6 March 2023, late morning
In the past when I would post a photograph on this blog I would resize it to 423px, so it would fit neatly in the enclosing box of a post. This is annoying and fussy work just to add an image to a post, and I don’t recall if the reason I was doing it at the time was to save bytes when downloading these pages or what. I want to be a bit more future proof going forward in case I end up redoing the layout here, making the main column wider for example. The image in the post about Craig Mod is 1024px. It’s scaled with CSS, or it should be. This seemed both fussier than it should be, but also seemingly so easy I should have done it from the start. I’ve set width:100% and height:auto to override the values Textpattern sets. This should scale the width to match the containing box, and the height to scale to keep the aspect ration. I’ve also set max-width: 100% so the image never has to scale up past its actual size. This later step probably not needed based on how the blog is currently designed: to fit on old 640×480 screens. Please let me know if i’ve broken the layout here!
Web Design
1 November 2022, early morning
It’s weird to break this blogging hiatus after my mom’s death to talk about how the character encoding on this blog seems to be broken, but it does make me crazy every time I visit this site right now. I assume at some point Dreamhost has upgraded MySQL and/or PHP and left my site in some weird state. One day I’ll have some time to figure this out. Till then, use your imagination when you see some garbage characters.
Weblogs
2 April 2020, mid-afternoon
When I first launched this site I really customized quite deeply a lot of the bits and bobs that make Textpattern go. Now, a million years later, I just don’t have the time an energy to do that. Dreamhost upgraded the version of PHP running on the server that hosts this webpage, promptly breaking the version of Textpattern I was running. I sort of expected that to happen. I have upgraded to Textpattern 4.8. I think it’s quite impressive that it seemingly worked without a hitch. This is just stock Textpattern. I’ll hopefully do a better job of keeping it up to date since the upgrade process is so seamless if you aren’t following it up with a bunch of porting random code. Let me know if anything is broken.
Stay safe: there is a pandemic happening.
20 November 2012, mid-morning
Today is another anniversary of A Funkaoshi Production. It’s been a while since I’ve called out this blogs “birthday”. The blog is 8 years old now. There are very few things I’ve kept up with for this long. The blog is definitely much more quiet now than several years ago, though I still try and post a link or two everyday. I think the first 2-3 years of the blogs life were its golden age. Whenever I stumble on a post from back then it’s always something enjoyable to read. (Remember when I saw Namugenyi on the street two days in a row!? Yeah, me too!) I suppose there are a couple factors that have contributed to this blog getting quieter over the years. The first is that I surf around on the internet way less than I used to. As the blog has slowly transformed into a lame form of Kottke links became the primary thing I post here, and I do that far less frequently now. The second is that the inane blurbs about my day to day life seem to have migrated from here to Twitter. Stupid Twitter. I need to make posting here easier: that’s a project for 2013.
[8] Weblogs
9 May 2012, mid-morning
Expect the links to flow freely once more.
19 April 2011, early morning
Sorry if my site redirected you to some malware site. Apparently someone injected some PHP code into the index.php file that everyone hits when they browse this site. I’m still not sure how. That’s what I need to look into now. Well, after work, anyway.
Weblogs
9 April 2010, late morning
When I first started this site I had a category for posts called interesting links. As the name suggests, this was the category I’d assign to posts that were about interesting links. The posts would show up on this site looking like a normal post, with a title, the date, etc. Generally these posts were in a style similar to how Kottke posts links now: they were just smaller blog posts about something I found on the net. One problem with this style was that there were plenty of times where I wanted to link to something without really saying anything more on the subject: some links are interesting without me having to explain why, or write more than a sentence about. So one day I sat down, mucked around with TextPattern, and switched to the style I have now. Lots of sites run their link logs like this. Two of note are Daring Fireball and Shawn Blanc.
