kirabug’s idea files

Note 1: if you’ve registered and you’re a frequent commenter and you’ve noticed that your avatar isn’t working anymore, it’s because I switched from a cumbersome and annoying avatar system to the gravatars built into Wordpress’s core. (Note: your old avatar will still work if I switch back to an old template… at least until I nuke all the old templates.)

To sent up a new avatar, go to this website and set up an avatar with an email address that matches the address you’re using here. (Your profile is here to check your contact info.) It take 15 mins or so for the system to catch up, but after that the avatar you have set up will work not only here but most other Wordpress and similar blog sites.

(We’re taking avatars rated R and under if I remember correctly, so make sure to rate your image appropriately.)

Note 2: If you haven’t registered and you want to comment regularly (or even sporadically) with some assurance that I’m not going to zap your comment as spam, use the Register link in the top right corner. It’s a really good idea to comment not long after you’ve registered so I don’t nuke you as registration spam either.

Note 3: I hate laundry.

Note 4: The avatar isn’t the only change on the site that hasn’t been completed yet, but I’m not tipping my hand to the rest yet.

Note 5: the key lime pie cheesecake was delicious.

Note 6: Congratulations to Eric and Wednesday Burns-White on their successful knot-tying!

Note 7: I have too many clothes.

There’s the dryer buzzer, off I go.

Just updated us to the latest Wordpress version, and while you won’t likely see anything on the front end (if I did my job right) ho-lee hell has the admin template changed. If you’re having trouble finding things, don’t feel bad, so am I.

On the other hand, most of the changes are very good things, including better management of tags, posts, etc. It’s just getting over the initial WTF that needs to be handled.

Oh, and I’ll probably be messing with things on here quite a bit over the next few weeks — if time allows — so if you have any suggestions or requests, now’s a good time.

Work was, well, long. Very very long. But I managed to get a few last-minute items handled before coming home.

I came home to a sick husband, who’s caught some kind of cold/respiratory thing. Exhausted and achy myself I’m not sure I really did a very good job of taking care of him today. For that matter, I didn’t do much for myself, either.

The forum upgrade’s required a few small tweaks, plus Wordpress came out with a security update that I needed to install, but everything’s been successful so far. A few quick notes I forgot to mention before:

• When you register and post a comment, it sits in the moderation queue until I approve it. After that, so long as you don’t do anything to piss off the spam filter, your comments display immediately.
• I’ll probably eventually (maybe even shortly) start putting a “babble” thread up every day or two so folks can babble to each other even if I’m not actively posting.
• See the RSS and Comments RSS links in the left nav bar? If you want to keep up with the comments, those will give you overall views of what’s going on here, and each thread has its own specific comments RSS feed as well that you can check.

Anyway, I’m off until Tuesday so I’m hoping to relax, draw some comics, and gut a closet. And yell at the snow. And the Phillies. And maybe sleep now. Goodnight!

For those of you on the forum, none of this will be news. For the rest:

The forum

phpbb2, while a wonderful forum application, has been driving me crazy as of late. In Wordpress, when I want to extend the app, I download or write plugins that do what I want. If something’s not working it’s easy to shut off, and if the software upgrades don’t get along with the plugins, the upgrades don’t destroy the plugins.

But there is no plugin interface for the forum. When you download changes those changes are to the source code, and every change you make is going to be absolutely stomped on by the next iterative upgrade of the forum application. And reinstalling changes is either tedious manual updates or fighting with a 0.3 beta application that doesn’t understand the idea of either reinstalls and uninstalls.

To sum up, every time I found code to block the spammers, I’d be good for a few weeks, then phpbb2 would update and I’d be hosed. Over and over and over.

Rather than embody the definition of insanity, I decided it was time for a change. Wordpress, after all, has built-in comments functionality. I didn’t use it before because I preferred the forum, but now I’ve reconsidered, especially considering its extensive anti-spam features. The forum will be shut down, probably in a few weeks, and comments will post here instead. And that leads to…

The new UI

So if I was going to have to rewrite my existing Wordpress templates, I figured I might as go all the way. The old templates were written for Wordpress 1.5 and I’m running 2.1 now. I knew there were features of interest to me in the new interface, and this is an easy way to add them. It took about a week of constant work, but I’ve redesigned the site to accept comments and trackbacks, with a new look and new background. It’s not perfect (it feels really cluttered to me) and more tweaking will come, but now at least the Project Wonderful ads are above the fold most of the time. And speaking of changes….

Get Outta My Head is now Night Fugues

That’s right — I changed the name of the primary comic. GOMH really didn’t have any meaning, and since many of the themes of the comic involve nighttime and strangeness, this felt like a better fit. But I couldn’t do it alone.

Most of all I want to thank the ideaphiles

Many of these decisions (well, not the UI obviously, or it wouldn’t be so busy) had a very heavy influence from the folks that hang out in the forum. My co-moderator, jzimbert, and jamie, and peri-renna, and larksilver (where are you, girl?) and Mark, and squeak, all have given me both support and constructive criticism throughout not only this insane process but also through the two plus years that we’ve had a forum. They rock and I’m very humbled and glad to have them visiting this little corner of the internet so very often.

As an aside, if you folks don’t have your avatars saved locally, you’ll want to do that soon.

So where do we go from here?

Well, here! Feel free to register and comment and tell me what you think of the new design, the new name, and all of that jazz. (Are the bricks too much?? I love the way they look but I’m nervous. Did I mention the clutter?) There are other ideas and features I might want to add too… and as always, I’ll be here soliciting your great ideas for most of them.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve now been working on the new site design for at least 20 hours and I still don’t have the effing design complete, because CSS is a pain in the ass.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the default Wordpress template is effing huge either. The current template is a design I based on the previous template, which is based on the template before that, on back to the default Wordpress template for Wordpress 1.5, so it’s not exactly up to date with the newest baubles and doodads, which is why I wanted this one to be clean.

Clean - hah! The designer of the default Wordpress 2.1 template organizes his stuff in ways totally foreign to my brain — valid ways, good clean ways, but it’s sort of like walking into the library and discovering that the librarian had decided to alphabetize all her books by the first letter of the third word in Chapter 3 of each book. The taxonomy is foreign to me. Just figuring out which CSS entry is modifying the item I’m trying to modify is trick enough at this point, not to mention that with my own addendums I’m already up to like 300 lines of CSS.

Granted, I did find a nice CSS Debugger which is helping to lower the insanity, but not by much.

Anyway, the comic Tuesday most likely won’t be a GOMH comic — but that’s OK because I’ve got some new photo comics I wanted to run (currently called Life is Odd) and we’ll kick off with one of those for Tuesday instead. I’ve got 4 comics in the queue right now, which damn well better hold us until this redesign is done, one way or the other, and a few other LIO comics to put together from my new camera.

Oh yeah, and I bought a new camera the other day.

Anyway, back to the coding. More ranting later probably.

Three upgrades to Wordpress have come out recently, with the big one being WordPress 2.1 Ella. Ella looks like she’s got a lot of features I’m interested in adding, so I’ll probably be working on an upgrade shortly. Not tonight, maybe next weekend, but shortly.

The forum’s in a similar (but not quite as far behind) state of disrepair. The forum is an absolute bitch to upgrade, though, so I might put that off a bit longer.

And if anyone has any really good AJAX tutorials they could point me to, I’d be very interested in some links.

Finally flogged phpbb into submission, so all’s good here. I’m going back to my video games now.