Fuddland | Weblog Category Archive

Category: Site News

Entries concerning the design or build of this website.

Oh look, I’ve got a weblog

I realise this place has built up a few cobwebs over the last six weeks or so, but I’ll be doing some dusting and hopefully back into the swing of things soon, including the return of the genuine, actually-posted-from-my-mobile Moblog, thanks to a gorgeous new phone, although it appears that sending and receiving data over the mobile network is relatively prohibitively expensive out here.

[Interesting-ish aside: I can access Wikipedia from my phone’s web browser, but it’s blocked when trying to access over a standard internet connection.]

Anyway. Anyone still listening? How’ve you been?

In: China / Cultural Experiences & Site News

2007 / 09 / 18 – 02:53 | Comment [1] | Top

5 + 1/365.25

I was going to come up with some clever China-related/relativity-based time difference argument, but the plain fact is I’ve missed the five-year anniversary of the inception of Fuddland by one day [almost two days!]. Oh well.

1675 entries [an embarrassing, below-one, 0.92 entries per day], 4681 comments [a respectable 2.79 per entry], and Fuddland is still going. Not as strong as once she was, but there’re legs on the old girl yet.

In: Site News

2007 / 05 / 22 – 23:33 | Comment [1] | Top

What’s the Chinese for zoooooooom?

It’s been irking me for a while that some of the more complicated Chinese characters can be rendered illegible on this site when the font size is on the small side, so I set about cobbling together a Javascript-based text magnifier. Now, whenever you hover the mouse over some Chinese text, a nice tooltip-like box should appear displaying the characters writ large.

[Tested in current versions of Opera and Firefox, Windows XP.]

In: Site News

2007 / 03 / 27 – 09:00 | Comment [5] | Top

Unbrokened

Oops, the search facility and the comment-editing wizardry were both a little broken. ‘Tare fixed now.

In: Site News

2006 / 11 / 25 – 17:40 | Top

Four

1565 entries [1.07 per day], 4452 comments [2.84 per entry], and still going strong: today Fuddland celebrates its fourth year in existence.

In: Site News

2006 / 05 / 21 – 09:15 | Comment [5] | Top

As if I didn’t have enough to do

…mutter mumble blooming new version of Internet Explorer breaking my design mumble mutter mumble gripe…

Good job it’s only a beta version — I’m refusing to fix anything until the final version is out, so ner.

In: Site News

2006 / 02 / 07 – 11:20 | Comment [2] | Top

Too much to do

I really have got too much to do right now, so I’ll not be posting here for the next couple of months. Just thought I’d let you know.

In: Site News

2005 / 10 / 20 – 11:35 | Comment [2] | Top

The amazing disappearing, reappearing entries and comments

As Jann noticed, the previous entry and its associated comments disappeared from view sometime yesterday evening. In the interests of transparency, I’d like to point out that this was entirely accidental and not the result of some dramatic hissy-fit over a misunderstood comment.

Thankfully, even though it was deleted from the database, and before the nightly backup process had caught all the updates, the static file was still on the server and I was able to reconstruct everything — hooray for MT producing static and dynamic output! [Ooh, subtle sideswipe at users of a certain other popular CMS…]

In: Site News

2005 / 09 / 02 – 10:53 | Comment [3] | Top

Flickr feed parser update

Thumbnails of two of my Flickr images, with bevelled edges added by my script

Prompted by Gordon’s Laziest-of-the-Lazyweb-pleas plea, I’ve made a quick modification to my original Flickr-feed script, so that it now applies various effects [including greyscaling] to the grabbed images. [For example, mine are currently sporting a hint of a bevelled edge.]

You will need:

You’ll also need to ensure you have the GD Graphic Library installed — I’m not sure how you go about checking if it’s there [beyond the script failing]; it appeared to be readily available on my server so I’m assuming it’s fairly common for it to be installed.

See the original entry for more detail.

Read the rest of “Flickr feed parser update”…

In: Photos / Flickr & Indexed / GoogleAdsense & Site News

2005 / 07 / 29 – 11:43 | Comment [3] | Top

Three

1,416 entries [1.29 per day], 4,025 comments [2.84 per entry]: today Fuddland celebrates its third year in existence.

