Eventually I’ll get around to adding everything back… but for now it will look a bit plain.
Update: Back to a more simple layout…
Category: Salted Wound (page 1 of 2)
I’ve updated the design of the site. I’m not quite finished with it, but I thought I was far enough to release it to the wild. It works, for the most part, in every browser I’ve tried except for the god awful Internet Explorer on the PC.
I’m looking for a work around, but for now IE users should just switch to FireFox anyway — especially if you’re sick of pop-up’s and browser viruses.
Well after posting a picture of Ogre’s ass, I realized that my previous design just didn’t have enough room. So, for the new year, I’ve got a new design that scales to allow for bigger and better things. I’m sure there’s some stuff broken, but I’ll clean it all up eventually.
Everyone have a safe drive home tonight. Drink as much cheap champagne as your brain will allow.
Happy New Year!
I’ll now return to regularly scheduled posts, mostly about Ozzy and his cysts.
My name is Tim Conner. I’m a Macintosh application developer and project manager for one of the largest financial printing companies in the US. I live in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and have been contributing to this site as well as other web based entrepreneurial and freelance projects since 1998.
One project that I’m least proud of, though it’s received the most recognition, is The Caption Machine. It’s basically a community site where I choose a photo from the thousands that have been uploaded. Then I allow the site patrons to add captions to it. It was one of the first on the web to be simply powered by a blogging content management system. Originally it was listed on Blogger.com as a weblog of note. Then it spent a couple days on the front page of “My Yahoo” as a featured site which brings new meaning to being “slash dotted” let me tell you. It was also part of a “cool sites” feature on Tech TV’s, The Screen Savers, and I was interviewed by the New York Times (it actually made it to print – my mom ordered a copy and framed it — that’s what mom’s do).
My other site is my shareware, freeware, and free AppleScript site called Objective Labs. (Originally called Web Entoruage, but Microsoft Layers “asked” me to change the name) The flagship product was BlogApp and was featured in MacWorld magazine. It’s since been overpowered by competition and a serious lack of updates. I have a few other jems on there including a Mail Merge program that uses the built in Address Book of Mac OS X and your email program of choice. It’s aptly titled MailMergeApp.
The Tech of Salted Wound.
The main or weblog portion of Salted Wound is powered by Movable Type version 2.63. Over the years it’s been also powerd by Blogger, Blosxom, the defunct B2 which is now called Word Press and is being developed by a new team.
The Photo Gallery on this site is powerd by PhotoStack. It’s a PHP based photo gallery maker that is simple and clean.
The referrer log is powered by Refer. It uses mysql and is full of referral spam and is now all but useless.
Comment spam blocking is thwarted by the always evolving Blacklist-MT. I’ve also got a cron task running daily to update my blacklist with the new additions at the blacklist clearing house.
The five recent photos you see at the top of the main page are placed there via Flickr. Currently in beta but soon to be released community photo site that allows me to snap pictures on my SonyEricsson T-610 camera phone and send them either to flickr, or to flickr and my weblog. I can also upload photos via email, or through a desktop client application. It’s quite nice, and you don’t need a weblog for it to be useful.
The “Listening To” section is now being generated by a desktop app and site combo called Audio Scrobbler. The list on the page is generated using a php based rss reader called MagpieRss
I’m sure you didn’t notice, but if you’re reading this, I’ve just switched weblog engines. I went from a php/mysql based, and now defunct, content management system called B2 to the most actively developed CMS solution around, Movable Type.
This will mean absolutely nothing to most of you, but you geeks out there are sure to notice the subtle changes. I had to export the 1,000+ entries and the 2,000+ comments from the mysql tables to the flat file database that MT runs. That means the archives are now thousands of files on my server rather than thousands of records in the database. Also, links are now to actual files rather than SQL queries and results. In the conversion some things may have been lost, and there is still a lot of work left. Certain things will look a little strange while I’m still massaging the data and patching old links to new files, so let me know if anything is broke.
Derft said my fonts were too small. Is this better?
Right now I’m thinking, less is more.
I’m playing with a silly little css/js trick. Hold your mouse over a ‘+’ symbol next to one of my daily read weblogs. You should see a menu popup with links to the last 10 posts for that particular blog. It requires a 6.0 or higher browser (sorry Robert, it doesn’t work with OmniWeb).
sidenote: the poison-ivy on my hand is gnawing at my brain
Update: I’ve removed the functionality from the page, but added it to the experimental link popup at the end of the daily read list.
I’ve been tinkering with a new layout. Like it? This is just a test run. (I may be color blind). I hope to have it completed by the may first reboot.