If you use my site’s RSS feed, when you click on the title of a link-post you’re taken to the post I was linking to. I have an extra link tacked onto the bottom of the post (when viewed in a feed reader) that will take you to the post on my site about the link. The idea is that people can read the few sentences I have to say on a topic in their feed reader, and then move on to the real content. The only real reason people would want to visit my site rather than what i’m linking to is if they want to comment on my site about the link. I would say this is standard behaviour for a link log. Daring Fireball and Waxy.org link to sites in their RSS feeds in this manner. Shawn Blanc does not. Shawn Blanc is doing it wrong. His site is great though, so I keep reading anyway.
If you use keyboard short cuts when using your feed reader, i’m sure you feel my pain.
[2] Weblogs
19 February 2010, late morning
I’ve been backing up my website from my web host (Dreamhost) to my local computer automagically for the past little while. The process isn’t too complicated, so I thought it might be helpful to explain what i’m doing. (Well, you probably need to know a little bit about computers and what not.)
Read the rest of this post. (375 words)
Weblogs
12 January 2010, late at night
I took my original photoblog down sometime in November 2006. When I moved all my sites over to Dreamhost Movable Type, which was what I was using to run the site, stopped working. I can’t recall why. At the time, I wasn’t particularly enamored with Movable Type anyway; I figured I’d eventually move things to Textpattern. I did do this, but it took me a good while. The thing is, the site never really worked as well under TextPattern. While the site was on hiatus I put all the photos I had posted over the years on Flickr. There were 718 photos in total. Without titles and descriptions though, it was really just a big mess of images. My plan was to one day figure out how the Flickr API worked, figure out how to parse my Movable Type export file, and then fill in all this information. It took me 2 years or so, but i’m finally done.
I did this all using Ruby. I used FlickRaw to talk to Flickr and ruby-mtexport to parse my MT export file. Thankfully all the images on my site were named after the date they were posted, which made it easy to match up data in the export file to a photo on Flickr. I can’t recall the last time i’ve been so productive when programming. Ruby really is a great little language.
For the time being Flickr continues to be the place to go to see my photographs. I still want to turn IMG VQVZ into a proper photoblog or portfolio site. I just need to sort out how that would work.
Code | Photography
22 September 2009, early evening
I finally got around to updating the site to TxP 4.2. If anything looks strange, please let me know. (Things that are likely to break: RSS/ATOM feeds.)
[2] Weblogs
11 August 2009, late morning
If you have been paying attention to the internet recently, you may have learned that tr.im is shutting down. tr.im was a URL shortening service, like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, etc. tr.im had a winning url, but apparently that’s not enough to make it as a URL shortening service. One problem with URL shortening services is being illustrated right now. At some point in the not too distant future all these tr.im links are going to be dead, despite the fact what they point to is still up and running. It’s probably a better idea for sites themselves to provide short URLs for those cases where they are actually useful (for example, posting links to twitter). So, with that in mind, all the posts on funkaoshi now have short URLs. Right now they are exposed in the shorturl link element in the HTML header for each article on this site. I’ll put them up some place more visible shortly. I need to set things up so the short URLs redirect to the real URLs. These short URLs should redirect to the correct canonical URL.
[2] Weblogs
7 August 2009, late morning
This sites RSS and ATOM feeds should be working again. I realized very recently that my site was generating invalid guids for the entries in my feeds. This has been happening for ages, since I didn’t populate these fields myself when posting links using my own bookmarklet. Sorting that out seems to have fixed Bird Feeder, which I use to track what links are popular. Links in my feeds should now redirect to the proper sites, rather than dumping you on my homepage. If there are still problems, let me know.
Weblogs
26 July 2009, late at night
Previously, when I linked to anything to this site it would get posted to Delicious as well. I don’t like Delicious as much as I used to — I think the site is too crazy now — so I’ve switched to using Pinboard. I think Pinboard has a much nicer (simpler) interface. I’ve flipped the way I link to stuff as well. I now bookmark things in Pinboard, and then review what I’ve bookmarked to pick stuff to link to here. Ideally, this should mean I link to less crap here on Funkaoshi. You’ll have to let me know how that’s working out. If you want to see all my bookmarks, you should pay attention to my Pinboard page (or RSS).