In: Site News

2005 / 05 / 21 – 20:04 | Comment [4] | Top

Ramblin’ on my mind

I could try and use this weekend’s unexpected loss [and subsequent full retrieval from backup] of my weblog database as some sort of backwards justification for not writing anything for nearly three weeks — if I’d written anything recently, the backup might…

Read the rest of “Ramblin’ on my mind”…

2005 / 03 / 09 – 08:31 | Comment [6] | Top

Unique words, part deux

Rejoice, for it is the return of the completely pointless, bandwidth-consuming, unique words list — this time in groovy random font-size weighted list styling that’s all the rage….

Read the rest of “Unique words, part deux”…

2004 / 12 / 02 – 23:51 | Comment [7] | Top

Hobo

Notice anything different around here? No? Well, I guess that’s a good thing. I’ve moved hosts again. Whilst Servage do offer good packages which would perfectly suit the majority of people, they fell short of satisfying the needs of this…

Read the rest of “Hobo”…

2004 / 11 / 30 – 21:42 | Top

Propagation

If you’re reading this, then the DNS transfer has propagated to your part of t’internet. Miss me?…

Read the rest of “Propagation”…

2004 / 11 / 16 – 23:44 | Comment [8] | Top

Moving

Server shenanigans going on, bear with me. Or, if spontaneous nudity is your thing, bare with me. Please expect everything to be utterly broken when the move goes ahead. Due to the new hosts PHP settings and my extensive use…

Read the rest of “Moving”…

2004 / 11 / 16 – 20:21 | Top

Bloghosts hosts blogs no more

Gosh, it appears my hosts Bloghosts have been forced to call it a day and close for business. This is rather sad as they really have been top-notch hosts; their customer service was particularly impressive. I’d like to personally thank…

Read the rest of “Bloghosts hosts blogs no more”…

2004 / 11 / 07 – 17:18 | Comment [35] | Top

Re-ordered comment form

I’ve made slight changes to the “Post a comment” section for entries on this site, in order to — hopefully — make things slightly friendlier for all you lovely people who like to comment on my nonsense. If [a] you’ve never commented before, or…

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2004 / 10 / 01 – 11:37 | Comment [6] | Top

The strangest error in the entire history of strange errors

I really am confused. When I first tried posting the previous entry — even when attempting to preview it — MT kept throwing up an internal server error [code 500, for all you HTTP status code fans]. After some investigation, involving writing a couple…

Read the rest of “The strangest error in the entire history of strange errors”…

2004 / 09 / 28 – 10:09 | Comment [9] | Top

Time out

Fuddland is closing its borders for a time. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading: friends, regulars, commenters, lurkers — you’ve all made it fun. I’ll be back later in the year. In the meantime, be sure to look after the important things…

Read the rest of “Time out”…

2004 / 08 / 06 – 09:54 | Comment [10] | Top

2.0027378507871321013 today!

Almost forgot to mention: yesterday was Fuddland’s second birthday, which I celebrated in style with a specially-chartered boat party on the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich; cheesy music, over-priced [and over-consumed] white wine, a bunch of my friends and bunch…

Read the rest of “2.0027378507871321013 today!”…

2004 / 05 / 22 – 15:12 | Comment [4] | Trackback [1] | Top

Switch it out

I’m simultaneously getting a bit more confident in my CSS and a bit bored with my current design, so I thought I’d spice things up with a couple of oh-so-fashionable alternate stylesheets. First up [but second designed] is a nice…

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2004 / 05 / 20 – 19:55 | Comment [2] | Top

User-editable comments

User-editable comments are go!

Read the rest of “User-editable comments”…

2004 / 04 / 17 – 14:02 | Comment [12] | Trackback [2] | Top

Attention Kinja users

It’s come to my attention that Kinja users can’t subscribe to my RSS feeds using their usual paths, because my robots.txt file prevents the Kinjabot from accessing them. [Kudos to Kinja for making their robot standards-compliant.] To overcome this, please…

Read the rest of “Attention Kinja users”…

2004 / 04 / 12 – 23:49 | Comment [3] | Top

MTIfNoEntries plugin

MTIfNoEntries plugin: conditional tag that displays its content if there are no entries in the current context.

