Tagged “blogging”

  1. Playing with the blog look and feel again

    It's been a while since I've played with the blog. I got rid of the right index bar; things look a bit different. Empty? Not sure. At least it's a change and I'm keeping this thing alive. Something to do while I'm still working on The Rev Programming Language.

  2. The blog is still alive

    Just realized it's been almost a year since I've written anything here. I haven't even checked it out in a long while. Regardless, I thought I'd give it a kick and see if all my RSS feeds and such are still working. I'm pretty sure that no one reads this. Maybe time to rewrite the blogging software. Again.

  3. Pasties - Yet another repost

    The following is a repost from 2006 that I wrote as notes to myself on how to make pasties, a sort of stew-baked in a crust type meal that is popular in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It came out really good. Every year or so, I re-reference this post to reuse the recipe. Here it is again. Plus, I'm playing with the blog again, so it's time to see if the blog still works.

    The Pasty

    Well, I'm not a chef. I'm not even a cook. I can barely order McDonald's. However, a few weeks ago, I got a craving for some pasties, a sort of stew-in-a-pie-package that is a delicacy of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I got a recipe off of this web site, and here it is, with my comments. Note! I have not yet eaten them, so if they turn out terrible, well, here is the proof.

    Making the Crust

    • 3 c. flour
    • 1 1/2 sticks butter (cold and cut into bits)
    • 1 1/2 tsp. salt
    • 6 tbsp. water

    In a large bowl, combine flour, butter and salt. Blend ingredients until well combined and add water, one tablespoon at a time to form a dough. Toss mixture until it forms a ball. Kneed dough lightly against a smooth surface with heel of the hand to distribute fat evenly. Form into a ball, dust with flour, wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes.

    My Commentary

    This sounds a lot easier than it is in reality. As far as mashing the flour and butter together, I did this with my bare hands as pressing it around a bowl with a wooden spoon was taking too much time and did not seem to be making any good progress. I also ended up added probably somewhere in the range of 10 tbsp of water since it all kept falling it apart, and forming it into a ball was impossible.

    The Filling

    • 1 lb. round steak, coarsely ground
    • 1 lb. boneless pork loin, coarsely ground
    • 5 carrots, chopped
    • 2 lg. onions, chopped
    • 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
    • 1/2 c. rutabaga, chopped (can substitute turnip)
    • 2 tsp. salt
    • 1/2 tsp. pepper

    Combine all ingredients in large bowl. Divide the dough into 6 pieces, and roll one of the pieces into a 10-inch round on a lightly floured surface. Put 1 1/2 cups of filling on half of the round. Moisten the edges and fold the unfilled half over the filling to enclose it. Pinch the edges together to seal them and crimp them decoratively with a fork. Transfer pasty to lightly buttered baking sheet and cut several slits in the top. Roll out and fill the remaining dough in the same manner. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Put 1 tsp. butter through a slit in each pasty and continue baking for 30 minutes more. Remove from oven, cover with a damp tea towel, cool for 15 minutes.

    Milwaukee Journal March 28, 1943 Welsh

    Commentary

    • Add brown sauce

    This is a LOT of food. When I was out buying the food, I didn't realized how much food this is. After rolling out the dough, trying to pack all that food in would be impossible. I got maybe 2/3 of it in, and I'm going to have to figure out what to do later with the remainder.

    Rolling the dough turned out to be a lot of fun, but I had to keep the kids away. Their comment about eating uncooked dough: "It tastes like Play-Doh".

    I used 3 spanish (yellow) onions, since they were pretty small and the recipe called for 2 large onions. They were pretty strong, and made me cry quite early into the process.

    I used a turnip in place of the rutabaga. I picked just a small one. They are tough little vegetables and strong to the taste. I think that if anything fails in the recipe, it's going to be due to not chopping up the vegetables enough.

    Well, 45 minutes to go...more later. I'll publish this now to avoid closing this window by accident.

    Aftermath

    These were, by far, the best pasties I have ever eaten. I'm sure that a good part of that is due to the fact of the work I put into it. However, the really did taste good.

    Things to think about in the future: Next time, I have to figure a better way to put them on the plate. I put down wax paper, but evidently (according to my wife), it was upside down. That really is the worst part of the whole thing. A bit of work, and it came off ok.

  4. The longevity of the blog format

    Looks like it's been at least 4 solid months since I've written anything here. And, I only showed up to find my pastie's recipe. I guess it's still useful for that.

  5. Random thoughts

    After reading some blogs about minimalism and the like, I'm feeling the need to become more focused in life. I need to start thinking more about what I'm doing, rather than living under cruise control. Not to say that I haven't been doing that before, but that it's probably worth it to become more conscious about life.