Weblogs
23 July 2008, early morning
I’m getting much more comment spam on older posts recently. I’m trying out a new plugin that will flag posts as spam or for moderation based on keywords or the number of URLs in a post. Of course, blocking by keywords is kind of obnoxious, so I replaced the default keywords with strings of text that I could see showing up in the comment spam I’m getting, “[/link]” and “[/url]” for example. I’m pretty sure filtering out comments with those two keywords will actually get rid of all the spam I’ve been getting here recently. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes.
Update Aug 07: A couple weeks later and this strategy is working great.
Weblogs
6 April 2008, mid-afternoon
It has been quite some time since I’ve written a plugin for textpattern. This plugin is quite simple; it will produce a list of the plugins you have installed in textpattern. To use the plugin, simply place the tag <txp:rsx_plugins_table /> in a form or page template. The plugin will produce a table, which you can style with CSS if you feel so inclined.
Download the plugin: rsx_plugins_table.txt. More information can be found at the Textpattern Forum thread for this plugin.
Update: I’ve added a new plugin that generates a definition list of your installed plugins instead of a table. This may be good for people who were trying to display the table in a very narrow space. I’m using this plugin right now on my about page. To use the plugin, simply place the tag <txp:rsx_plugins_list /> in a form or page template.
Download the plugin: rsx_plugins_list.txt
Update May 29th 2006: You can now decide to not show inactive plugins in the listing or table by using the show_inactive parameter.
Update Apr 6th 2008: You can now decide not to show the description field in the list or table by using the show_description parameter.
Update July 13th 2009: The code for both plugins is available on GitHub, as are the plugins themselves: rsx_plugin_table and rsx_plugin_list.
[3] Code
7 January 2008, mid-morning
I’ve set up a simple page to post the photos I take with my iPhone while out and about. (These are the photos that I email off to Flickr.) To mix things up a bit I’m also pulling in the junk I write on Twitter, which I usually update via SMS. The page works by processing a feed I made using Yahoo pipes. Every half hour a ruby script grabs the feed and generates an HTML using Erubis, which looks to be a better implementation of ERB. This works well enough for now. The first thing I need to fix is having the script do nothing when there is nothing new in the feed. I would also only like to generate the delta between the old feed and the new feed, appending the new information to the old. Right now, old entries are going to disappear when they no longer appear in the feed, which is no good.
Weblogs
27 November 2007, mid-morning
I’m a week late for this site’s anniversary; November 20th 2003 is the day I consider to be the first day of funkaoshi.com. (I summed up the history of the site reasonably well the day it turned 1 year old.) This site has been online for 4 years and change now. That seems like a long time. The site hasn’t changed too much in those 4 years. I watch a lot less movies now then I used to, which sucks, but otherwise I think the site still has the same vibe. Lots of inane posts with me bitching about America mixed in. (I actually feel like I’ve toned down the bitching about America a lot, but that might just be in my head.) At times I feel like I should redo this layout, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.
[10] Weblogs
16 October 2007, mid-afternoon
That page where I had links to blogs I read and what not is now gone. It was bith horribly out of date and, according to Mint, unused.
[3] Weblogs
16 August 2007, early evening
I finally got around to fixing my ATOM and RSS feeds for my link posts. When I link to another site, the link you click in the feed will take you to the site, not here. I think this makes more sense. The ‘#’ at the end of the link description will take you to the post about the link on this site.
