I was checking over the referral urls section on my blog stats and it seems someone emailed a link to my blog to someone on yahoo. weird.
My 3D Design and Animation lecturer reckons he’ll be able to disable firefox’s text zoom feature on his “widescreen” site. Ha. Ha I say. Like I think I told him, the only way to do that would either be easy to reverse or done as an extension to firefox. So basically, pretty impossible to do.
His site by the way, uses iframes for layout and flash for navigation. Ha.
I am annoyed and frustrated about being taught obsolete and semantically incorrect techniques.
I’ve managed to import the important stuff out of the disk image: bookmarks, history & saved passwords. Had a little hassle with the saved passwords but a quick google fixed that.
A couple of weeks ago, I installed the foxylicious Firefox extension. It’s an interesting extension- it imports your del.icio.us bookmarks to your Firefox bookmarks.
The simple configuration is easy to understand, and prompted me to rethink the way I tag my del.icio.us bookmarks. The specific option I’m talking about is the option to specify a character for category separation.
Technically what I used to do when I first started out is just put the tags in under any old order. Then I started to denote sub-categories in a linear fashion eg web-comic Ctrl+Alt+Del parody Jack-Thompson (I’m skipping out the bit where I went from camelCase to dash-seperation).
I’m still specifying categories in a linear fashion, except it’s more a case of multiple categories instead of sub categories. Sub categories are now separated with a colon eg web-comic:Ctrl+Alt+Del parody:game-series:GTA:San-Andreas parody:gaming:censorship:Jack-Thompson.
I’ve got over 300 bookmarks on del.icio.us to go through, so I still haven’t finished yet. After I’m finished, the parsing that foxylicious does should result in a filing system which mirrors the one I use anyway.
It also means that eventually I can move my bookmarks onto del.icio.us, and use my computer as a backup of my del.icio.us account, instead of the other way around.
Today out of nowhere I started refiling all the parody tags. In issue 80 of Applegeeks, they parody Batman and his . In this case, Batman is a sub-category of parody, so I entered a tag for that page as parody:Batman. The issue itself is referring to Batman’s ridiculous , so that was entered as a separate tag as opposed to a sub-category of parody:Batman.
Now I’m not too sure if this is the intended use for the del.icio.us service, as a limitation of their service means searching del.icio.us for Batman will not bring up any of my bookmarks. I’m not too sure why that is, but I’m not really intending my bookmarks to be read by anyone else than me. I just don’t care if other people do read them.
Putting all these thoughts together, I am about to attempt something a bit iffy. I am going to edit my BlogSpot template so it cuts out all the miscelaneous HTML crap, and leaves the pure post code. I will then download my posts to my computer, making it easier for me to migrate- a simple highlight, copy & paste from Notepad++ straight into WordPress.com.
No messing about with back and forwards buttons. No waiting for page loads. No triple message boxes on each back button press. No warnings about POST data. A step in the process will be simplified. Migration from BlogSpot to WordPress.com will no longer require access to BlogSpot.
I have an idea of how I’m going to make it work, but I’m not sure if it will.
With all these service delays, and no news getting to me on what’s causing them- is it technical problems with WordPress.com, technical problems with my sucky ISP etc- I’ve come to the following conclusions:
What this basically means is that while I love the WordPress platform, I’m starting to hate the WordPress.com site as for whatever reasons beyond my and the technical ppl over at WordPress.com control that are causing the server time out delays that are preventing me from blogging.
Basically, I’m stuck on what to do. I’m not even sure whether this post will actually make it to the blog when I click the Publish button.
So I had some free time between lectures at Uni today, so I thought I’d spend some time migrating the posts over from here to there. Aside from the issues I’ve been having with server time outs, that are- in fact- still present. My inability to access the WordPress.com server is the reason why I haven’t gotten anywhere near migrating and why I’ve missed two weekly news roundups. I’m getting thoroughly pissed off at this delay which is outside of my control- so much so that I’m actually regretting migrating in the first place.
Yes, I know WordPress is by far a superior blogging platform to BlogSpot, but BlogSpot rarely, if ever made it impossible for me to post. WordPress.com on the other hand has decided to think that it needs reinstalling. Every single blog hosted on WordPress.com, and the main site appears to have decided it needs reinstalling. While I was writing that sentence the problem appears to have gone. The timeouts are still there though, so I can’t update my wishlist to show that I’ve actually bought, received and installed the 512MB module on my system, and that I’ve bought but still waiting to receive most of what’s left. The timeout problems seem to have disapeared, although I don’t have the time to fool around migrating tonight.
After those server time-out problems appeared to have gone away, I’ve managed to get all my posts up to July migrated. Still crap loads to go though.
The fairly large amount of posts was always going to be a problem, but I keep forgetting to adjust header values to fit with the template I’m using here. Can’t wait for the XHTML 2 all-purpose header tag. Early posts used an <h1> tag in the post below an <h3> tag in published output and later posts used a more semantic <h4>. What was an <h4> is now an <h3>.
Let’s not forget ISP screw ups and intermittent service outages.
The little ‘security’ feature they have in place means I can’t use <dfn> tags for my potentiallyOffensive coding experiment (you’ll read more about potentiallyOffensive experiment when I get the posts migrated), and also cause problem with my class=”hidden” and class=”offscreen” coding experiments.
It’s a little experiment relating to censorship, freedom of speech and freedom of choice.
Personally I hate seeing full stops at the end of lists and header tags- <dt> and <th> included. The reason I put them there in the first place is back when I was working for Connexions, I was experimenting with some screen reader software, and the dumb piece of crap didn’t put a pause after each header or <li> tag in the navigation list. So I had to put full stops in the <li> tags, but hide them from view. Thus class=”hidden” was born (yes I realise other people may use it, but that was when I first used it). More recently I’ve needed to have some full stops (or other text) be hidden in @media screen, projection etc, and apparent in @media print, aural, braille, embossed, and others hidden in just @media screen, print, projection, handheld etc. Thus class=”offscreen” was born (early posts in Blogspot used class=”hidden”, later ones used class=”offscreen”).
However I have noticed that the code disappeared between manual coding (I don’t like WYSIWYG editors) and publishing.
I’ve found a small work-around to the problems I was experiencing with my ISP– do the migration from Uni.
So right now I’m sitting in Cell M1 in the Info Centre, typing away in an uncomfortable position because it’s not my comfy office chair, and my shoulders are hurting (although I suspect my wrists will follow) because there are no wrists rests in the entire University. I also can’t spell check my typing as although I’m using Firefox, it’s not my computer so I don’t have all my extensions, configurations at hand.
Grr.