Asides

  • May 5 - Words of Wisdom

    Without getting into the whys and hows this statement came about, I find it very simple, yet poignant and applicable to many of life's situations.

    We're still learning to walk, and we're going to trip every now and then and sometimes when we run, we're going to fall on our faces. But as long as we get up, try again, and learn something from the experience, in the end, skinned knees and all, it'll be worth it.

    Thanks Sean.

    edit - might I add, I'm in a new-ish romantic relationship, which very recently hit a bump, and perhaps this analogy hit home there more than anywhere.

  • May 1 - Mac SVN Monitoring Widget

    SVN Notifiier is a handy little Mac Dashboard widget that, using Growl, will notify you when a local working copy is out of date. I've not quite gotten the "sticky" notice to work, but I just might need to edit the actual Growl settings.

    Still, it's nice to be able at a glance check your dashboard, or see a little growl notice pop up.

  • April 26 - Apple Drivers in VMware Fusion

    I think with the help of a google search and Scott Gruby", I've figured out how to use my bluetooth keyboard in VM.

    Finally, I found a reference to inserting the Leopard DVD while in Windows. I tried this and when I did, the BootCamp driver installer came up and installed my drivers. Perfect; why couldn’t VMWare say something about this on their website?

    Thanks Scott and I agree, why isn't this documented somewhere.

    Edit 8/1/08Seems you also have to disconnect the USB Bluetooth Host Controller to get it to work. Something about only one OS can control the device at a time, so the machine gets confused when the two are both connected. Disconnecting the controller, shutting down the XP install, then restarting VMware Fusion finally got it working.

Leaving the Nest

April 30

This past week it was proposed and not shot down in flames that my first foray into a Habari theme, mzingi , intended as a simple, image free theme to be used as a foundation for building proper themes, should be included into the core download of Habari.

I was humbled and honored to say the least, and so from here on out, all development for this project will be maintained by the community.

Thanks to all who've helped, and shared their appreciation for it's intended purpose, and I trust the community will continue to use it for creating full fledged themes. Feels a little odd, but satisfying at the same time.

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Quick Update on Themes

April 28

I recently updated my themes, and since that time a change has been made in trunk in how pagination is handled. All 3 three themes have been updated for this change. I will be leaving download links for the previous versions up as well, as I believe those versions should work with 0.4.1. If you experience any problems with either version, please set me know.

Downloads and more info on each theme available on their original post.

Also, I have a demo site up and running to check them out. I still need to tweak the themeswitcher plugin so you can only select certain themes from your theme directories, so note that only my 3 themes have the switcher code.

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Updated Themes

April 24

I've been quite lazy (or busy, you decide) lately, and have been meaning to update the 3 themes I've released to work with the latest trunk. Previously, I kept decent todos and a svn repo for mzingi, but this time I simply bore down in some late night frenzy and got everything up-to-date. I've got a new svn repo to work with, and will check them in at some point in the next few days, and hopefully will be able to better outline any changes.

Basically the changes to mzingi were minor, just a few code changes for things like atom links, and updating the YUI fonts and style sheet. I also added some styling for draft posts.

As far as swanky and Harvest Field, they have more extensive changes, most evident in the sidebar content. Harvest Field now only uses built in code for the footer content – the about, recent comments and more posts links. The sidebar in Harvest Field is entirely plugin reliant now, sans the search and subscribe link. It supports by default the Twitter, linkoid (for aside like posts - which is also excluded from the more posts offset) and the very nifty blogroll plugin. All three have their own templates in the theme. I also added support for the credits due plugin, with a built in page template, and conditional code in the footer. Also, I borrowed the watermark for draft posts from michaeltwofish's connections theme, and a little more emphasis on comments in moderation styling.

Swanky was also updated to use the current Twitter plugin/template, as well as added support for the blogroll plugin. If these plugins are not active, nothing will show, nothing will break. Recommended plugins are listed on the themes page. As with Harvest Field, the draft watermark and comments in moderation were addressed.

As usual, if you find a bug, or would like to see something added/need help, please leave a comment either on this post or the original post for the theme in question.

So without further ado :

Also, I'm putting the finishing touches on a demo site, which I'll be adding links to the aforementioned theme posts. Just need to decide how I want to add the theme switcher code (I'm trying to decide between adding a new fixed element at the top of each theme, or simply adding the dropdown to each sidebar).

As always, much thanks go to the community for the help and assistance in putting these together.

Edit Twitter, linkoid, blogroll, and credit due plugins can be downloaded from Habari extras

Second Edit To clarify the "Credits" feature is accomplished by 1)activating the creditsdue plugin from extras 2)create a page with the slug "credits", you can add additional content to the page if you want 3) there is no three (I've always wanted to say that!).

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What's Habari?

April 22

Chris Davis quoting Owen Winklerfrom IRC on what Habari is.

Certainly couldn't have said it better myself.

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Migrating Servers

April 15

What an experience this has been. I hope to write a comprehensive post at some point about the experience, but suffice to say, it's been quite the crash course on Apache, Debian, and DNS.

It all started with some curiosity, in which I purchased a Slice, and began poking around with the many tutorials they offer.  Ultimately, Owen provided me with his LAMPME script that did the basic setup for a debain, apache2, PHP 5, MySQL 5 set up, using mod_vhost (please don't quote me on any of this :-D ), which sorta got me going.  I got a bit sidetracked, and confused with setting up phpMyAdmin (I'm not that comfortable with CLI yet), and let the whole thing just sit, unused for a month or so.  However, due to the persistent problems with MediaTemple grid-servers, I vowed to stop shelling out money to them for the hassles.  If my sites go down, I want to be the one to blame, and no one else.  Besides, it's high time that I learn more about this aspect of web development.

So, armed with help from Skippy, and some new found confidence, I got everything set up so as to have a basic understanding of how/where things go, and started moving domains.  I'm just about done, with this being one of the last.  If anyone notices anything wonky, assuming I have visitors, please let me know.

Also which is quite cool so far, is that I'm going to deploy the multi-site functionality of Habari to minimize the number of actual installs I have on the server, as I run everything off of head, this means less outdated installs.  Right now I'm looking at having just 2 actual installations, with everything else running off of those.  So far it's worked out fine, though it took a little playing to get paths for things like images and files sorted out.  More on that later.  Certainly something that needs more attention, especially as silos mature.

Thanks to everyone who've helped in the process.

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