Adam's Blog

I've spent quite a bit of time, over the last 5 or 6 days, diving into WordPress and learning what makes it tick. Parts of WordPress are really impressive - just flat out cool. The way some of it works is fairly complex and deciphering it sometimes means reading page after page after page to understand an entire routine. But sometimes, when you finally see, end to end, how something in WordPress works - I mean really see individual bits of the engine - you have to admit it teaches you a little about PHP. WordPress, underneath it all, is a pretty big beast and its strength and ubiquitous presence comes largely, I think, from the fact that it can do virtually anything. The really sweet plugin system, the ways hooks work, "The Loop," the dynamic options panel - it's all very educational. The interesting thing here is that I've browsed the source of Slash, Scoop, phpNuke, and now WordPress, and all of them are definitively more complex and much heavier than the entire OSNews codebase. Now, before you jump all over me - firstly, Slash and Scoop are Perl, and I don't really read Perl, so I can't speak...

Having a young baby means you are lucky enough to get to watch have to endure kid programs. Some are better than others, but nearly all of them are painfully repetitive. Shows like Dora the Explorer are, at first glance, mind-bendingly boring. But after a while, you start to appreciate the little nuances and differences, such as when a bad guys gets away with something they usually don't (like that bastard Swiper Fox). I've grown to appreciate The Wonder Pets and even Pinky Dinky Doo. But my new favorite kids show is The Backyardigans. Your backyard friends This is the basic premise: in each episode, some subsection of five talking, dancing, young animals meet in their backyard(s) for a pretend adventure. They "imagine" the adventure, and along the way, they sing songs - not just kids songs, the show is a musical. Each episode also features a new genre of music, some as simple as "Rock N Roll," but others are as specific as "zydeco." Along the way, they dance, and the dances are actual animations of real kids dancing fed through some process to make a computer representation. The thing is, the songs are pretty catchy. And what's worse,...

To those of you that read sethadam1.com via RSS, I'm sorry about the recent difficulties. My conversion to Wordpress is almost entirely complete, including handling all old links, etc. I have a few legacy things left to fix. In the meantime, I realize that my feed has been screwy for the last few days and I'm sorry about that. It should be fixed now, so that likely means another 20 dupes or so, I can't control that. But I can tell you that I think we're all caught up. Thanks for hanging with me.

Bloglines released a new "skin" on their Bloglines Beta this week. Having been tied to the speed, look, and feel of the live bloglines.com, I decided to give it another shot. Let me tell you, this one is head and shoulders better than the previous version. Here are a few notes. First of all, the default skin is really nice. Unlike the last one, this one is a little more "Plastik" and a little less glass. I may be making this up - but since the entire experience is smoother, it feels lighter and more responsive. The slow "clicking" of posts is gone. Whereas before, if you scrolled down in Opera and other browsers it would slowly chunk down the page, it now scrolls smoothly and easily, without effort. The fonts and basic layout are both familiar and attractive, and the javascript is very pleasant in its fading and other dynamic effects. This is the first of the Bloglines betas that I could use everyday and the first I prefer to the live site. Way to go, Bloglines team.

Thus far, my move to Wordpress has been an adventure. Here's a few lessons learned. First off, I was very excited about the features of Wordpress. I was really excited, most specifically, about the API, and about the rich text WYSIWYG of the backend. I've done a lot of work on Small Axe's backend, but it's still nothing compared to Wordpress. When I imported my stuff, it worked well, but the "slugs" -- or URL-friendly post titles -- did not convert properly. They converted as Wordpress friendly, properly escaped slugs. The problem was, my slugs needed to stay intact, because I didn't want all old links to break. Understanding the way Wordpress functions is really tough for a WP newbie, because the code is so spread out, yet compact, voluminous, yet digestible. Start with index.php, onto wp-blog-header.php, into wp-settings.php, and then you find the massive list of files in the wp-includes directory. You'll dig all over trying to find files to find includes in includes in includes. I finally found a great article that tries to explain the Wordpress slug architecture. It's fairly complex. Much of it lives in/wp-includes/query.php. However, my problem was very specific. Many of my post slugs...