Read the rest of “MTIfNoEntries plugin”…

2004 / 03 / 07 – 14:42 | Top

This friendly, friendly world

In one of the weirdest duets ever, for the Man on the Moon soundtrack Michael Stipe performs with Jim Carrey reprising his role as Andy Kaufman [and Kaufman’s alter-ego Tony Clifton], covering Fabian’s This Friendly World, and you can’t help…

Read the rest of “This friendly, friendly world”…

2004 / 03 / 06 – 20:13 | Top

Dynamically-generated MT category archives

Update: The following refers only to Movable Type versions 2.5 — 2.661, and not the dynamic features of MT 3.1x. I’ve never really figured out the best thing to do with entry categories. There are some categories for which I want to…

Read the rest of “Dynamically-generated MT category archives”…

2004 / 03 / 04 – 17:51 | Comment [3] | Trackback [1] | Top

Spot the differences

As Phil noticed, I’ve added a bit of shading to the entry and comment bodies, to make them look a little less flat; however, as I said in my reply, this is only visible to newer, non-IE browsers due to…

Read the rest of “Spot the differences”…

2004 / 02 / 08 – 18:32 | Top

Throttled

Despite my previous irritations, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MT. Since they’ve introduced comment throttling, I’ve also added Distler’s comment-, trackback- and search-throttling patches. If you submit a comment and realise as soon as you hit ‘Post’ that…

Read the rest of “Throttled”…

2004 / 02 / 02 – 09:53 | Comment [2] | Top

Wrong DVD I’m afraid

From my referrers files, I notice I’m listed in the DVD Directory at Linkcentre.com [I’ve got a strange misplaced sense of pride at being the first entry not actually related to proper DVDs]. What’s odd is that, from the…

Read the rest of “Wrong DVD I’m afraid”…

2004 / 01 / 29 – 07:52 | Comment [2] | Top

Feeder

I’ve finally gotten round to creating the RSS 2.0 feeds for the Moblog and Bugblog — it took me all of three minutes to copy over the template and alter a couple of things, so I don’t know why it’s taken me…

Read the rest of “Feeder”…

2004 / 01 / 28 – 11:40 | Comment [4] | Top

About face

I’ve added a proper Colophon to the About page, which I mention not because I expect everyone to find it fascinating, but because it contains links to virtually every resource I consulted during the redesign/rebuild of this site, which might…

Read the rest of “About face”…

2004 / 01 / 24 – 10:40 | Comment [2] | Top

Upgrade downgrade

The new upgrade to Movable Type, obstensibly to close a few more holes that comment spammers have been abusing, irritates me immensely. The major new feature is a change to the comment author link that MT generates — instead of being a…

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2004 / 01 / 15 – 16:11 | Comment [7] | Trackback [1] | Top

The underlying number system

As well as the obvious mathematical link of the Mandelbrot fractal background, I made some other numerically-based design decisions when creating the new look: Whilst I’m not suggesting you’ll find the answer to life, the universe and everything within the…

Read the rest of “The underlying number system”…

2004 / 01 / 03 – 16:51 | Comment [3] | Top

metamorphosis underway

i’ve started rolling out the previously hinted-at redesign in the other areas of this site apart from the weblog and front page — because i want the previously archived entries to retain the old look, and to make a clean…

Read the rest of “metamorphosis underway”…

2003 / 12 / 13 – 10:58 | Comment [2] | Top

if it ain’t broke, break it

i’ve accidentally deleted my .htaccess file due to, well, my own idiocy, so things might be a little bit screwy round here for a while. i think hope i’ve got a backup at home — if not, it might be…