[4] Web Design
2 August 2007, mid-morning
I started using del.icio.us links back in May 2004. At the time I didn’t post links to this site the way I do now, inline with larger blog entries such as this. Interesting things I found on the net would get their own little blog post, regardless of how long or short that post might be; I wasn’t fond of doing things this way. Shortly after I started using del.icio.us, I began posting the links from there on the links page here. The page was populated with my last 10 or 20 links on del.icio.us, in addition to the links that are currently there. I also wasn’t too happy with this scheme, since it forced people to browse to another page to check for new links. That solution was short lived. When I started posting links here inline with my posts, I also started cross-posting those links to del.icio.us. This worked seamlessly till August 9th 2006. By this time I had really stopped checking my del.icio.us links page to see it was being updated properly, so I didn’t notice things had stopped working till some time in December. del.icio.us had changed its API and I hadn’t noticed.
Recently Jody mentioned he wished I posted my links to del.icio.us. (He is a lot more creative with the way he uses del.icio.us than I am.) Up until this time, no one had really said anything about the loss of my links on del.icio.us. I had really only been cross-posting for the sake of doing so. It was a programming exercise and that’s about it. Yesterday, I sat down and tried to figure out what had changed between del.icio.us and my script. The details are short and boring, but it didn’t take too long to fix things. My links are now being cross-posted to del.icio.us again.
A side note on PHP, and languages that let you pull variables out your ass: declaring a variable before you use it is a good thing. For example, in Pascal I wouldn’t end up with a bug like $title = urlencode($tittle);, which left me wondering why $title is empty when you urlencode it. Maybe i’m just a sucker.
[1] Weblogs | Code
17 May 2007, lunch time
Discussing the state of Textpattern is in vogue at the moment. Apparently Textpattern, which is the software I use to run this site, is in dire straights, and “the long term prognosis isn’t good.” It would seem that it lacks direction. The developers disagree on that point. This topic comes up on occasion in the Textpattern forum. People seem to want Textpattern to become Wordpress, but at the same time, don’t want to simply use Wordpress. Drew’s post on this topic is actually one of the better ones I’ve read, though I’m not sure I agree with his take on things.
Read the rest of this post. (423 words)
[3] Weblogs
6 February 2007, early afternoon
I’m redirecting any hits to this site at www.funkaoshi.com to funkaoshi.com, dropping the superfluous www. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but just read an article on the topic, and it seemed as good a time as any.
[4] Web Design
31 January 2007, mid-morning
Here are instructions for using Bird Feeder with Textpattern 4.0.4. This isn’t an ideal solution, as it involves modifying atom.php and rss.php. C’est La Vie.
Read the rest of this post. (230 words)
[6] Weblogs
29 January 2007, early morning
When I bought Mint a year and change ago it was a decision I put a fair amount of thought into. When I noticed late last night that the software had been updated I upgraded almost right away, vaguely aware of what the new features would be. This isn’t a good way to buy anything, but I figured the new Mint would be at least as nice as the old one. The set of new features is fairly terse. I don’t think it’s worthwhile buying of upgrading software based solely on its immense feature list. You want to buy stuff that works well. It looks like the way Mint works has been improved upon a fair amount. A lot of things have been cleaned up nicely. There is a new feed reader pepper by Shaun that looks promising, though its installation is a bit more involved than that of normal peppers so I haven’t had a chance to give it a run. The way the panes in the interface stack is a big improvement over the old layout of the interface. I’ll have more to say after using the new Mint for a little while I suppose. Of all the software I’ve bought, Mint is probably the one I use the most — next to World of Warcraft I suppose.
[2] Web Design
4 January 2007, mid-morning
Yesterday I was so frustrated with how slow the site felt I emailed Dreamhost. Over the last few days I noticed it was taking upwards of 6 seconds to get anything form the database. If we were living in the 60s I think I could let that slide, but it’s 2006: nothing you do on the internet should take 6 seconds. Dreamhost responded to my email very quickly. I got a reply to my email from a fellow called Justin who sounds like he is a real person. They moved my database to a new server, which looks to have fixed everything. I can’t stress how much of an improvement Dreamhost’s customer service is over 1&1s. I mean, the fact you don’t have to seriously dig to find their support contact form already made them winners in my book even if they ignored my email.
Weblogs
