Posted some more old "what’s new?" pages, these were from 1996 and 1997, just before and after I moved to Chicago.  It’s neat to read all that stuff again, that was such an exciting time for me.

I spent some time last night plugging in a bunch of old entries from ‘99 and 2000 — they’re from back in my days on Tripod when I had a "What’s New?" page and did all the HTML by hand.  It’s mostly site updates and geeky rants, but some of it’s mildly interesting.

I’ve had so many sites and so much different content over the years… I just want to fold as much of it as I can into the database instead of collecting it forever in zip-files.  Anything that’s got a date on it is fair game, I reckon!

Jeremy Hedley at Antipixel has one the of the loveliest and most informative blogs around.  For some time now I’ve been wanting to implement popup menus for my long list of archives and categories, and now I see it done here, looking just as pretty as a picture.  Also, I love the way he’s improved the layout of the comments input section of his Movable Type templates. I always thought that was confusing and ugly… I’d messed with it a little myself but had never gone as far as he has.  Now his code’s been added to the default templates in MT, so I felt free to steal it for myself.

I think I’ve finished tweaking my two RSS feeds.  They both seem to validate at least. The URLs are still the same, only the format is slightly different.  I finally clarified in my mind how I want the feeds to be.  Which is: one of them (index.rdf) only has post titles and short descriptions, and the other (index.xml) has the full monty.  The complete post, including pictures and the extended-entry portion that you can only get to by clicking "More" on the website.  It looks good enough to me in NetNewsWire (except that the pictures aren’t aligned correctly) but I’m not sure the code will work the same for other feed-readers.  (?! I dunno, what do you call them anyway?) I’m also not sure how it will perform in certain tricky situations, like when I have a page full of clickable thumbnails or whatever the case may be.  Please do post a comment if you have any preferences / suggestions.  I have no idea, I don’t even subscribe to my own feed.  At this point I’m pretty much doing it for religious reasons, and/or for the sake of that one guy Brian.  Tee hee!!

Now I’m going to go find some pretty matching buttons for these feeds.  I’m sorry darling, but that little orange XML button has got to go!!

I just deleted a post I made a few weeks ago which contained a list of jokes of a non-politically correct nature.  Because now in my stats it shows that the current top search term used to access this site (from anywhere) is not my name, but the term "Jokes About XXXX." (XXXX being the term I want to avoid placing into the search engines!) I’ve gotten around 300 hits from people looking for that exact term, and even more hits from other variations.  It’s not the kind of traffic I want to attract, so I just removed the post. I still think the jokes are funny though.  A better solution would be for me to more closely examine the logic behind the robots.txt file, and how to tell the SE’s that you don’t want certain individual pages crawled. I only know how to exclude them from whole directories.

I’ve been studying my site’s access logs, I’m nearly going blind with it.  But at least I know a lot more about who (what) I need to keep outta here.  There are a lot of search-engine bots that seem to be minding their manners and wearing proper name-tags (like Googlebot, and all the blog-related search engines). They’re behaving nicely and sending lots of traffic in return. But there are others that are just ramming through my site grabbing everything they can find, and sending me no new visitors. I’m working on a list of the worst offenders now, and later this evening I’m going to be uploading an htaccess file to my site in order block out the baddies.  I wanted to give y’all a little bit of warning so you’ll know what’s happening, in case I screw up and block out any legitimate visitors.  You people are fine!  If it were just for you, the fans and the friends and the normal blog-readers and miscellaneous visitors, there wouldn’t be any problem.

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You may or may not remember that post from last summer that talked about the phone number you could call to get yourself removed from some sort of credit bureau telemarketing thing.  Well, I deleted it, and also deleted another post from the following day that referred to it.  Somebody had told me that the post was coming up at the top of the list when you do a Google search for that term (which I’m not going to repeat here…!).  And today, while perusing my website stats I noticed that page is getting the most entry-page hits of any page on my site, other than the front page and the mystery songs.  That is not the kind of traffic I want.  People should be researching that stuff on Snopes, not here.

My apologies to the grumpy old man who intially informed me that I should never have posted STUPID CRAP like that.  He was absolutely right, as it turns out.

You’ve heard the records.  You’ve seen the shows.  You’ve read the blog.  Now ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the videos!!  Please let me know what you think, especially if you like ‘em.

I’m going to have to watch my bandwidth very carefully; I might not be able to host the high-grade versions very long if too many people want ‘em.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I am now moderating comments on this weblog. I found the answer posted as a tip on the MT support forum, and it works great. The comments are mailed to me and posted to my maintenance area, but they aren’t actually posted to the weblog until I go and republish the page manually. All I had to do was comment out six lines in lib/MT/App/Comments.pm…

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I finally got around to uploading a browser icon for my site.  I just grabbed a generic one from royaltyfreeart.com, but if anyone feels like making me a better one, I’m all for it.

I’m tired of being annoyed by the problems with my site’s front page layout.  All this one-column two-column crap is really chappin’ my ass, man.  It’s bullshit!!  I know my HTML; I am the table queen!  So I’m going back to tables now for the layout of this page.  They’re what I’m comfortable with; I know they work. I can code the thing by hand and I know how it’ll look before I even hit ‘refresh’.  I can still use the style sheet for the fonts and colors, but no more for the layout.  At least not until the rest of the world realizes what a non-standards-compliant piece of crap IE is.

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A lot of people using Windows have been seeing my front page as one column instead of two.  I just went through the templates at Movable Type’s site and made a few changes that might help with that.  Problem is, I only have one PC running Windows and it’s always looked fine there.  So, will somebody tell me if it’s fixed or not?  If you were seeing only one column before, are there two now?

If this doesn’t work I might just break down and stop using CSS to layout the front page.  I wanted to stay away from any tables-based layouts, but if it’s looking funny for most people, then screw it.

Just re-re-re-upgraded my Movable Type install to the latest version, 2.63.  No security warnings this time, just some bug-fixes.  Speaking of bugs, I wonder why it hasn’t been sending me copies of y’all’s comments?  I’m only seeing them when I actually visit my own site, which I don’t usually do unless I’m looking for something (like comments!).

Just so’s you know, if you don’t leave at least some kind of fake name when you post a comment, I’m taking it upon myself to give you a name.  I’ll make it up and it might not be very flattering!  So that’s your incentive to come up with something more interesting (or real) on your own.

Just re-upgraded my Movable Type install.  There were some security issues and bugs etc., but it’s fixed now.  I still have to check out the template fixes they’ve posted… maybe that’ll cure the viewing problems that some IE users have had with this site.  (IE doesn’t comply with CSS standards as well as most other browsers, so half the time my 2-column layout gets smooshed into one.)