I haven’t posted in a while. It’s been about three weeks.
I mean, of course you’ve got the Christmas holiday — I went home for a week, and Mom and Pop still have dial-up in Chipmonk. Then there’s the busy-ness before the break, the stuff after. And don’t forget New Year’s.
So that only gets me to about January 3rd. I actually started a rather lengthy post. No, let me rephrase that: I wrote a lot for a post. And then I lost it all. PowWeb was having issues with MySQL that day, and I lost the post. Pfft. Gone. Up in smoke.
The post was about IM clients — Gaim and AIM Triton. I wrote a bunch of stuff about features, my experiences trying each out, and why I chose not to use either. I hadn’t gotten to the part about how the crap Triton put on my system has left me considering a format.
That post was also the first time I had tried out WordPress 2.0’s authoring interface. It’s a little bit different, and a little prettier, but I must point out that it doesn’t work well with the Google Toolbar Spellchecker. This leaves me feeling very melancholy. Hopefully I spelled “melancholy” right, because I sure as hell ain’t gonna spellcheck it.
So yes. There’s a post. Happy New Year. If the Colts had managed a miraculous come from behing win today, I would have made a post today with the words “holy crap” involved.
I moved in to my new apartment on Monday. I was at my sister Maureen’s over the weekend. The drive from Allegany to Arlington is about six hours, and the drive from Arlington to Atlanta is about ten hours.
My apartment community has a website that allows residents to set up utilities before moving in, so gas and electricity were on when I got here. However, I didn’t get Internet until today, which is why I am writing this now.
I have no furniture, but I was at Ikea yesterday and Target the day before. I found some stuff I like, and hopefully by Monday I’ll either have everything or at least ordered it.
I just finished uploading all the old posts. The archives now go back all the way to April 2002. Before this version of the site, none of my posts had titles. For continuity, I read each post and created a title for it.
Check out the very first post, The Best Time of the Day.
You may also notice a slight change to the layout of the site which resolved several issues: My email address is now more prominent, the Login link is easier to see, and the archives links are at the bottom of the nav, so even as they continue to expand they will not force any elements farther down the page.
There is a new maintenance release of Firefox out today, I think. If you take a look at issues in the release notes, you’ll see a disabled, work-in-progress, enable-at-your-own-risk “single window mode.”
In one of my previous Firefox gripes, I called for just such a feature. When I discussed it with Lewis he claimed that this would disobey the wishes of the site developer. I admonished him, and he cried.
Speaking of old gripes, my next big move will be bringing back my old posts, at least as far back as the last version of the site. I may just upload the old files, but I’m considering manually entering each post into the current version of the site. If I (re)insert entries from one version back, I might as well do it for all of them. I like this idea a lot for two reasons, one of which is vain and one of which is functional: I will enjoy seeing my “Archives” section date all the way back to 2002; And the old entries will become completely searchable. Plus there’s Permalinks … I might lock out comments on old posts, though.
Wordpress released version 1.5.1 Monday. I installed it Tuesday morning. Apparently it makes the system run faster.
You might also notice that the title of the page is slightly different.
It’s been leading up to this for several years — On the previous version of the site, I upped the “Dan Premo” and made the “Historical Context” very small. Then I got the danpremo.com domain — and not historicalcontext.com. Why? Well, eight letters is easier than seventeen (or even fifteen). And maybe — maybe – there was a little narcicism involved.
Anyway, even back in college I thought about dropping the Historical Context moniker. What can I say? I’m moving away from it.
Please update your bookmarks, favorites, and links. Although www.danpremo.com still works, I’ve decided to go with the shorter, dare I say — cooler, URL of danpremo.com.
As is tradition, I will now complain about my new hosting provider. (I did it with Tripod and I did it with 1&1.)
Complaint #1. PowWeb features WordPress autoinstall. Great! Only thing is, it autoinstalls WP 1.2.2. The current version is 1.5. I ran the automated install, looked at it for five seconds, then deleted all the files (and all the tables).
Complaint #2. Apparently PowWeb allows me to upload only two files simultaneously via FTP. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue with day-to-day or even month-to-month site maintenance, but I uploaded WordPress three times in the last two days, and it’s a hassle. Additionally, some of the timed-out uploads didn’t resume, so I had to go through the entire WordPress folder structure and ensure all of the files were present and at the correct file size.
I decided to bite the bullet and move the page over to WordPress. I haven’t developed my own theme yet, but I have put some time and thought into one.
Additionally, I changed my hosting provider. PowWeb has more of what I’m looking for for a little less money than 1&1. Due to the nature of the Internet, 1&1 still handles my domain, for six bucks a year. I haven’t yet figured out how to manage subdomains when I go through separate companies for domain and hosting.
I modified the color scheme a few days ago. You might not even notice. The top and left edges are darker. You can tell the difference (more or less) by checking out the old page.
I still have aspirations of extending the effect to all four edges of the screen … and keeping it there even when you scroll down. The only site I really see doing anything technologically along the lines of what I want is Bungie.net. At least I’m happy knowing that the whole thing renders correctly in Firefox and it validates.
So besides the dubious layout wishes … maybe next I’ll create a database system for the posts … something generated on the fly … I’d like that.
