I edited my .htaccess again to get rid of the rule that sent people (and robots) to an error page if their browser didn’t provide either a user-agent ("Hi, I’m Internet Explorer!) or a referrer string ("Hi, I grabbed this image because your front page told me to!").  It just wasn’t working; too many browsers are sending these empty variables.  I’ll have to comb through it again to make sure I really did what I intended to, but I think the plan should be to ban user-agents that I know are evil, like EmailSiphon — what honest user would be crazy enough to claim to be something like that?  And I feel fine about banning people coming from certain machines that have been trying to hack into my (nonexistent) FormMail to use it for spamming, and people using FrontPage to try to get a copy of my whole site.  I’m still on the fence about other offline downloading tools, so please pipe up if you have an opinion one way or the other.  Also let me know if I fucked anything up, as always.

Just finished installing yet another plugin, Kalsey’s MTSimpleComments.  It lets you merge comments and trackbacks together into one seamless list.  I’ve been getting more and more trackbacks, and they weren’t really being utilized, or even clearly shown on my website the way they should’ve been.  Big thanks to George for smacking me with that clue-by-four!

My brain hurts, I think I’ve had enough for today.  But at least it took my mind off getting boo-foo’ed by the robots.  :-|

I just uploaded a new config file for MT, I hope I didn’t break anything.  I’d been using the same mt.cfg file since the beginning, but the most recent one has a new switch that I wanted to implement.  It isn’t included in the update-only bundle I normally install, so I had to go grab the full-install version for comparison.  The switch I’m talking about is ‘GenerateTrackBackRSS’… you see, whenever I get a trackback ping (which has only happened three times… I’m not exactly Miss Popularity in the blogging world!) a little .xml file gets stored in the root of my archive directory.  It’s supposed to be used to generate an RSS feed of trackbacks, should you wish to do so.  But with only three trackbacks in the whole damn blog, why would I ever create a feed for it?  The .xml files were just cluttering my pretty archive folder so I turned off the feature altogether.  You can still send TB pings exactly as before; the only difference is that these useless (to me) little files won’t be generated.

I hope somebody pings me soon so I can make sure it worked, but I’m not holding my breath.  ;-)

I’m getting better with my CSS; I feel freer now to make up my own div-tags for certain styles I need to apply to my posts. The newest one is <div class="quotation">… you can see it in action on the previous post, and in the press categories like this one. My album reviews were especially messed up… sometimes my own comments would be italicized, and the quotation would be in plaintext, and sometimes it’d be the other way around, or maybe I’d use blockquotes instead. Well I cleaned ‘em all up so now you always see a gray bar to the left of quoted text, and only album titles and things that need emphasis are italicized. I know… who cares, but I think it looks nicer and it’s a lot easier to see who said what.

I had a pretty cool idea for my blog that I couldn’t really figure out how to accomplish in MT. So I posted an SOS in their amazing support forum, and one of the resident genii Kadyellebee helped me see the light.  :-) We’ll see how long it takes for me to get the proper coding implemented here.

Speaking of categories, eventually I have to migrate my past-shows list into my blog.  It’s the only truly date-based section of my site that hasn’t yet made it over here.  It’s going to be a pain and I’ll have to do it by hand since I don’t know Perl… I should make MARCY do it!

Another new category, this one for my old doodlings.  Years ago they were stored in one of the many albums I had on Zing, a photo-storage outfit which no longer exists.  I had all sorts of shit on there. After they folded I think I moved this particular batch of drawings to the site I had at Tripod, but for whatever reason they never made it to edithfrost.com.

I got rid of Nice Titles, a bit of Javascript I was using on my webpages.  Because it chokes up the validator, and I just got sick of looking at it.  Nothing against whoever wrote it, I just don’t like something popping up in my face like that.

I finally got around to making an index page for the various categories I’m using in my weblog.  It’s a bit of a wreck because my eyes were bigger than my stomach — there are a lot of categories I never quite got around to really using.  But this makes it a lot easier to see what I’ve got and where I should go with it.

Next step is to label my blog posts with their respective categories, and to improve the navigation on the individual archive pages, so you can move around either by date or by category.  It’ll be some sort of breadcrumb menu, but I can’t wrap my head around what this should look like.  I probably just need more coffee.

Just installed my second Brad Choate plugin, and sent my second Trackback ping.  Fun fun fun!  MTIfEmpty gives you an extra set of tags to use in your Movable Type templates.  If you have a variable that’s sometimes empty and sometimes not, you can encircle it with <MTIfNotEmpty> tags so the variable will only display if it’s got something inside.  (Duh.) I used it for my category template, because some of the categories have descriptions (like the Discography) and some don’t (like Weblog).  Previously it was showing a blank white box for categories with no description. Thank you Brad!

I forgot to mention last week that I pretty much finished uploading all of the old photos that used to be in the gallery section.  You can find them over in Photos of me and Photos by me.  These are the ones I didn’t have precise dates for, so I just fudged and stuck ‘em wherever it seemed most likely.  I tried to indicate all bogus dates, i.e. I’d say "taken sometime in June" or whatever.

I worked on the stylesheet this weekend and finally uploaded the results.  I still have to monkey with the HTML on some of the templates but I’m getting there.  What do you think?  Anything coming out funny on your end?  I haven’t even looked at it on the PC yet, just the iBook.

I finished (re-)posting all my old web-diary entries from ‘97 and ‘98.  The famous (?) diaries that I ended up yanking down with no forewarning, just before Telescopic was released… I’ve posted them again because, well, it’s five years later and I guess they don’t bother me as much as they used to.  The diary thing ran from around 8/24/97 through 10/16/98, first on my old site at Enteract and later at Tripod. (I’d done site update and newsy-type pages before that but had never called it a diary.) There was no such thing as blogging software back then; I did everything by hand.  Life is SO much easier now!

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Added some lovely photos by Debra A. Zeller, of our 4/19/2002 show at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.  She has a website called Playing In Fog with lots more kickass live-music photography on display.

It was so silly of me to think I needed to create extra blog categories because my archive pages were getting too full.  All I needed to do was to change the templates to make them display less info.  DUH!!  So what I decided to do is show the most recent fifteen entries in the normal way, and under that there’ll be a linked list of older entries, similar to how it looks on the master archive list.  I.e., when you pull up the My Photos page, everything’s either viewable or reachable, but you’re not downloading fifty jillion thumbnails when you only want to check out what’s new.

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My photos page was getting to be a monster, so I separated it out into different categories by year.  I’m going to have to do that to the pics-I-took page as well, and some other categories that are getting too full.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Movable Type had a "paginate" feature, but the categories solution works well enough.  You actually can have pagination by using a plugin, but I’m too lazy to mess with that.  Just hoping they’ll eventually add that feature to the main program.

Stole the code for the pulldown menus in the sidebar from Antipixel.  First I tried to code the Javascript on my own, but the multiple menus screwed me up and I couldn’t remember the syntax to get it to work. So I gave up and stole his code instead.  He’s using a cleaner method than I would have anyway… looks like this will degrade a little better for the search engines, and for the folks who don’t have Javascript turned on in their browsers. But as usual, let me know if it looks or acts funny.  I know the menu area is still too cluttered but I’ll fix that.