Read the rest of “if it ain’t broke, break it”…

2003 / 12 / 04 – 15:50 | Comment [1] | Top

sneak preview

coming to a weblog near you in the new year……

Read the rest of “sneak preview”…

2003 / 11 / 23 – 22:27 | Comment [11] | Top

back from the brink

the conspiracy theorists can crawl back under their rocks, i haven’t been ruthlessly deleting comments and entries. now filed under ‘these things happen’, bloghosts had a sudden hard drive failure earlier today [for me, but in the middle of the…

Read the rest of “back from the brink”…

2003 / 11 / 20 – 18:16 | Comment [6] | Top

bye bye tie

a sad day as mrtn lets his registration of pinkshirtyellowtie.com expire. we eagerly await his next incarnation……

Read the rest of “bye bye tie”…

2003 / 11 / 05 – 19:51 | Comment [2] | Top

crossover

i think at least one comment [posted by phil] got lost during the time my hosts were moving my account to the new server, so sorry about that phil [and anyone else who might have posted a comment — i’ve…

Read the rest of “crossover”…

2003 / 10 / 29 – 12:44 | Comment [1] | Top

here we go again…

i’ve received an email from my hosts informing me that on tuesday night they’re transferring my account to a new, bigger, better, faster server. excellent news, except for one thing: it means i’ll have a different dns ip address. which…

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2003 / 10 / 26 – 11:54 | Top

bigger, but not necessarily better, moblogging

mainly to see if i could figure it out, i added some image manipulation to my moblog script — although the quality’s not exactly great, it scales the image to twice its size for the individual entry [mostly so it…

Read the rest of “bigger, but not necessarily better, moblogging”…

2003 / 10 / 25 – 00:27 | Comment [2] | Top

new tag discoveries

perusing the w3 school tag list, i noticed a couple of tags i’d not used before, and immediately realised i should be using them. the <col> tag tells the browser information about each column in a table, e.g. how to…

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2003 / 10 / 24 – 15:12 | Top

serving better pages to better browsers

following the raging success of my foray into .htaccess-controlled alternative file serving, i’ve got a treat for all you lovely opera 7.x users out there. when the rest of the world looks at my moblog main page, they’ll see a…

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2003 / 10 / 19 – 17:40 | Top

concealment

something i’ve meant to do for months: hide the sidebar checkboxes from browsers that don’t have javascript enabled. i’ve not done it before because i’ve never really given it serious thought as to how to go about it, but then…

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2003 / 10 / 18 – 00:30 | Comment [1] | Top

stylesheet forcing

since all flavours of internet explorer patently ignore min- and max-width css attributes, i’m sending anyone with ‘msie’ in their http_user_agent a special version of my stylesheet, which has a fixed page width of 750px. this was achieved with a…

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2003 / 10 / 17 – 09:00 | Top

comment spam-preventing measures

having not ever received a single spam comment, i’m in a fairly unique position amongst mt users to try out jacques distler’s preventative measures before any robots figure out where my mt-comments.cgi script is. once they’ve got its location, the…

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2003 / 10 / 16 – 16:29 | Top

chek yoar speling

thanks to the mt-speling [sic] plugin, if you use the ‘preview comment’ button when commenting on a post, you get a few suggestions of possibilites for words not in the ispell british and american dictionaries. it looks like i can…

Read the rest of “chek yoar speling”…

2003 / 10 / 14 – 23:30 | Comment [2] | Top

rearrangement

as perhaps some of you have noticed, i’ve got rid of the ‘fuddland is…’ section of the sidebar and replaced it with the latest entry from the moblog — the former section wasn’t really serving any purpose and i only…

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2003 / 10 / 09 – 21:19 | Top

mo’ moblogging

i know nobody really cares about this, but i’m fairly proud of what i’ve achieved given that i know nothing about coding in perl or the inner workings of mt. the moblog script now has a few bells and whistles:…

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2003 / 10 / 05 – 21:00 | Top

mobiley upward

i’ve been working on two new additions to the land of fudd for a few days now, and feel ready to give them a public airing. firstly, don’t you just hate it when you can’t get to your pc to…

