Site Updates

I guess I needed a new experiment.  I’ve recently returned to cycling after an extended absence and while Oklahoma City has improved dramatically as a biking city we’ve still got a ways to go to become a real bicycle friendly metropolis.  One thing that I’ve found lacking is the difficulty to find information about cycling resources in town.  The trail maps haven’t been updated in ages and there just doesn’t seem to be a very active web group out there disseminating information.  So, I decided to put this site together.  I know that there is a lot of work to do, but all great journeys start with small steps.

For all six readers I’ve got out there, some of you may have noticed that my site has been down for the last few days. My long neglected Tom Waits blog got hit by a massive number of spam bots to the point that my hosting provider was forced to bring my site down for an overabundance of CPU usage. I was forced to bring down the Tom Waits blog in order to get my service restored, which was not too much of a hurt since I haven’t found any time to really start that site back up. In any case, I’m back up and running now . . .

Well, I toiled and toiled to make a completely personal design for the new RadicalWacko.  It turns out that CSS is a pain with so many tricks, hacks and caveats that it makes me truly wonder about the value of table-less layouts.  Take, for example, this “simple” explanation of the so called “Holy Grail Layout".  It almost seems that tables aren’t such a bad thing after all.  However, who am I to buck popular opinion?

Well it’s been a fun weekend spent working on Radical Wacko.  I’ve been wanting to be a bit more active on the site for awhile now, but technology was holding me back.  After a couple of years of tinkering, hacking and patching, the site had become an almost unmaintainable mess.  Even my WordPress installation had started giving me trouble with unexpected plugin errors.  I was scared of making the simplest of updates on the fear that the thing might finally just break down completely.  Additionally, a bunch of legacy code was laying around doing nothing but cluttering up the place.  Therefore, it felt like the perfect opportunity for some real house cleaning.

The site will be going down this weekend for a complete redesign.  I’ll post again when the upgrade is complete.

It is always sad when it comes time to kill code that you worked hard to create.  When I first built the galleries here on RadicalWacko, gallery code libraries were cumbersome and services like Flickr were nothing more that a gleam in the eye of some entrepreneurs.  However times change and it’s good to try to keep up with them.  I was spending a large amount of time (something that is in very short supply these days) updating my galleries with new pictures.  The entire system was pretty slick for a custom built job, but still it took to many steps to get stuff published. 

I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.

Thanks to the excellent help of the guys over at WordPress, the feeds are back. Besides this little set back, 1.5 is a great product. The theme system alone is enough to make it worth while. I’m still evaluating looking at a .NET product, such as DasBlog, so that I would be in a better position to edit the system, but for the time being I’m shelving any conversion for the time being.

Sorry folks, but there are some blog issues I’m working through right now. While the upgrade to WordPress 1.5 seemed to go fine, all of my RSS feeds are returning 404 errors. My php skills are very poor so it may take me awhile to get them back up and running. If I can’t, I’ll have to switch of a .NET blog engine where I can understand the source code. ;)

As you may have noticed, I’ve released a correction to the background image so that the prominent repeat lines are no longer visible. Thanks to Andy Sheppard for the fix, though I have to say the simplicity of the fix makes me feel real stupid. (See Previous Post)