    Maybe I need to think more about blogging. Writing about these thoughts instead of thinking. Making a more tangible touch on the world rather than just thinking about things.

  6. Bug fixing

    Fixed another bug with the rss. Well, something that slowed things down a lot. Hopefully, the RSS will work a lot better now.

  7. Markdown

    Until you actually implement it, Markdown seems quite simple. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of gotchas, ranging from when you fill in paragraph markers, indented quotes, etc.

    For example, this is an example of an indented, quoted paragraph. We can make it difficult by adding code in it. That is really tricky.

    Crazy how difficult that is to implement.

  8. Rewrite kind of complete

    I spent a few hours and got a lot of new bugs complete in here. It works more using a sort of Markdown like syntax. I can write code by using backticks:

    code

    And add quotes by just indenting.

    Let's see how long it works.

  9. Hail

    We got the first day of hail today. Always seems to happen on this week in October (at least in 2009), near the end of biking to work. And the updated blog rewrite is coming along. Mostly, I'm just removing old junk that's accumulated over the years. Hopefully it still works when I'm done.

  10. Blog rewrite?

    I'm currently thinking about rewriting this blog software. I originally wrote it with some sort of Wiki type idea, but now I'm thinking about using some sort of Markdown type notation. The old blog is pretty much unmaintainable. Maybe time to begin anew?

  11. The yearly playing with the blog

    Every year about this time, when the weather gets rainy and I don't feel like getting all damp, it seems this blog gets a bit of a workout. Sometimes, it's just reworking the CSS and the look and feel of the blog, sometimes it's tweaking the code. I'm not quite sure what it's going to be this year, but there's a lot of hacking that has gone on in the code for too long, and it needs to be cleaned out. The questions is, can it, and do I really care enough to do it?

  12. Spring cleaning

    As spring cleaning goes, so does the website. Lots of dead pages, projects that just aren't happening anymore. So, the new link for this blog is . Still lots of old junk that I've been saving for a long time. I guess now is the chance to clean things up.

  13. 110mb diagnostics

    If you use 110mb for free web hosting, here is a nice website that monitors the actual uptime of the servers.

  14. Download

    IsnyBlog

    For those of you interested in using this blogging software, here is the source. Let me know if you have any question/ideas/suggestions. No complaints! No guarantees! Code is GPL, so if you change it, publish the source.

    Please note that the release is pretty out of date, and there are much newer versions available. Please mail me if you are interested; otherwise, the older version is below.

    Features

    • Written in PHP

    • Flat files - no SQL database required

    • Picture uploading and embedding

    • Comments

    • Tagging

    • Static pages with Wiki style-dynamic page adding

    • Multiple user support

    Download

    IsnyBlog 2008-10-02

  15. Back in time...

    In an effort to clean up my website and get rid of old useless junk, I'm going back through my old blog and porting some of the more useful and interesting posts here. This is extremely time consuming, but, in the end, hopefully I'll have something that's cleaner, more searchable (well, that's debatable), and smaller. There's sure a lot of junk, though.

    Update: Well, I'm done now. I haven't deleted the old blog yet, but everything is in here. You can click here for a tags and date index.

  16. Autumn is the season of geeking out

    It must be autumn. I'm working on the blog project again, adding more wiki type functionality. Since it's getting dreary and dark out, the blog software is moving along again. Hopefully, I'll get it working flexibly enough to make the Bike to Work Week site more usable.

    200910080519_image.png

    This should have revision history as well, so I can go backwards to older post versions.

    Thanks for bearing with me while I'm playing around here.

  17. More complexity

    Well, now I have wiki-like links in the blog here. For me, this means that I can have easier ways to get to static pages like the about me webpage. So what does this mean to this blog? Well, nothing, but hopefully, with the Bike to Work Week website, it will mean additional integrated wiki type functionality. Plus less remembering html tags and such.

  18. Gnome-Do: Fixing Twitter

    I had a problem with using Gnome Do to post to Twitter (not that I did it a whole heck of a lot). It said 'failed' everytime, but it would post anyways. Also, the popups at the top of the screen stopped working. Clearing out the Gnome Do plugins and restarting (logoff and back on again) fixed it.

    To clear the plugins, do:

    rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-do/plugins-* You may be able to just restart Gnome Do, but I found it easier just to log off and back on again.

  19. 110mb broke my RSS feed

    Due to the RadarURL option, all my text (including RSS) feeds were adding the RadarURL script code. RadarURL tells you how many people are on your site at any one time, and gives you various traffic details. Evidentally, it's on by default on Boxes 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and off by default on Boxes 4, 9, 16, and 17+.

    You can turn it on and off on your account by: Log In -> Account Profile -> Turn it OFF/ON.