Read the rest of “mobiley upward”…

2003 / 09 / 30 – 12:51 | Comment [2] | Top

cron jobs

finally, thanks to the power of the cron job, i can get things automated around here, rebuilding certain pages automatically at certain times: doodle-based, music-based, photo-based posts, the hours of blogging graph and the unique words list: rebuilt nightly just…

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2003 / 09 / 26 – 22:11 | Top

let me count the ways

[geek mode in full effect.] reasons i love bloghosts: a customisable .htaccess file means i can rearrange my directory structure without breaking links [lucky for me, since i had to use this function as soon as i moved]; design proper…

Read the rest of “let me count the ways”…

2003 / 09 / 20 – 19:36 | Comment [1] | Top

anybody out there?

if you can read this, then hooray! the dns transfer has propagated some way around the world. if you can’t read this then, erm……

Read the rest of “anybody out there?”…

2003 / 09 / 20 – 14:43 | Comment [10] | Top

bye bye word stats [part 2]

it was a tough decision, but a mere three months after i first got rid of, then wrestled with the php and reinstated as graphical representations of my weblog’s word stats, i have binned them again. for me, getting them…

Read the rest of “bye bye word stats [part 2]”…

2003 / 09 / 17 – 17:51 | Comment [1] | Top

overhaul

back in the days when i first started using mt, i didn’t really pay attention to the power of categories, and thought the best way to separate posts that were more photo-based or about music, was to create separate weblogs…

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2003 / 09 / 15 – 12:08 | Top

taking a step back

no changes have been made to anything bar the doctype, but i decided to declare this site as valid xhtml 1.0 strict rather than xhtml 1.1. after reading a bunch of stuff about what it means to declare a site…

Read the rest of “taking a step back”…

2003 / 09 / 11 – 14:25 | Top

customer disservice

apologies to any of you who witnessed a less-than-healthy looking fuddland earlier on; this was due to my hosts getting hacked over the weekend and changing the passwords of all affected clients, not telling us for a good day or…

Read the rest of “customer disservice”…

2003 / 09 / 08 – 12:30 | Comment [5] | Top

i’m watching you…

at long last i’ve found a web-stats tool that doesn’t log my own visits to my site, in the form of fluid dynamics axs visitor tracking system. owing to the fact that i have a couple of files that are…

Read the rest of “i’m watching you…”…

2003 / 09 / 07 – 23:32 | Comment [1] | Top

absolutely static

i’ve removed the sidebar from the root archives page, so that everything below /archives/ is static once published; more like a proper archive now….

Read the rest of “absolutely static”…

2003 / 08 / 18 – 15:45 | Top

manual blogrolling

i’m still not sold on the benefits of blogrolling.com, so i still manually update my list of blogs i visit. hence, two long-overdue additions: d4d and snowgoon….

Read the rest of “manual blogrolling”…

2003 / 08 / 13 – 14:08 | Top

trackback link rethink

trackback links now jump to the trackbacks section of individual entry archives rather than opening a popup window, to avoid the user getting stuck in a tiny browser window….

Read the rest of “trackback link rethink”…

2003 / 07 / 23 – 17:16 | Top

problem with numbers plugin

i spoke installed too soon — getting the following errors in my server’s log: Parens missing around “my” list at numbers.pl line 85. Useless use of a variable in void context at numbers.pl line 85. no idea what it means,…

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2003 / 07 / 22 – 22:48 | Comment [2] | Top

getting structured

each page is now properly marked up using <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags decorated with css — previously everything used a <h3> tag, although i’m not sure why i decided to do that in the first place. with correct markup,…

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2003 / 07 / 22 – 18:01 | Top

shorter sidebar

stream-lined the sidebar, removing links that were basically free adverts for various commercial sites, and am considering moving the ‘end credits’ section to an ‘about this site’ page of its own. updated the front page to reflect the changes to…

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2003 / 07 / 22 – 12:31 | Top

strange browser bugs #234,983,458

i almost went mad posting my last entry — i was utterly perplexed that a ‘greater than’ sign [>] was appearing instead of a full stop [.] at the end of the paragraph. the text in the posting textarea was…

Read the rest of “strange browser bugs #234,983,458”…

2003 / 07 / 21 – 20:48 | Comment [2] | Top

not so herish anymore

meg causes thousands of bloggers [me included] to delve into their template code and update their blogrolls as she moves from not.so.soft to me[ish], becoming all movable type powered along the way….

