goption Brian's blog

No more GoDaddy

I manage about 30 domain names — about 10 for my own use, 10 more for friends and family, and the rest for various businesses — and started back when GoDaddy was the cool alternative to Network Solutions.

As of today, I have moved all my active domains off of GoDaddy in response to their continued support of SOPA. (The rest of the domains expire shortly and won't be renewed.)

Like many blog owners, I stand firmly against the letter and spirit of SOPA. Everyone should read up on the proposed legislation and make up your own mind.

Now running WordPress

I was a happy user of Movable Type v3, and stuck with it long after MT v4 was available.  When MT v5 was released, I bit the bullet and upgraded to v4, but really didn't like the UI or the theme selection.  I also lost all my customizations - my headache calendar, the link repository - which bummed me out.

This summer, I started working with WordPress on my technical blog, marcach.com, and got to like the clean interface, easy theme switching, and the wide variety of plug-ins.  Since then, I researched what it would take to migrate this blog over to WordPress, and my feelings for Movable Type got even worse - exporting is a pain, especially if your hosting provider has per-process CPU limits, and they all do.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and roll my own export script for Movable Type 4.  It took a while to unwind the database schema, but I was able to write a Perl script using DBI to dump out an MT-format export file.  (The whole process was possible only because I had no real comments.)  I had to get HostingZoom to give me a short-term exemption from the normal per-process CPU limits, but in the end it all worked out.

The WordPress importer worked like a charm - at least once I got the export format right, and did some basic text->html conversion in the dump file.  There's a number of posts that will need hand editing, mostly to convert in-house links to use WP's format, but I left the old static MT pages in place for now, so the current links at least go somewhere.

New URL shortener

I installed a new, PHP-based URL shortening package today. The home-built one I've used in the past remains in place, but new entries will use the new package, which is more robust than the old one.

New site design

I spent some time today reworking the style sheet for the site, to hopefully give it a cleaner, more modern look. Luckily, the basic structure of the site makes it easy to update to change the layout.

Pibgorn

I added Pibgorn to the comics page. Pibgorn is an online-only, 3-day-a-week strip by Brooke McEldowney, creator of 9 Chickweed Lane.

My FJR site

I finally decided to set up a separate site for my FJR postings. Here it is:

TCFJR

Yay.

Headache Page

I added four more months to the top of the Headache page, so it now displays two full years, with daily details for the most recent twelve months, and summaries for the preceeding twelve months.

Also, an overlib box with details from that day's entry are now displayed when you hover over a medication day (in yellow).

Odds and Ends

The Odds and Ends sidebar section for remaindered links has been updated to use the overLIB tool tips library. In the past, the Movable Type excerpt (if any) was displayed as regular text following each link, and there was no way to determine the category of an O&E link.

Now, hovering over a link displays an overLIB floating tooltip, with the category as the caption and the excerpt as the body. If the excerpt is blank, a single   is used to persuade some height into the body of the tooltip. Double quotes in the excerpt are converted to entity reference ".

Since entries in the Odds and Ends weblog have titles that are full link tags, the only way to add the required onmouseover/onmouseout entries was to use the MTPerlScript plug-in, with a function that takes three arguments: MTEntryTitle, MTEntryCategory, and MTEntryExcerpt. The code builds the overlib call using the excerpt and caption, then modifies the title string to include the overlib and nd calls.

New Grey Style

I revamped the grey style to use larger, white letters on an grey-blue background. The header logo is now a background image, and the entire header is clickable to return to the home page, ala the LAPI site. I should convert all the style sheets to this type of header.

Site upgrades

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to make two upgrades to my Movable Type setup: a better monthly archive list, and an actual Recent Categories listing. Today, I finished both.

Previously, all pages but the main index page used the standard MT monthly archive listing. As the months and years go by, this listing became so long as to be unusable - or at least quite ugly. A few months ago I was reading the Tiny Pineapple weblog, and noticed that the author used a yearly table format. I sent him an e-mail asking how he did it, and he good-naturedly admitted to building and updating it manually.

In my mind I was assuming that a lot of deep MT work would be needed to build it automatically. This morning, I decided to try a different, much simpler method: use the MTPerlScript module to open the archive directory, find the year archives, and print the monthly archive table. It took a few iterations, but it now works quite well, if I say so myself.

I've had a Recent Categories section on my main page sidebar since the last redesign, but the categories listed were hard coded in the template and rarely updated. With my MTPerlScript success with the monthly archive table, I dived in to automate the section, using raw DBI code instead of MT internals. It took a couple of minutes to lock down the SQL, and I needed to "borrow" the dirify function from MT::Util, but now the Recent Categories section is fully automated.

Teaser style

I've been using small, teaser graphics in the upper-right corner of many posts for a while now, but always just added the necessary spacer info directly to the tag - normally align=right style="margin-left: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;". Some of the teasers are in macros in the banner template, and some are just inline in individual posts.

This morning, I converted the teaser-specific formatting into a class in the style sheet. I changed all the macros to use the class, and changed the most recent inline teaser (lightning) to use the class.

PDF icon

page-break-after

The calendar on the Headache page started out with three months, grew to six months, and is now (and forever) a full twelve months. From the beginning the monthly calendars have been wrapped in a <div id="calendar"> tag. With the recent change over to a Print-specific style sheet, I decided to move the daily narrative section of the Headache page to a new page when printed. The calendar entry for the print.css style sheet now includes "page-break-after: always;", which FireFox happily supports.

Each of the doctors that I hand the diary to are interested in the calendars, but they don't seem to really care about the narrative. With the calendars on a separate page, their bookkeeping will be simplified.

I'll take the new printout to Dr. Liao on Thursday morning, along with my fully-notarized Advanced Health Care Directive.

Print-specific style sheet

I print out my headache diary each time I visit a doctor, with varying results. What looks pretty (enough, at least) on the screen doesn't translate well to a printed page. IE has big trouble printing it in portrait, as well, with the text getting cropped on the right margin.

In honor of this morning's visit to Dr. Wogenson, I created a print-specific style sheet, and changed a couple of templates to make it work. The Meta template now includes media="screen" on the original style sheet LINKs, along with a new link to print.css with media="print". The Banner template includes a new #printhead div, with goption in stylized text. The screen style sheets set display:none; for #printhead, and the print stylesheet sets display:none; for the standard header and menu div's.

The print style sheet also removes the page background, the border around the master div, and a few other minor changes.

The site looks the same when viewed on the screen, but now looks much better when printed.

Moving on up…

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Movable Type 3.1, specifically as part of an evaluation of a new tool called reBlog.

Currently, when I want to cross-post a link I find in Sharp Reader, I drag the link to my Windows desktop, then drag it into Firefox, then use the JustBlotIt! extension to post it. reBlog is a package with it's own RSS aggregator and MT extensions to help automate the cross-posting of links.

I'm still working on it, and it'll probably be a while before I switch away from Sharp Reader, but there are some potential advantages: a) I can read my RSS feeds from any computer; b) I can cross-post without having to drag things around.