Finally got around to making that new skin for the blog. This one is very bright ^^;; but I like it because it's so cheerful and colorful! Even if it might be a bit hard to read! LOL :)

I haven't properly mobile-friendly'd this skin. Just fixed a few basics. But the widths and menus haven't been taken care of yet. When I have time! :)

Okay, so I got tired of the dark skin, I knew it wouldn't take long :)

Switching back over to my bright 'n' cheery daytime skin now. The bonus is, it's much easier to read! :)

As for the Nucleus issues, things are actually relatively stable at the moment so long as I stick to my current combination of plugins and script versions. As discovered, NP Random 1.4 and Access Control v.1.5 seem to work relatively well for Nucleus v3.70.

On Nucleus development version 3.80 (a recent March download copy, which I think is already slightly out of date now, but it works well enough for my needs at present!), NP Random 1.4 and Access Control v1.42 work ok.

On v.3.70, the normal internal Nucleus blog backup function doesn't work for me (might be specific to my webhost, not sure), but NP Blog IE seems to work ok for exporting just items, and I find that mysql backups from phpmyadmin or cpanel usually work best for me if I really need to restore something, anyway, so I'm just doing my backups that way for now.

On v3.80dev, both the normal internal blog backup function and NP Blog IE seem to be working fine with no problems.

So I'm taking a little break on the troubleshooting for now, until I get around to updating the version I'm using for this blog, which is a little outdated. That will probably break something, but hopefully it won't be too difficult to fix! :)

» read more...

Hadn't actually planned to have a contact form for this website, originally. Put one up just for the fun of the exercise more than anything. Then I realized that it was such a simple form it would probably get spammed to death once the site gets found by spammers, so I decided to add captcha verification to the form. Didn't want to have to go through the bother of signing up for ReCaptcha and all that, so I'm using a different thing.

It can be a bit difficult to make out the characters in this captcha plugin, but I don't want to remove the extra noise yet. We'll see how it works out. It's a very forgiving form though, I mean you can reload the page any number of times and try again, quite quickly, so if you don't guess it correctly immediately just try again.

It's not any worse than Google's "I am not a robot" tiles, after all - I always fail those repeatedly :) (Am I the only one? I find them extremely imprecise. They say roads, or store signs, or whatever, and then they show you very unclear pix that look like they seem to have a tiny bit of road in the corner.

Or they say store signs and then apparently there is some arbitrary Google rule why some signs qualify as store signs and some don't. Or road signs ditto.

So I always click on anything that looks remotely like the target item just to be on the safe side, and it probably dooms me to being identified as a robot :)


tags: captcha, recaptcha, mail forms, contact forms

Ok, this is pretty funny. Or not :)

So I made a nice new skin and then things got really busy and I ended up never quite getting around to updating the blog.

Now here we are a year later and I've made several more new skins - actually the first one probably looked the best but I was in the mood for a different look so this is what you get for now :)

I took the whole "mobile-friendly" thing as an excuse to go back to being more minimalistic, which I often kind of prefer anyway. So this is quite a quiet skin - quite retro actually, as you can see. I've taken out all the noisy sliders and things, and left just the content. It's also the darker side - the other skin, which I'll probably switch to again at some point - in fact I'll probably switch around quite often :) - is much brighter and more of a "cheery daytime" skin. This one is a sort of peaceful, contemplative, camping in the forest at night, watching the stars and listening to the birds kind of skin :)

There's a fair bit of invisibility in this skin as well. The scrollbar for the content is fairly invisible (depending on your browser ^_~) and so are the HR bars. The content on the right scrolls semi-independently of the sidebar on the left, which is a rare departure for me :)

My only problem at the moment is the fonts. I used two new fonts, Barlow Regular and Museo/Museo Sans. (Thank you for making them free, fonty people!!!) I liked the look of them both, but I'm not sure they go very well together, and I'm not sure they're very readable, either. Though that may be the fault of my background. But I really like looking at these background pix :) (Thank you for making them free, Unsplash and Unsplash photographers!!!!)

