I finally integrated the past shows list into my blog.  I’ve been meaning to do that for like two years!  Just makes things easier to keep as much content as possible in ExpressionEngine, so I can use my current style sheets and banners and all that.  It didn’t take me nearly as long as I thought it would, thanks to magic of cut’n'paste and the fact that (a) I haven’t played that many shows in my life, and (b) I tend to work with the same people over and over, at the same venues.  Man, I need to set up another show, it’s been almost a year.  I haven’t even broken out my new guitar onstage!

I think I finally finished cleaning up all the broken internal links I created when I moved to ExpressionEngine.  You know, like in my comments or within the body of my posts where I’d link to another post in the old Movable Type URL style.  If you find any I missed (jeez,  there were about 200 of ’em) or if anything else acts wonky, please let me know!

Just so’s y’all know, in the future any system-generated e-mails coming from this site (comment and membership notifications, member-to-member e-mails etc.) will be using the address "admin" instead of what it was using before, which is my personal address, which I’m not going to repeat here but it’s pretty easy to guess if you know my first name, heheh!  This way y’all can use mail filters if you want to, and my own personal mail won’t be shuffled into that same category.

Today must be my two-week anniversary of using ExpressionEngine.  I absolutely love it, it’s the most fun I’ve had on the web in years.  I feel like I’ve just barely scratched the surface with it too.

Sorry for the downtime there… if you’re reading this, that means my new DNS numbers have propagated to your network and you’re viewing my site on the speedy new USA server.  U.S.A.!!  U.S.A.!!!  I can’t see it over here yet.  Wish it would hurry up but it hasn’t even been 12 hours yet, gotta give it a little more time.

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Around midnight tonight I’m going to be turning off new comments and member registrations.  Reason being, I’m moving the site to a new server.  I have to export my database, import it into the new digs, make sure all the settings and templates are correct (HA!), alert GoDaddy of the DNS change, and wait a little while for the numbers to propagate.  Expect about 48 hours of this shit, and hopefully by Monday or Tuesday you’ll see things hoppin’ again.  Sorry for the inconvenience but it’ll be worth it — the site should be a whole lot faster when the move’s done.

I made Matthew and Rob admins on this site, they now have the title "Sergeant-At-Arms", heheh.  No real reason, other than they now have the power to play with my CSS if they want, and to bitch-slap any comments spammers and haters if I’m not around to do it myself.

We now have them, thanks to the "Recently Commented Entries" plugin by Yoshi at Psychodaisy.  Thanks Yoshi!!

I got ExpressionEngine installed, and my old Movable Type entries are now imported, yayyyy!!!  But I didn’t do the latter without fucking hours of help from one of the EE developers, Paul/reedmaniac.  For this he deserves to get his car detailed at the very least.  I was having weirdnesses and the guy totally jumped in and got it all fixed up for me.

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I’ve made up my mind… I’m going to try moving my blog to ExpressionEngine.  The Movable Type licensing hullabaloo is interesting, but as I stated before I don’t fall into the class of blogger who’d need to pony up, so what do I care really?  For me it’s all about features, about wanting to use a system that’s more powerful, more efficient, and easier to tailor to my own needs.  I’m not just a blogger, I’m a spam-hatin’ roller skatin’ record makin’ picture-takin’ scintillatin’ scotoma havin’ FOO!!  I have all these weird categories and the way you do things in MT, it’s just a pain to keep everything all tidy and easily navigable.  With EE I won’t feel so much like I’m shoehorning my data into a format that doesn’t really suit it.

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I just upgraded and I’m getting all kinds of errors trying to post comments and rebuild files.  Also I have to mess with my templates to get some of my customization back (like the picture, etc) but it’s too late, I want to get some sleep so can you just come back later? I don’t want you to see the site like this, it’s all messed up.

I’m running Movable Type 2.66 now.  Like the last couple of updates, they’re mainly focusing on ways to deal with the explosion of comments spam.  3.0 is supposed to be just around the corner too, and they’re going even further by including a new user-subscription feature you can turn on if desired.  I don’t know if I’m going to go that far though; I like moderating my comments, and I like the fact that anyone can shoot their mouth off without having to sign up for a username.

I’ve upgraded my Movable Type to 2.65 to fix a newly-discovered security issue.  As always, I’m pretending I’m doing the community a favor by spreading the word, when in reality I’m just checking to make sure I didn’t break anything.  :-)

For years I’ve been collecting a lot of crazy clip-art, saving stuff I find on the web and scanning pics from my own collection of mostly cowgirl-related paper stuff — calendars, magazine covers, matchbooks, postcards, Valentines, whatever!  I like to display the pics as rotating desktop backgrounds / tiles which change every half-hour or so.  I’ve been trying to get them a little more organized, but the built-in wallpaper changer in Panther doesn’t search subfolders; you can only give it one folder and have it choose pictures from there.  So I’ve been using this freeware utility called ChangeDesktop, which gives you lots more options, including subfolders.  One more option it gives you is the ability to upload your pictures to the web as they’re changing, so everyone can see what’s on your desktop.  I set it up to work on my server, but the question is, would anybody make use of it?

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I moved another section of old static pages into my Movable Type install.  Made a category for lyrics and stuck ‘em all exactly one minute after 9am on the records’ release dates.  All the releases are set at 9am for no particular reason. I guess it’s the time the stores might have opened? The whole concept of tiiiiiiiime is such bogosity, man.  Anyway, now the lyrics will appear on the post immediately after the post for the actual release, if you’re viewing the date-based or individual archives. Confusing for you maybe, but simpler for me!  I saved myself some room by sticking all the songs on single pages instead of individually, and of course it makes it a hell of a lot easier for me to control the look’n'feel along with the rest of the site.  There’s only a few sections left to stuff into MT: the past-shows lists, the old press crap; the video section and the rest of the old links pages.  One day I’ll finish, sometime in the next ten years…

I just solved another access-logs mystery (to me!) and eliminated yet another route the spam-bots are taking.  Remember a week or so ago when I thought I might’ve broken my trackback?  Well, it was never broken, and now I know what the source of confusion was.  See, my trackback entries and comments are only displayed on my site directly via the individual archives; I don’t use the popup windows anymore.  But even though these popups weren’t linked from my site, you could still get to them through the cgi’s in my Movable Type install, which builds them on the fly upon request. And sure enough, the spiders WERE trying to look at them.  Always the spider called grub, which makes me even more suspicious of it than I was already!

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