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2003 / 07 / 21 – 19:56 | Top

ordinals in dates

a nice little plugin by the name of numbers has added ordinals to the date’s day, which makes it read better. that is, ‘saturday 19 july 2003’ reads ‘saturday nineteen july two-thousand and three’, whereas ‘saturday 19th july 2003’ reads…

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2003 / 07 / 19 – 10:06 | Top

it’s all relative

i’ve got round to adding appropriate <link rel=”up” href=”the url of the next level up in the hierarchy” /> tags to the <head> of all the archives, in addition to the existing prev and next links. these allow keyboard navigation…

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2003 / 07 / 18 – 23:13 | Top

blockage

a preventative measure blocking people who left not-nice comments has been in effect for the last couple of days. i don’t mind constructive criticism and differing opinions, but i’d prefer the comments to be of the valid, intelligent kind rather…

Read the rest of “blockage”…

2003 / 07 / 16 – 16:56 | Top

don’t know my rss from my elbow

i’ve created an rss feed of my posts. i just don’t know why….

Read the rest of “don’t know my rss from my elbow”…

2003 / 07 / 13 – 17:18 | Top

category plugin switchout

i’ve replaced the exclude categories plugin with the catentries plugin, for the simple reason that the latter properly honours the lastn attribute, allowing me to specify that there always be n posts on the blog page [currently, n=10], no matter…

Read the rest of “category plugin switchout”…

2003 / 07 / 12 – 09:18 | Top

combine and conquer

putting the xhtml doctype and common html <head> tags into a separate file and php-including them into templates etc. allows me to quickly change or add globally used tags, as well as saving me 686kb of precious server space by…

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2003 / 07 / 07 – 23:24 | Top

bugblog-related updates

phew, i just remembered to update my robots.txt file to disallow ‘bots from indexing and caching the new bugblog directory and contents. luckily it doesn’t appear to have been too late. also added info about the bugblog to the front…

Read the rest of “bugblog-related updates”…

2003 / 07 / 07 – 16:50 | Top

alternative method for yearly archives

a new method to generate the annual archives, in the form of a dedicated plugin, has been released, and it produces the required output with less fuss than brad choate’s code. it also has the advantage of automatically generating next-…

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2003 / 07 / 06 – 22:55 | Top

bits and pieces

a few small changes: used the supplemental category tag mtifcategory to grey-out the backgrounds of bugblog posts if the bug has been fixed. added the line GlobalSanitizeSpec a href title,b,tt,i,br/,p,small,del, acronym title to the mt.cfg file to set the sanitize…

Read the rest of “bits and pieces”…

2003 / 07 / 06 – 17:03 | Top

bugblog

taking my perfectionism to greater lengths than ever before, i have created a new area of fuddland: the bugblog. as most people who have designed a website — be they professional or amateur — will be aware, it’s very difficult…

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2003 / 07 / 05 – 21:08 | Comment [8] | Top

dealing with sidebar overlapping

set the min-width attribute for the stats page so that the sidebar cannot overlap the plots at narrow browser window sizes [i.e. less than 860px]. i originally wanted to shrink the plots to around 420px wide, but doing this using…

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2003 / 07 / 04 – 23:58 | Top

downsizing

extensive use of the box model hack renders all the fonts the correct size and colour in earlier versions of ie. that should hopefully be the last of my pandering to non-compliant browsers. [until i redesign the whole site.]…

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2003 / 07 / 03 – 19:54 | Top

down and out

removed link to steve’s blog as he appears to have stopped blogging for now. links to other holidaying bloggers anna and meg remain in place as they provide access to archived posts….