    See this discussion for more info.

  20. Multiple blog users

    I updated my blogging software so that multiple bloggers could post to it. I'm thinking about expanding my Bike to Work Week site into a bike commuter news type site, and this software would drive it.

  21. Software means never having to have nothing to do

    Found yet another bug in the blogging software. Whenever someone added a comment, it was never updating the web pages. A one line fix. It always seems that whenever I want to demonstrate the IsnyBlog software, there's something else to fix.

  22. Windows 98 Annoyances

    I've been using XP/Vista/Ubuntu for a long time now, and I'm writing this remotely from an old Windows 98 machine. The machine is pretty slow, but the most annoying this is that this web site isn't displaying the images correctly. I don't know why, and I don't know if I'm going to bother to fix it; if you click on the links (picture border), the pictures show up ok, but they display with zero height.

    I guess I should fix this, but does anyone really use Windows 98 anymore? Oh yeah, me...

  23. Phoogle - Google maps for PHP - Broken

    While working on my Bike to Work Week web site, it suddenly appeared that Phoogle, the Google maps generator that I use, stopped working. Thankfully, a fix was issued for the "Cannot use string offset as an array" error. In short, the fix is:

    add:

    if(!trim($data)) return;

    as the new first line of the characterData function.

    It also appears that you have to replace the instances of [Response] with ['Response']. Fortunately, I fixed that issue myself along the way.

  24. Facebook?

    This is a test post (interesting, eh?) to see if my RSS feed will pick up this post and put it onto Facebook.

    Update: It didn't. Ah well.

  25. GoDaddy, 110mb DNS problems

    I host my website on the free 110mb.com. It works great, but I've had issues trying to get my DNS A record to point to the right server (box 13, or whatever box you happen to use) with GoDaddy. However, you may have a similar problem, no matter what domain service you use. Here's the easy way I used to fix this problem:

    • Locate your address (i.e. ghofulpo.110mb.com)

    • Ping it (ping ghofulpo.110mb.com)

    • Change the address in the A record to whatever IP address was returned.

    Hopefully, this will solve somebody else's problem, as well as mine, when I break it again accidentally.

  26. Faster...better...blog

    I did a bit of work to improve the caching mechanism. Now, I keep the titles, comment counts, and tags in a separate cache file. That way, when I want to fill in the 'by date', 'latest posts', 'tags', and index pages (or portions thereof), I don't have to look through each entry each time to figure out what the title of the post is and the tags. The more work I do, the more I think of how this could be faster if all the data was stored in a database (precisely the reason against why I started this blogging software. However, I still want to keep this software database-free. So, small cache files improve the time greatly.

    If I want to scale this software up to be more of like a 'Digg' style site, I would have to use a more aggressive caching mechanism. For example, each time a comment is made, the cache is flushed. If I could update the entry cache a bit more intelligently (i.e. update instead of regenerate), it would be a lot faster. However, there would be new race conditions, etc.

    I'll do that later. Another project for another day.

    I just hope I didn't break anything.

  27. Nicer URLs

    I did a bit of work on the blog to give it the capability to generate nicer URLs without using .htaccess or mod_rewrite with Apache. Previously, all posts were looking like:

    http://ghofulpo.com/blog/index.php?page=200810220519

    Now, I can generate posts like:

    http://ghofulpo.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/22/0519/Axe_Murder_Hollow

    The two posts are equivalent, but hopefully the second one is a bit nicer to look at.

    My hope is that these pages will be indexed by search engines a bit better. The old pages should continue to work as they did before.

  28. Wrapping pictures

    I added a simple tag to pictures to align the pictures to one side of the entry or the other. Looks okay, I guess, with small pictures and a large amount of text. So far, IsnyBlog, this blogging software, seems to be doing everything I need with a minimum amount of effort!

  29. Publish / Do not publish feature

    Added a publish/don't publish flag for the blog entries in IsnyBlog (this blogging software). Seems like it could come in handy.

    I'm not sure I'm so enamored of the file uploading capability, but it seems to work for now.

    I just noticed that the software replaced "don't" with "don't"...well, there is my next to do for the software. :-)

  30. When blogs are hacked, crashed, or are lost

    I had some free time, so I started trying to port the entries from the old Pivotlog blog into the new blog, which, since I wrote it, I presumably have a better idea on how it works, how it can be hacked, and how to recover from failures, crashes, and hacking better. It looks like I'm missing lots of entries but, in retrospect, most of the entries I had were pretty trashy in the first place. Really, the blogosphere is full of garbage, and this blog is probably no exception. Hopefully, with this cleanup, I'll end up with something more usable and interesting in the long run. If not, at least it will be faster to back up my website!

