Tag: website

It’s what you are looking at now, jerky!

New Web Hosting

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You probably don’t notice anything different, but I have switched Web hosts. MediaTemple was acquired by GoDaddy and very quickly their service turned to crap. GoDaddy incessantly tries to up-sell stuff and they charge for just about everything you can get for free anywhere else. Most annoyingly, they phased out unlimited e-mail addresses that MediaTemple would always offer. GoDaddy sucks. Avoid them like the plague. Giving Namecheap a try and so far they’ve been great.

Also: I’m just now discovering that many of my beloved em-dashes were converted into curly-apostrophes when I migrated off of drupal. This will require a post-by-post search of the database with some clever regex tokens.

Is Anybody There?

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Okay, how about this: I just spent around a week updating this site and, in order to celebrate(?), I’m going to hold a little contest. I get a little trickle of traffic every day and I am always wondering if anyone actually reads this stuff. So here’s the plan, I will send an original print, The Politics of Against, to the first person to send me an email using my contact form with the subject “Send Me Free Art!” Make sure you leave a valid e-mail address on the form and I will contact you if you are the winner. Check back here and I will post in the comments if the prize has been claimed. This contest ends midnight CST on Sunday, Sept. 15. Ready… set… go!

Upgrading to Drupal 7

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Well, I’ve finally decided to upgrade this site to the latest verison of Drupal. The actual process of migrating to version 7 wasn’t too bad. The majority of issues came from Views and fields not being named or typed the same way they were in Drupal 6. Changing all the views by hand was not that difficult and it allowed me to do a bit of how cleaning withing views. Views in Drupal 7 is sooooo much better!

The biggest challenge has been recreating the site’s theme. Although the general look and feel is more or less the same as before, I have made some visual tweaks here and there. The biggest change has been the fly-out menu and the switch to a responsive, mobile-friendly layout. I’m still working on getting that finished, but for the most part the site looks good on just about any size viewport.

The only downside to the switch to Drupal 7 is that my host, MediaTemple’s Gridserver, has performance issues with the new system. There are a couple of tweaks that help, mainly changing references within the database file from “Innodb” to “MyISAM.” I have no idea what this does, but it helps keep the database from freezing up and timing out on the Gridserver.

Download Martian Law Music!

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With the demise of Drop.io I have had to find a new place to offer MP3s of my musical project, Martian Law. In the process, I have rearranged the site a bit and given all my releases their own pages: The Exciting Sounds of a Compaq P133 and Upgrade Downgrade. I have also added a new track for download from the 2002’s Lumpenwave 80s cover compilation.

Did You Notice Anything Different About Me?

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After a back-to-back Drupal projects at work, I think I now have a better idea how this system works. In the process, I have updated the design of my Nonagon site and reworked the theme of this site. You may not notice any major differences, but now things are much more organized under the hood. However, I am guessing that I broke a few things, so if you notice any pages not rendering decently, please let me know in the comments.

Comment Spammers Ahoy

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You know I loves to get comments. But let’s not deceive ourselves here, visitors and their witty comments are a rarity around here. I was quite excited to see that I was getting lots of comments in the last day, but it turns out some less-than-moron with small genitals is taking the time to answer CAPTCHA forms just so they can post links to their stupid male-enhancement scam websites. For the time being comments are disabled until these trolls go away.

Oh, Hello There…

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Although I try to minimize political posting here on the Pages of Fun, about a week ago I decided to run with a post featuring a “Tea Party” protest poster I created: Teabagger / Teabaggee. I tweeted (I hate that term… almost as much as webinar) a link, got a few dozen hits and that was that.

However, yesterday I started to get all sorts of notifications of new comments in my inbox regarding this post. I went and checked my analytics account:

Analytics!

This could graph could mean one of two things: anthropogenic global warming is real and we are all on the cusp of the apocalypse, or someone on the Internet with many more readers than me linked to my page. Fortunately it was latter. I was able to back track to find out where all these hits were coming from:

PJTV’s Stephen Green (a.k.a. Vodkapundit) featured the post on his weekly show, The Week in Blogs. In fact, he referred to it as “The Photoshop of Week” and “The Blog of the Week.” Also (and I’m not sure if this came first) I was also linked on Glenn Reynold’s mighty Instapundit blog!

In the immortal words of Three Stoned Men, “Smells Like the Big Time!” Ok, time to check my Google Adsense account and see all that money I raked in:

Google Adsense Winnings!

Dammit.

Drupal Update

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Well, I just updated the core version of the Drupal CMS on the Pages of Fun from 6.12 to 6.13 and it went pretty smoothly. One thing that I did discover is that it pays to update all your modules before doing the core update. I had earlier tried to update and the system completely failed on install because of a problem with the out-of-date Admin Menu module. Only a complete reversion to the backed up files saved me. Backing up is ever so very important in this whole process. Anyhow, I am really loving Drupal and I hope to build more sites with it in the future.

New Website Launched!

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Well, it’s official. Robert Wm. Gomez’s Pages of Fun have moved to a new, personalized domain name: www.robertgomez.org! I was surprised I was able to get the .ORG domain (robertgomez.com has been taken for as long as I have been checking).

In addition to this new address, The Pages of Fun have been completely rebuilt from the ground up using a fancy content management system called Drupal. I’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the site as close to the previous version as possible. The most noticeable change is that the layout has gotten wider to accommodate for all of the content management tools and navigation elements of Drupal. You may also notice you favorite page is gone. I tried to move everything over, but a couple things got lost in the move. But don’t fret. Now the site is searchable!

Design tweaks aside, the new system will make updating my site so much easier for me. That MAY mean more frequent updates, and, after a decade of resisting, this site might officially become a blog! Like other bloggy sites, I now have opened areas for visitor’s comments—that could be a mixed blessing. We’ll see how many spazzes feel the need to chime in.

One more thing. I now have a proper rss feed. I will be glad to never have to hand-code XML again. Please go to rss.xml and subscribe to stay on top of the latest additions to the site.

My RSS Feed Troubles

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I’m pretty sure I am only only person who has subscribed to my RSS feed, but, in any event, there’s trouble brewing with the feed. I want to reorganize the home page a little and that means I need to change the RSS script at Feed43. The problem is that I lost my password when I moved to the new computer and they don’t have a password recovery service. SO, if you are a subscriber and don’t hear from me for a while, please check this page occasionally to see if I have updated my RSS service.