prolific.org

Remember when changing CMS was news?

Got fed up with Movable Type (most notably the lack of new themes/styles and its slowness on my host), so it’s time to get fed up with Wordpress again. The problem I have with Wordpress is that I don’t know it well enough to be able to change much, but then I no longer know MT well enough either. Same difference.

I’m using a barely altered theme by Derek Punsalan, which I’ll hopefully find time to personalise a bit more.

Thanks to Hg for alerting me to the new Action Stream plugin for Movable Type, enabling you to aggregate your virtual presence around the web. In the left hand side you’ll find list of recent updates. Unfortunately, the styling looks a bit pants on MSIE. If you don’t see icons and the text looks a bit large, do a shift-reload to refresh the stylesheet.

To speed up rebuilding on this and previous installations of Movable Type, I cut my archives in half and publish through two different blogs. #1 is the one you are looking at. #2 is ‘prolific classic’ (archives from 1998 - 2001), which resides at prolific.org/classic/

#1 Publishes fine, it shows the 3-column layout the way I want it, with sidebars. #2 Won’t show its sidebars, whatever I do. Not on the front page, not on the archive listing and not on the entry pages. I can’t figure it out and don’t see any difference in the templates. Anniwun kan halp?

I’ve also not been able to get dynamic publishing working on more than one blog. MT won’t let me publish both #1 and #2 dynamically at the same time. So now one is published static, the other dynamic.

Fixed. The problem occurred because I was publishing one blog’s archives outside the root. Hmm. I’d call that a bug.

(The first one to tell me ‘why don’t you use wordpress’ or ‘why don’t you just code your own’ gets a punch in the nose.)

Feedreaders have killed blogrolls, haven’t they? Well, I’ve brought them back to this site. There’s a small, sort of old school blogroll in the right hand column now which contains some fixed staples in my blog diet, some going back to cabal pre-blog days. And I’ve revived my blo.gs and blogrolling lists. They have become a bit long over the years and haven’t been updated in a long time, so I’ve put them on separate pages, using MT4’s new ‘page’ feature. I’m not sure that’s the best way to deal with them, but it will have to do for now.

• Blo.gs
• Blogrolling

As you can see there have been a few changes here. Nothing too spectacular.

I upgraded to Movable Type 4. Initially confusing, I think I’ll come to appreciate the new features. It took some time figuring out where what was, as templates have been ripped apart in modules and I’ve never quite been able to figure out the logic in MT’s stylesheets.

There’s one thing I’ve been unable to do and that is to create a new navigation bar above the header, just a black bar exactly as wide as the header… it should be simple and somehow it isn’t. If anyone is familiar with MT’s new stylesheets and thinks they can help me out here, let me know, please.

 I still have to move over the second half of the archives from my old installation (and I do recommend a fresh MT4 installation instead of an upgrade) and redo some of the old includes and widgets.

Another thing that’s changed is the site’s title. We’re back to the old prolific.org domain. You know what they say: once a prol always a prol.

Some stuff I’ve run into while moving to MT4:

• The Feeds.app plugin no longer works.
• I don’t like wysiwyg editors at all

Eachman kills the blog you know. Daily personal blogging takes place at VOX. Links, feeds and other delicacies continue to be served here.
Bring your own browser.

My answer to everything this week: “Whatever”,  “Be like that.”
and “f.o.a.d.” I am sick of fandoms, running websites, answering rude
and stupid e-mail, moderating, mediating and I’m in full on misanthrope
mode. It may be time I kicked it all in the head.

Meanwhile, Dreamhost is moaning about my CPU usage and they’ve moved
this site to a test server. I cannot figure out which of Pivot’s php
files is using that much CPU, because Dreamhost run php as cgi (don’t
ask me what it means, I haven’t a clue) which means all php files show
up in resource stats as ‘php.cgi’. (And when we override the php-as-cgi
switch, Pivot stops working because it loses writing rights to various
files.) I fucking picked Pivot because it’s fast and easy on the
server, after my problems with MT’s scripts timing out on Pair.com.
Christ.

I can’t be the only person around with 6 years of posts who keeps running into problems with their CMS, can I?

Then again, why would I want to keep 6 years of s.f.a.?

[Read more]

Have upgraded MT. Testing, testing.

I am still having problems with Field of depth. For some reason, I no longer have ownership of the files created by MT. All permissions are hosed, I can’t even delete them via FTP or telnet. I am going to have to rebuild the site at Pair.com. As for now, Field of Depth is on hold. I cannot post or do anything.

I loathe Dreamhost. Over the last few years I’ve told everybody who ever asked not to use them, but to go to Pair.com. Why I thought things might work out for me there this time, I do not know.

Update: F.O.D. is temporarily available at http://log.nu. Back in the saddle is the best remedy. I’ve put too many hours into this site to let hosting problems get to me.

F.O.D. is back online.

If you tried to comment on the quicklinks section and were asked to ‘register’, apologies. Things should be fixed now. Let me know if they’re not.