If you’re reading this, then this weblog just went through a huge backend overhaul. I’ve imported over 3,000 records and combined table after table in the database. It was major effort to better separate content from data. Basically I hope to reduce 60+ tables down to about 10, and I’ve pretty much accomplished that.
The actual conversion was from a PHP-Nuke based backend to a b2 based backend. They are still a bit intermingled. The links portion is still Nuke, but the entire usermangment system is out the window. The permalinks still work thanks to a 3 line php file, so you don’t have to change a thing. This is also good for google, because all the links it has indexed so far still function.
I switched because nuke was becoming this big behemuth, too commercialized, and I had tore most of the thing to shreds anyway to get it to do what I wanted. Also, I can use BlogApp with b2. Finally, the themes are much easier to create, and faster to load. Don’t mind the broken links for a few days while I polish this up. I’m more of a trial by fire kind of developer.
Screw that. That sounds like too much work.
I‘m doing did a major site backend overhaul. Roughly 24 sql tables and literally thousands of lines of code will be torked-out in the upgrade, not to mention an entirely new template system. So, expect problems and whatnot. I did the development on my Mac with OS X, and it is going onto a linux server, and on top of that the versions of apache, php, and mysql are all different on the two systems. It will be interesting to say the least.
Update Complete – mostly: Most of the big stuff is moved over and seems to be working. Some of the things that look different, will eventually return to to how they were, at least that’s the plan.
To think, this weblog on the front page of kottke.org and on Meta Filter on the same day? That’s just too much attention to handle.
*Internal dialog, come on … stay calm … act modest … Oh hell* Woo!
If your looking for the post they’re talking about it’s down a few. Now that the cat is out of the bag, mail me if you have any tips, suggestions, or ideas about the 6 degrees project.
This just arrived from my web host:
We will be upgrading the power strips in our racks today which will result in a short period of downtime for all services (ie HTTP, MySQL, Telnet, SSH, FTP, etc…). Your sites and servers should only be down for approximately half an hour. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this upgrade please do not hesitate to contact our Tech Support Team.
Happy DreamHost Power Team
Like 30 minutes is this short, insignificant downtime for the 27,000 web sites they host. Note to Happy DreamHost Power Team, look up Redundancy, and while you’re at it look up moron too.
Through an error in programming (go figure) my “Currently Online” function has been grossly exaggerating my currently online count. I meant to set it to 6 minutes, but it was set to an hour, damn decimal will get you every time. It is now more accurate, though adjusted to 10 minutes as it so honestly tells you. (It’s at the bottom of the left hand column if you’re looking.)
The script I wrote was reviewed by a Korean Apple news site. I hope it’s a good review. (I’d link directly to the review but the cgi just wont play nice) I attempted to translate it with Babelfish.
I’m glad to see the top search requests that lead to Salted Wound for the past month are of this nature rather than the usual porn hits.
Where can I find patriotic wallpaper for my computer
I was just perusing my referrer logs (which is a given for those of us in the weblog meme*) and noticed a few referrals from the ever-wonderful site:
After some goofy DNS crap with my mysql database, things are back to normal. All complaints can be directed to Dream Host. I need a spell-check/grammar-check bot to scan my site hourly and automatically make corrections. I can’t spell for shit. Because of this post and the fact that the google bot loves my crawler page, I have been getting near 1000 distinct hosts and around 7000 page views per day since Tomb Raider came out. Salted Wound is now a porn mecca. Today a milestone was reached for this weblog. 100,000 Page views since November! Too bad my commercial sites don’t get this much traffic. Can I have your attention please. There is a silver Chevy Corsica in the north parking lot with it’s lights on. Thank You. Today is national renew my commitment to my weblog day. In the mean time you can check out Erik’s new site design. I have had a few people ask me how I got that “currently online” thing on the bottom left of my page. As you can tell by all of my links, this site is entirely powered by MySQL database to store all of my info, posts, links, boxes, session and cookie info, everything. For the Currently online box I made a table that is populated with IP addresses and the time the address was added. When anyone loads a page from my site I gather their IP address from the Header information and place it in the table. Then a little script looks to see how old the IP address is. If it is older than 10 minutes it deletes it. Then a simple record count of the table gives you the number of unique visitors in the past 10 minutes. It’s nothing special. As we know I like to check my referrer page to see what google searches lead to my site; this one is funny. Someone searched for 10 Commandments Poster and came to my elephant poop page. Ha! My host is moving my site and my databases so there may be some strange things going on while the dns catches up – and they get their act together. My link submissions slowed down considerably lately. It seems I disabled anonymous link posts. Well it’s fixed! Now anyone can