Webloggery
Thursday, June 03, 2004
All is right with the world
The Panda's Thumb is live and online again!
Thumbs down
You may have noticed that the Panda's Thumb has been inaccessible since yesterday. Rumor has it that those big storms in Texas have left the server without power. I'm sure it will be back up as soon as it is physically possible.
Creationists, you may credit this to the efforts of your latest prayer meetin', if you'd like.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
How Blogs Work in 7 Easy Pieces
If you're already an old hand at this weblogging thing, you won't be much interested in this simple summary of the weblogging process—but I'm making a note of it here because it might be handy in the Fall semester when I have to explain it all to a bunch of students.
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Still tinkering, sawdust is flying
This Expression Engine is a powerful tool, and I'm finding all kinds of nifty things I can do with it. The blogroll over there to the right is getting shaken up rather extensively right now; if you're used to seeing yourself on it, don't be offended if you've disappeared. It's only temporary as I plod through the process of reviewing and entering links.
Friday, May 21, 2004
Changing stuff around...
I've just switched weblog software from pMachine to Expression Engine. Things are mostly the same, but it'll take a little while to shake out all the quirks.
The old pMachine software is still lurking around here, so old URLs will still work—but there won't be any new entries there, and I've turned off comments on that software.
If you are using a reader and the syndication tools here, note that the URLs for that have changed.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
No burnout here, either
Tyler Cowen has a few words about blogger burnout. He's not experiencing it, and I have to agree with all of his points on the process. For me, a weblog is like brushing your teeth. When you're a kid, it's a chore, and you feel like you've pulled a good one over on your parents when you skip it some night. But eventually you realize it's no trouble at all, it actually feels kinda good, you do it without hesitation three times a day, and you start doing it spontaneously whenever your mouth feels a little fuzzy. You begin to find the hygiene of people who ask if you ever get tired of it a little bit suspect.
And the long posts on biology? That's like flossing.
I think I'll stop the metaphor right there, though, before I get to root canals.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Absolutely essential Mac OS X alert!
There's a scary security hole in Mac OS X, but it's easily fixed. You might want to do it right now.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Score!
This site is based on pMachine Pro—I rather like it. I figure I’m just doing my part to maintain species diversity in the blogosphere. It’s also nice to sit here feeling bemused and aloof at the recent MT-3 kerfluffle. Speaking of MT-3, though, the clever fellows at pMachine saw an opportunity to get people to switch to their new tool, Expression Engine, and have been offering a number of free licenses this weekend. Lucky me, I snagged one—so in the next week or two (depending on how long it takes me to puzzle out all the nifty new features), I’ll be switching over. It looks like it should be relatively painless, won’t cause any major disruptions in how things work, and should give me some new features and better performance.
And even better, my brand new PowerBook G4 has shipped and should arrive this week: 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, and the special super-secret laser death ray option. Soon enough I’ll be hammering out weblog posts at four times my current rate. At least I think that’s how it’s all going to work, anyway.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Warning - they're pulling the plug tomorrow
Pharyngula is going to be inaccessible tomorrow, Sunday 16 May, from 10AM (or earlier) to 6PM (or later), while the host goes to Sunday School, several church sessions, and a big potluck supper with a bunch of Lutherans.
Nah, just kidding—the physical plant crew is doing some major maintenance on the campus electrical system, so everything is going down for a good part of the day. I plan to continue to practice my heathenish ways, only privately and without network access. My fish, on the other hand, are going to be without their bubblers and heaters and filters, and they may take up prayer.
(but don’t worry, fish lovers—8 hours without their accustomed water conditioning will make them worry a bit, but won’t really hurt the fish.)
Thursday, May 13, 2004
IE sucks
I got a look at Pharyngula on a PC running Internet Explorer today, and it was a little bit cringeworthy. I saw what long comments did to the page—stretching the box out of the boundaries of the left sidebar, which motivated me to reduce them to the minimal dab you see now—and just generally everything looks flat and clumsy. I’m going to have to spend a little time working on this later this summer. I’m not quite prepared to completely dismiss all IE users, but jeez, it would sure be nice if more people would adopt Firefox or Opera or Konqueror or Safari. As you can see, IE is the most common browser that hits these pages:
Listing the top 20 browsers by the number of requests for pages,
sorted by the number of requests for pages.
#pages: %pages: #reqs: %reqs: Gbytes: %bytes: browser ------: ------: ------: ------: ------: ------: ------- 61616: 41.51%: 925057: 63.57%: 10.28: 53.60%: MSIE 19873: 13.39%: 33178: 2.28%: 0.81: 4.21%: Googlebot 13893: 9.36%: 173312: 11.91%: 2.02: 10.55%: Mozilla 10629: 7.16%: 29485: 2.03%: 0.87: 4.52%: Netscape (compatible) 7869: 5.30%: 13406: 0.92%: 0.34: 1.77%: msnbot 7641: 5.15%: 111662: 7.67%: 1.47: 7.66%: Safari 7406: 4.99%: 13905: 0.96%: 0.41: 2.15%: Baiduspider 4406: 2.97%: 47331: 3.25%: 0.85: 4.45%: Netscape 1961: 1.32%: 43753: 3.01%: 0.37: 1.91%: Opera 1422: 0.96%: 3853: 0.26%: 0.19: 1.01%: MSProxy 1146: 0.77%: 1870: 0.13%: 0.06: 0.33%: Gigabot 836: 0.56%: 1004: 0.07%: 0.02: 0.12%: UbiCrawler 658: 0.44%: 748: 0.05%: 0.03: 0.14%: larbin_2.6.3 512: 0.34%: 1622: 0.11%: 0.03: 0.16%: NaverBot-1.0 467: 0.31%: 6144: 0.42%: 0.06: 0.31%: Galeon 454: 0.31%: 3422: 0.24%: 0.03: 0.18%: Konqueror 323: 0.22%: 369: 0.03%: 0.02: 0.08%: Butch__2.1.1 309: 0.21%: 501: 0.03%: 0.01: 0.07%: kuloko-bot 296: 0.20%: 346: 0.02%: 0.01: 0.06%: CrawlConvera0.1 284: 0.19%: 1081: 0.07%: 0.04: 0.21%: TurnitinBot 6453: 4.35%: 43200: 2.97%: 1.25: 6.52%: [not listed: 721 browsers]
