging on TypePad weren't already easy enough, along comes Drivel from Dropline Systems. I use Dropline Gnome at home, so I know Todd Kulesza knows his stuff.
(And the world wonders, Will he be able to post?)
Not only was my submission turned down, but someone else's, with identical links in the same order, was accepted three hours later. I suppose my monthly bandwith is safe.
It's OK. I can take rejection. I have slack.
I just submitted an article about the new Slackware release, and I gave this weblog's address in my submission. So, if the article is accepted, and now you're reading this from my submission:
Welcome! But brace yourself. My opinions are wildly different from the typical /. commenter.
/me braces for the bandwidth storm
Lords and ladies, leaders and followers, artists and technicians alike, I present to you: Google Search!
(No warranty for licensability or usefulness. May cause premature baldness. Read instructions carefully before using.)
"Bulletin Board" is something I put together, after looking over a phpBB site. Green isn't my favorite color, but the combination of silver background and dark green makes for a nice contrast.
Having a combo box for stylesheet selection is much nicer. It lets me add more stylesheets, without requiring more real estate on the page. And the "changing status" effect (choose a different stylesheet to see it) isn't really dynamic HTML; take a look at the page source to see how I did it.
I really wanted a puppy, but I guess I'll have to settle for a re-design.
Notice the new links at the top of the right column. If you find the Silver design not to your liking, you can choose the lower-contrast Sandstone style. The currently selected style is shown in red text. Hopefully, this method of indicating the current stylesheet will be tweaked in the future.
Also, the JavaScript is broken out as a separate file now, so browser caching should help speed things up slightly. Credits are given where appropriate.
I suppose I should explain how I did the topical images. It isn't really a special hack, but it did take a little work.
I had fun finding images to use. Perhaps the oddest is the image for the Humor topic: Howard Dean's mouth. Yeah, he had a meltdown after Super Tuesday. But he has taken it in stride. If you've heard or seen the new Yahoo! commercial, you know what I mean. His policies suck, but he can laugh at himself. I'll give him credit for that much.
The images are now in every archive type (category, date-based, and individual entry), and they're right-aligned. I've checked the rendering in Firefox (Mozilla) and Opera. I'll try MSIE as soon as I can, but I doubt it'll be a problem.
And, if you're reading this with Internet Explorer... why?!?
As you can see, I've spruced up the main page with some topical images, all swiped from the Inernet and doctored a bit. I suppose the wierdest one is the "Media Spin" icon. For those who might not know, it's a spinning wheel, for turning cotton or wool into yarn. Or, in the case of ABCNBCCBS, spinning BS into "news."
All the links are fixed!
Two things to point out about this site:
First, because TypePad does not support arbitrary directories, I no longer have a W3C privacy policy. Furthermore, even if I did, I would not be able to enforce it, as I am no longer hosting the site myself.
Second, I have uploaded all the images. I hope to take care of the inter-posting linkage tomorrow.
My old weblog is done. Shut down. Finis. Verklempt. I have moved the whole kit 'n' kaboodle to TypePad. It's based on Movable Type, my preferred weblog manager.
I am tired of fighting with my DSL provider about their pathetic DHCP setup.
Note: Some links will be broken; some images aren't uploaded yet. Please don't email me about them; I'm working on it.
(Yes, this is the new site. It's pretty much identical to the old one.)
Finally, after three and a half months without a website, it's back!
And none too soon, with all that's been going on in the world. I haven't really had a way to blow off steam about current events. Sure, I've been able to spout off some at The Command Post, but I've tried to respect the editors-in-chief and not dump too much on their site.
I'll be soon filling up the main page again with my thoughts and opinions. I know it's empty right now, because I haven't posted anything recently. That has now officially changed.
This website will be put on indefinite hiatus by next Saturday, Feb. 7th.
I know, I've neglected the weblog. Please forgive me. I was installing a real firewall, and getting things situated to work more smoothly. In a couple weeks, the website will be going down for a while, possibly a month or more. But for now, I'm back.
With a pending approval from Syndic8.com, I did a quick validation for the XHTML and the RSS feed. Fixing a couple wrinkles (a missing </div> tag, clarifying the Links section) makes the site even more passable as a weblog. Not that anyone really wants to syndicate this site... yet. ;-)
I have a few new links to the right, and they're categorized. I also made a few adjustments to <blockquote>'s in the style sheet.
From now on, all comments must be approved. I didn't want to require this, but some scum jerks out there insist on using my site to advertise their genital- and bustline-enhancing substances. I have blocked those addresses several times, but it's very much a moving target.
Don't worry about legitimate debate. After all, that's what I want.
The newly designed website is now officially launched. It features a textured background with less contrast, a more visible indicator as you "hover" over a link, each article's topic(s), and a topical archive in the Links to the right. My only complaint is the small holes in the Calendar area, but these are visible only in Mozilla and Konqueror; Opera shows a complete, smoothly textured background.
Please, leave comments about this look, if it renders properly on your system, what browser you're using, etc. I don't have Internet Explorer or any Macintosh OS X systems available to test with. Also, if you know how to get rid of the holes in the Calendar area, I would really appreciate the help.
Sorry about the website being down so much yesterday. Two storm systems came through here yesterday. The first one brought a very close lightning strike. I haven't yet found where the strike landed, but it was close enough that it went "bang" immediately, rather than a delayed "boom." One circuit breaker tripped, an intercom is now non-functional, and the furnace blower is permanently "on." If that's all the damage that occurred, I got off lucky. I was in my garage when it struck, and I'm glad for that; the metal siding probably protected me from any bodily harm.
Notice: the following no longer applies. The link to the privacy policy has been removed. (EDITED 2004-07-05 by gus3)
For the record: I do not keep logs of visitors who simply read the articles and comments. However, my web server does keep an error log of missing documents and denied requests, for administrative and debugging purposes.
However, I do require an email address for people who wish to post their own comments. This is to establish ownership of the comments; I own only the hosting web server. Of course, I can delete comments if I believe someone is abusing the facility. I can also block access on the firewall, if it's warranted.
Addendum: There is now an official privacy policy for I Am, Therefore I Think. It is fully W3C