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2003 / 07 / 03 – 10:23 | Comment [1] | Top

css inheritance

a few changes were needed to the css code to correct display problems in mozilla. whilst in other browsers, the min- and max-width settings in the <body> element are inherited by all children that don’t specify their own, mozilla didn’t…

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2003 / 07 / 02 – 12:05 | Top

commenter leaderboard graph

i thought of another simple graph to add to my stats: a ‘commenters leaderboard’. it displays the five most prolific commenters on my blog and their corresponding comment total. if you’d like to have one on your own site, first…

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2003 / 06 / 28 – 09:38 | Comment [7] | Top

how to make the word stats graphs

as promised, here’s what i do to make the pretty graphs displaying various blog word stats. this all assumes you’re using movable type — so sorry if you’re not, i’ve no idea about other cms tools. you’ll need the following…

Read the rest of “how to make the word stats graphs”…

2003 / 06 / 27 – 16:44 | Top

back by popular demand

okay, so only a couple of people were moved enough by the disappearance of the word stats to actually comment, but i liked the information they provided, so tonight i set about thinking up a better way to compute and…

Read the rest of “back by popular demand”…

2003 / 06 / 27 – 00:28 | Comment [3] | Top

bye bye word stats

things were getting slightly ridiculous with regards to the rebuild time for the unique word list and word stats-related things — to the point where my server apparently hung during rebuilds. hence i have been forced to stop rebuilding the…

Read the rest of “bye bye word stats”…

2003 / 06 / 23 – 15:09 | Comment [4] | Top

show your stuff

i’d noticed that if the cookie does not exist, the sidebar sections are initially hidden — ideally i’d want them to all display, with their respective checkboxes checked, so it’s more obvious to a new reader what the boxes are….

Read the rest of “show your stuff”…

2003 / 06 / 16 – 14:46 | Top

old and new updates

the updates page shows the ten most recent design-related posts — now there is a second page in this category which shows all the remaining posts, for a complete record of the changes i’ve made to the design of this…

Read the rest of “old and new updates”…

2003 / 06 / 15 – 19:18 | Top

non-pop-up trackbacks

i’ve made the individual archive totally self-contained by adding the entry’s trackback url and any pings recorded to the bottom of the page, rather than appearing in a pop-up box — now no javascript is required to view all the…

Read the rest of “non-pop-up trackbacks”…

2003 / 06 / 15 – 17:57 | Top

goodbye google

after hurrying the process up somewhat by submitting the url of my robots.txt file to google’s automatic url removal system, a google search for fuddland now throws up only the front page, followed by some mentions on other lovely sites….

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2003 / 06 / 15 – 13:49 | Top

official ‘2,000th comment on fuddland’ moment

yes! the proper, official, i’m-pretty-sure-there-aren’t-any-unintentional-duplicate-comments-in-the-archives, 2000th comment has been made. erm, by me. so, i’ll save the prize and award it for the 3,000th comment, yeah? righto….

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2003 / 06 / 14 – 01:44 | Top

faster inclusions

a rebuild-speed improvement should be evident due to the caching of files called by <MTInclude> tags. i have two included files that are called in virtually every template, one containing the macros that are used by the mt macros plugin…

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2003 / 06 / 11 – 14:54 | Top

when in doubt, ask an expert

after deciding i couldn’t figure out how to get the calendar month headers to link to the corresponding month’s archive page [on the condition one existed], i emailed brad choate — the author of the code that generates the annual…

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2003 / 06 / 10 – 15:53 | Top

archival in the correct sense

another rethink about archiving. i decided that i wanted my archive pages to be just that: pages that were not dependent on current activities. for this reason i’ve removed all trace of the sidebar from the monthly, daily, and individual…

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2003 / 06 / 10 – 11:40 | Top

by jove i think i’ve done it

i bit the bullet and delved deep into my “show\hide sidebar sections” javascript this morning — a last-ditch attempt to get it working in mozilla. and i reckon i’ve done it — in the end, it required changing only one…

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2003 / 06 / 08 – 12:10 | Comment [1] | Top

joining the club

seems like i’m not the only one who isn’t too interested in visitors to my blog from google search hits. although my reasons weren’t to do with google’s apparent lessening of blog importance [in fact, mine was a purposed effort…