Here it is, the tenth and largest ever revision of sethadam1.com. After a long decision-making process, I decided to migrate to Wordpress. There are a number of reasons why I did this, but here are a few. First of all, Wordpress is actively developed... a lot. Small Axe is a lot of fun, but it's a hobby, and although one I enjoy, it was a lot of work. On top of that, certain features were a challenge for me that I simply never had enough time to implement, such as a quality API. With Wordpress, I can post from my iPhone. Or Flickr. Or Digg. Etc. I was also able to preserve my permalink structure with this code. I've developed a decent standing in Google, one I'm fearing I will have destroyed with this migration, but it was important that my links be maintained. Themes with Wordpress are a snap. Honestly, changing the look and feel is cake once it's uploaded. The migration to Wordpress was PAINFUL! Importing the feeds was easy enough, it can be done via RSS, so I quickly edited my RSS script to output my whole blog. Boom! Done. But getting comments in was a lot...

Overall cleanliness I'm talking overall. Are there nasty paper towels thrown about? Are there available trash bins? Tightness of the TP holder Does the toilet tissue roll easily or is it tight? When you pull it, does it break before it rolls? Are There Seat Covers? These days, it's commonplace to have toilet seat shaped tissue that cover the potentially offending public lid. I think most appreciate that as an option. Is the Floor Dry? Is the floor wet and nasty? Or is it dry and shiny? A wet floor - not wet from mopping, which is also bad, but wet from... uh... general use - is disgusting. Dry floor is always best. Noise Level/Fan Presence All bathrooms should have ambient noise. A small fan provides a level of discretion for any given stallman seeking to expel a standard dose of flatulence. Silence in a toilet is horrible for a stall-goer with company by the urinal. I can only imagine this is ten times worse in the ladies' room. Paper or Dryer? Are there paper towels or an air dryer? Ideally, there should be both. Some prefer one or the other. Although air is cleaner (or so "they" say), I...

I learned most of my HTML skills by reading the source code of the web sites I frequently visited. Of course, when I learned HTML most web sites were static and those that weren't almost exclusively used Javascript for dynamics and CGI for processing. Nowadays, reading source code is much less beneficial, as most web sites use server-side code and databases even to generate standard pages. The origin of sethadam1.com is long and varied. The first version of the website was static HTML with a little Javascript. Version 2 added some very basic PHP. Shortly thereafter, I began planning a way to make sethadam1.com as automatic as possible with a small script I wrote called php_news_system. The original templating system developed for sethadam1.com was named tubecode and was originally intended to be a free software package available for download. php_news_system served as one part of the tubecode package. Not long after the 0.8 release of tubecode, the code was reviewed and I decided to begin a rewrite to place more emphasis on security, flexibility, cleaner code, and more adaptable general use. It was renamed Flip. When Flip projects began to deviate from the original intent, tubeCode was resurrected as the...

I've been pretty liberal in completely redesigning my website for some time now. I built this site sometime in August of 2000, using my own HTML. All dynamics were achieved... well... faked... via re-uploading static HTML files. Version 2.0, a major overhaul, arrived shortly thereafter, and version 3.0 completely migrated to PHP as the base. The site thrived as a Phish music archive and when I moved away from that, I retired what was then version 4.0, and several versions followed until this one, version 9. But alas, shortly, I will begin the design of sethadam1.com version 10, and it will be a chore, as I intend to modify most of the tables in my underlying database. Many features I wish I had implemented long ago - such as subscribing to threads and letting users enter a website, thereby not exposing their email address - are long overdue and virtually omnipresent in other weblogs. I've even tossed around using another blog engine and just migrating my data, but then, where would I play? My primary goal, though, for sethadam1.com 10, will be a radically simpler and more attractive interface. I like some Web 2.0 mainstays. Expect larger text, brighter colors,...

Facebook today launched their long in-the-works redesign. I've been following it for at least 4 months or so, and today it appeared live. After many iterations, this may actually be the one I like best. But alas, I use Opera, and strangely, this version doesn't play well. Many links flat out don't work, there's weird Flash that Flashblock blocks with every page load, and worst yet, the thing is actually parsing A LOT incorrectly. Check out the below screenshot, and be sure to click on it for the full size version.