So … it’s been, what, a month? There are some things I’d like to put up here, but I’m going to do it in chunks.
First thing’s first: new site templates. It’s a little more monochrome than the last one was, but I like it so far. It needs some tweaking, but that will happen as it happens.
So many things are going on at once right now that this homepage and all maintenance thereof have fallen into a gigantic black hole. I’m taking some time off from blogging. Hopefully I’ll be back before Halloween.
A coworker of mine at Google was trying to get his PicasaWeb album downloaded to his computer so he could transfer the photos to Photobucket. Unfortunately, the only way you can currently do that is on Windows – Picasa for Windows will do it, Picasa for Linux won’t, and there isn’t even a Picasa for Mac, although we can upload with iPhoto.
This irritated me, so I threw together a Python script that downloads entire PicasaWeb albums using the album’s RSS feed. A few tweaks and error checks later, and I deemed it worthy for public consumption. It’s called GPWAD, and I hope someone finds it useful.
I made the foolish mistake of moving my WordPress directory shortly after I installed it. This wasn’t a problem until a security upgrade to WordPress was released. To prevent this from being a problem in the future, I’m going to run another install and migrate everything over. Hopefully this will not nuke anything, but I’m going to back stuff up in case it does. Hopefully the site should only be down for a few seconds as I change some settings, but who knows. Wish me luck.
Update: well, that was painless. Apparently, DreamHost’s scripts were smart enough to know that the location had moved. Thank you DreamHost!
Update #2: the upgrade uncovered a strange issue with server-side caching. I’ve disabled it for now. If anyone has to refresh a page to see anything, please let me know.
Hopefully you didn’t notice, but last week I changed the backend for eDeep so that it uses AJAX to grab new thoughts from the backend. This prevents those of you who have browser caching enabled from seeing the same thought over and over again. Just click “Another Deep Thought” and the page will magically change without refreshing. Web 2.0-y, isn’t it?
Also, per Chris‘ suggestion, I’m going to work on producing a Dashboard widget for eDeep. More on that as it develops.
Sometimes I go back to things I’ve done with this site and recoil in disgust. The second revision of eDeep’s look-and-feel was like that. Yuck.
What do you think of the new eDeep? Mmm mmm copyright infringement.
The world’s favorite Deep Thoughts generator looks a little sexier. For too long, eDeep has just been plain white text on a black background. 15 minutes of Photoshoppery (and a sweet stock photo from stock.xchng) later, it looks a little better.
Holy hell are there a lot of updates to tell you about!
First, I’ve continued to discover more little tweaks and widgets to play with inside of WordPress. It’s all just so painless! I wish I had done this sooner. I must say, however, that if you can’t hack around in databases and twiddle some lines of PHP when you need to, this whole large-scale blogging app experience might be a little bit on the frustrating side. The layout of WordPress – both in terms of GUI and in terms of how it works under the covers – really dovetails into what I’ve been trying to accomplish all these years with my blogging engine. As such, whenever I need to make something work in just such a way, all I have to do is write a little PHP, maybe run some queries against WordPress’ databases. It’s just that easy! All non-programmers have probably either passed out or gone somewhere else by now. Pity.
Check out the Photos section. That’s Flickr integration right there baby, and I didn’t even have to write my own API calls. I wonder if it’s evil to use Flickr even though it’s made by the competition.
Let’s see, what else … did I mention the wishlist before? If I did, oops. Anyway, it’s auto-generated just like before, except I didn’t have to write the libraries. Woot.
So I loaded the page earlier this afternoon only to find that it had become blank. If this happens and you notice, please don’t hesitate to e-mail or IM me. Those of you who check this frequently know how to do that.
It would appear that things are going quite smoothly so far. Due in large part to a lot of already-written code (WordPress is much more popular than I’d assumed!) a lot of the site’s more dynamic features are back up and running. There will be a lot of brokenness here in the next week ord so. Please bear with me, as I have work at Google to attend to.
I don’t think I’ve given that the proper bloggy treatment yet. Stay tuned for more.