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2003 / 06 / 07 – 20:41 | Comment [2] | Top

plan a [revised]

the original plan of installing linux was resurrected after one of the system administrators turned up with an image of a linux build on a hard-disk. he just copied it over to one of my partitions then spent half an…

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2003 / 06 / 06 – 12:56 | Top

no more overlap

i’ve hopefully finally fixed that irksome problem of the sidebar overlapping the posts if the user’s browser text-size is set larger than average. obviously the design should be size-independant — i can’t assume that no-one is going to need large…

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2003 / 06 / 04 – 23:30 | Top

putting a stop to search hits that do no one any favours

this post essentially says: i’ve stopped google indexing fuddland. if you want to know why, read on….

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2003 / 06 / 04 – 19:29 | Comment [5] | Top

more speed, less waste

decided to make the ‘recent links’ sidebar section a small separate file that is php-included into the sidebar. the reason for this is that the sidebar gets rebuilt on every comment as well as every entry [because it contains the…

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2003 / 06 / 04 – 14:22 | Top

dashed links

i added a div.blogbody p:hover a:link {border-bottom: 1px dashed #336699} to my css, so that — for browsers which support it — when the mouse is hovered over a paragraph in a blog post, all links in the paragraph are…

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2003 / 06 / 01 – 22:54 | Top

mammoth task complete

finished at last… i’ve edited each one of the four hundred or so posts that were imported from blogger, making the html valid in the entry body and associated comments [without altering the content of either — at most some…

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2003 / 05 / 30 – 01:11 | Top

more ie weirdness

fixed a bug in the ‘recently commented on’ sidebar section: in ie, when you moved the mouse over the links they wobbled by a pixel’s height and the border went screwy. apparently ie has a problem with <div> <a href=”…”>link</a>…

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2003 / 05 / 29 – 10:38 | Top

i can be in two places at once

i’ve add a dummy category to allow for posts to appear in both the blog and updates pages. in the blog template i use <MTEntriesExCat category=”fuddland design”> [courtesy of the exclude categories plugin] to exclude the posts that should only…

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2003 / 05 / 28 – 11:20 | Top

backtracking

i discovered a whole bunch of duplicate comments — about a week’s worth — were made during the great comment import, which means the race is back on for the two-thousandth comment on fuddland. only sixty-three to go……

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2003 / 05 / 27 – 10:40 | Comment [7] | Top

annual archives added

as discussed the other day, and deciding that it was a more interesting task than sorting out the imported posts, i’ve now got calendar views of the entire year’s blogging for 2002 and 2003. handy for ‘i wonder what dvd…

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2003 / 05 / 26 – 17:37 | Top

colour change

changed the colour of <a> tags to match post titles. previously they were a slightly lighter shade of blue than the titles’ colour but it wasn’t really noticable unless you put them next to each other, and even then you…

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2003 / 05 / 26 – 10:40 | Top

reorderage

reordered the ‘stay here | in fuddland’ sidebar section….

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2003 / 05 / 25 – 23:49 | Top

import\export revisited

can’t export your yaccs comments in the right format to import them into mt? why not email the guy who runs yaccs? you never know, he might just flick a switch, then chuck you an email back saying now you…

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2003 / 05 / 25 – 02:55 | Top

more about annual archives

further to my post mentioning annual archives, i’ve discovered that prolific plugin-writer brad choate had a similar idea, but a much more sensible one. initially i had envisaged building a page containing — in chronological order — every post from…

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2003 / 05 / 24 – 23:29 | Top

sizing up

taking pity on those who have no control over which browser they use, i’ve implemented the ie 5 box model hack [i was convinced by the argument in simon willison’s css case study]. the problem is when using the verdana…

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2003 / 05 / 23 – 12:02 | Top

import\export

yowzer! in a completely irrational fit of nostalgia, brought on by the recent first anniversary of blogging, i’ve just finished importing my posts and their related comments over from blogger and yaccs respectively — using the mt manual’s instructions for…

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2003 / 05 / 23 – 01:17 | Top