Theledge.net

So, the site is now running on a new server (sitting within a foot of the old server, which lays buried in an insecure location in an extremely dusty environment). And the site has a new template, which hopefully is pleasing to the eye.

The new server is actually about six years old. It is a dual processor 733 Mhz machine, with one Gigabyte of RAM and about 30 Gigabytes of harddrive space. The old server is approximately 11 years old. It is a single processor Pentium Pro 200 Mhz, with 512 Megabytes of RAM, and about 20 Gigabytes of harddisk space. The old machine was limping under the load, mainly because it evolved into its current position. This machine (for now) is pretty well tuned. I hope it is faster for you.

The new template I put together several months ago, but was unsure if I liked it. I am still a little unsure if I like it. I do like the picture I used as a header. I chose that picture specifically because it is my daughter managing to look remarkable similar to myself when I was that age (though the lighting was better for her). Of late, however, she looks nothing like me, but more and more like herself.

So, the site had some unexpected downtime...

While we were visiting Alphie’s Grannie Annie and deda the router holding this little network together took a digger. It was a really old computer. Really old. It was the first computer I built, running in the first case I ever owned. It was an AMD 200Mhz processor, with 128 MB. It was over ten years old.

So, this day had been coming for a while. In fact, it had been coming for so long that I had acquired hardware to replace the router on two separate occasions. Last December I had grabbed some really old replacement hardware from Luke before he left for Iraq, and then I had purchased a nice little 1-u server which would actually be an upgrade.

So today, when we returned home, the router was dead. I immediately jumped into action, pulled out the shiny new server hardware and whipped it into place, only to find out it doesn’t work. The Ethernet cards aren’t initializing under M0n0wall for some reason. (Link is established, but not detected.) I fiddled with it for forty minutes or so before I give up and figure I am going to actually have to read some documentation somewhere.

So, I rummage around the basement and within about ten minutes I had built a replacement router... with a 200Mhz AMD processor, and 128 MB of RAM... So I have replaced a busted, old computer with almost the identical (but working) old computer. And none of the parts in either computer is newer than seven years old.

I think I need to clean the basement out.

So, I changed the template for the webpage around a little. The tabbed linkbar is based on code by Ivan Fong, but I have to thank Ziyad for getting me interested in using it in my template.

If anyone has any problems, please let me know!

I sat down and, while listening to a mixture of Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash, hacked together an Atom feed for Buddy’s site. It was an enjoyable morning. If you use an RSS reader (I use RSSOwl, Angie uses Sage for Firefox) you can now add a feed for Buddy’s pictures, so you will see them when they update.

The reason I programmed this little hack was that I wanted to put a static page in this website (à la the baby page and our vows) that showed the most recent picture of Buddy. This was, of course, a warm up for the extremely likely scenario that I will take tons of pictures of the baby and want to do the same thing.

The reason I used an Atom feed was because I thought it might be more useful than custom-built method (that is, I took the “Long View”), and it had the added benefit that Angie could subscribe to the feed.

But I forgot that Serendipity doesn’t actually have any capacity to parse Atom feeds yet. So, while the morning was fun, it leads to the question:

1) Should I abandon the Atom feed, and redo it in RSS (I have not used the Serendipity aggregator, so I’m not sure if this is a good solution)?

2) Should I extend the aggregator plugin to support Atom (if it hasn’t been done yet, it ain’t easy)?

3) Should try to build a simple Atom parser (ha!) and just toss a custom plugin together for myself?

I’m going to have to think about, but all I can think right now is “So much for taking the Long View”.

Ok, I’ve added a new version of the usergallery plugin to CVS.

It has configurable title and subpage control, and when it is used with a recent 0.9 build, it will allow the user to set the directory to display.

And thanks to Stefan Willoughby it now offers a thumbnail view with pictures opening in a new window, which allows the user to control which directory is viewed! (Which sounds kind of like this idea...)