And it's not that I don't have any content for the blog either. I've actually been writing up a ton of notes on various issues I've been troubleshooting this whole time. So many in fact that it's more of a "my heart quails slightly looking at the pile I have to import" thing ^^;;; But actually I guess it's not a bad thing. I will just post one whenever I have the time. At least I know I probably won't run out of things to post any time in the near future :)


tags: site updates

I've spent the last couple of days in a mini fever of activity, updating the site and doing up a new skin, putting in a contact form, fixing problem plugins, adding new pix, etc.

I like the new skin better than the old one. The old theme was pretty but slightly less readable, and also somewhat darker/dimmer to look at. This one is a little more cheerful. Not as cheerful as I originally intended, because of the background image being a little darker than what i was originally thinking of, but it's not too bad and feels kind of peaceful, so I don't mind it. I'll probably make another brighter skin later anyway.

The new contact form worked at first try. Which really surprised me :) Usually it requires some troubleshooting before things move smoothly, but I apparently managed to get everything working right the first time for once! No, not completely - there was an issue on the backend, but it was minor and didn't affect the mail being sent out, and it was quickly and easily fixed, so not a big deal.

Ok. Now to go back to actually making posts! :)


tags: site updates

Spent all day working on a new skin for this blog, only to find that the Tags plugin was for some reason not working.

After poking and puzzling at it all day, I finally figured out that it was clashing with the Skin Chooser plugin.

Would never have tumbled to it if I hadn't accidentally noticed that the Skin Chooser dropdown on the skin that worked correctly was automatically switching between the chosen skin and the Tags plugin skin whenever I clicked on a link.

That made me start looking in the direction of Skin Chooser. Before that I thought it had something to do with the tags php file not directing the link properly, which didn't make sense since nothing had changed since the last time it was working fine. Then of course I realized one thing HAD changed - I'd made a new skin today and switched over to it to test it! :)

Anyway, it looks like Technorati Tags only works with the default skin (whatever you set in blogsettings and configuration options). If you use the default skin, the tag links will work normally and everything will be just fine. However, if you use the Skin Chooser dropdown to temporarily switch to a non-default skin, Technorati Tags will stop working on the non-default skin.

You'll still see the tags and tag cloud, but when you click on the tag links, they won't show the search results properly. Instead, they'll simply load all the posts as though you called index.php.

Not a huge deal since I only use Skin Chooser for myself. Visitors will only see the default skin, which will always work properly, so it's a tolerable problem.

I also solved two other plugin issues yesterday, which I'll post in a separate item.

tags: nucleus, plugins, skin chooser, Technorati Tags, site updates

[Update, Sat, 3-05-2016, 6:23:50 PM: I'm porting all these entries in from the old site backups pretty much higgledy-piggledy, so if you're wondering why they don't make sequential sense, yeah, that's why :) The entry below should probably have been the first/oldest one I entered. Oops :) Needless to say, it's now almost four years later and things have come a long way :) And, of course, most of the stuff referenced below is no longer valid, since the current design and blog script are all completely different from what was on the old site.]

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:08:41 +0000

This is my first attempt to do an entire website completely in/from a Linux-based operating system. I am not allowing myself to leave Linux at all for this, though I guess I might be cheating a little bit by using some programs via Wine :)

One of the hardest parts has actually been to put a header graphic together in Gimp, which I have had absolutely zero experience with prior to now. It has certainly been a bit of a learning curve, and it takes me so long to do the simplest things that I find myself often thinking longingly of Photoshop. Most likely I will probably try to install PS in Wine soon, for times when I just can't afford to take all day figuring out how to edit something or other in Gimp, but I am going to try my best to stick with it and get used to how Gimp does things. Nothing like being thrown in the deep end for learning something new, right? ;)

Anyway, I'm mentioning this primarily to explain why the header graphic looks so awful *cough* not-so-hot at the moment. I may have to use Photoshop as a crutch for a little while just to get this part done :)


tags: Gimp, Photoshop, linux, site updates