  31. Index by date for the blog

    I added indexes by date (in the right column) to allow searching articles by year, or a combination of year and month. It didn't take too much work, and seems to be a nice addition to the blog. I also reduced the font size on the right a bit. It's starting to get a bit cluttered, so I may want to rethink how I display the latest posts and tags.

    Of course, this blog is purely a hobby in of itself, so I may want to actually write some content eventually.

  32. Blogging software posted

    Click on the 'Download' link above for the source code of this blogging software. No guarantees, no complaining! Just run and enjoy.

  33. Blog progress

    I am starting to clean up the code -- a bit. I think I want to add some comments, but the plan is to make it available on this site for those interested. Hopefully, it's even a bit more fast now, but it's going to be as good as it gets; it could get faster if I saved off everything that I ever loaded from a file (maybe that's a good idea?), but it makes things even more bloated. It's nice to keep this down to a minimum of code. 28737 bytes today.

    I also added the capability of turning off comments (i.e. the 'About' link at the top of this page, or closing comments (allowing no newer comments to be added).

  34. About the blogging software

    The blogging software is coming along pretty well, today at around 26798 bytes total in one script, not including the CSS and data files. Here are some interesting things about this, specifically for people who are interested in the mechanics behind stuff.

    • Written in PHP
    • Flat files - does not require a SQL database
    • Agressive caching for static-like page performance, if the web page is not expected to change.
    • Picture uploading and embedding (not pretty, but it works ok)
    • Comments
    • Tagging

    I'm really not sure what's next with this. I may slowly transform this into a website CMS type system, but, for now, I'm happy with it as a simple and tiny blogging system. I think I'd like to add some static type web pages to this, in order to clean up my website, which has fallen into disrepair as of late. [Update: 2008-09-28 ... it now has static pages, too!]

    I won't vouch for the security of this, but security through obscurity will work fine for now. If you have any questions or ideas, add a comment or send me an e-mail.

  35. Tagging

    I added tagging to the blog today. Also added multiple index pages and various other fixes. Current size = 26572 bytes. The code base is still pretty small, hopefully getting better and faster with time.

  36. Faster blog

    I've implemented a caching system, based on the assumption that most things that people do when they come to a website are just read. Now, if the content hasn't changed, they get the last page that was displayed. It flushes the cache more often than not, but it should greatly improve the throughput of processing, since there is almost no processing for most pages.

    You can see the processed time at the bottom of the page.

  37. What now for the blog?

    Ok, so most of this blog is working pretty good. Maybe I'd want to add tags and subindexes in this. Who knows? Certainly not me. At least, if something bad happens, I have a fairly good idea about what I wrote, so the potential for me to fix it is pretty good. I know it doesn't have lots of fancy features, but it's all in one file, doesn't require SQL, and has lots of text files for data which should hopefully make things easy to do in the future. Or not. At least, it's compact and fairly quick. We'll see what happens as the future goes on.

    I still haven't decided if I want to make this open source or not. Got to get rid of more holes, first.

  38. Working on more stuff

    Getting better, I think. Size is 22331 bytes. Not that anyone out there cares, but I'm just watching out for bloat. Need to add some comments in the script.

  39. Adding new features to the blog

    So far, this blog project is moving along. Fixed a few major security bugs. I think the next step will be to add commenting to the posts. Shouldn't be too hard to do, but, well, there is some work that has to be done.

    I guess it would be nice to have something different in this blog than there are in every other blog in the world, but...oh well.

    So far, the code is about 18549 bytes total. Not too bad, could be a bit more compact, I think.

  40. Working on the Layout

    Well, I've been adding more and more "features" (if that's what you want to call it) to the blog here. I have a fancy second column now with links, dynamically generated stuff. Not too bad, though I really need to rewrite a lot of the code so it doesn't do the same thing over and over again. Pretty neat, actually. And, it's all in one simple php script, with text files.

    And, if it gets good and stable enough, maybe I'll open source it. Not terribly exciting, though.

  41. Welcome

    Well, the new blog is "live". Let's see how well this one fares! This is my third blog on this site. The first one, Thingamablog, I tired of due to its' having to upload content on each update. The second one, Pivot, died due to hacking.

    This is the third one...let's keep our fingers crossed. I don't have any images on here yet, though.

  42. Hacked...bummer

    Well, my blog got hacked. Ick. There are lots of terrible people on the net. As if I didn't already know that. Anyway, rather than complain about it and try to fix it, I thought I'd try my hand at writing my own blogging software. Let's see how it goes.

    If you hadn't noticed, this is now under construction....indefinitely.

    I've removed the old Pivot blog which had a few interesting bike to work comments in it, but nothing really Earth-shattering. I've moved those particularly interesting comments here.

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