Category: About This Site

Details and updates about the mechanisms behind this weblog.

Grrrrrr

Allowing remote editing of this Weblog is my next tech project.

I have the software for this Weblog set up in such a way that I can’t add new stories, except from my computer at home. This makes for excellent security, but lousy reporting on the road. Which means I couldn’t post during our NYE trip to LA. (More on that in other postings.)

The software for running my publishing system allows remote editing, I just have it configured differently. Changing that around, while still keeping good security, will be my next tech project, I imagine.

I also don’t like the way it sorts stories from the same day. Days are sorted youngest to oldest, but stories on the same day are oldest to youngest, e.g., the opposite. Going to have to fix that, too…

On to the Next Thing…

I finished the project at work that I was procrastinating on by working on this site. So you’ll probably never hear from me again.

Yesterday afternoon, the marketing analysis I have been working on for the last four weeks stopped being a pile of shit, so I sent it to the people who need to review it.

I have to present / defend it on Monday, so I’m sure I’ll be working over the weekend…and procrastinating on that by writing here. Depending on how the presentation goes there may be more work to do on my MRD, but it won’t be so urgent, or monumental — there’s nothing so intimidating as the blank page.

But I’ve been posting to this thing for the last month, so maybe it’s become a habit. If not, I probably won’t post again until I have another big project I’m avoiding.

Then again, I may end up hacking away on the code that runs this site, so I can add pictures more easily, and things like that. Which would give me another excuse to write.

We’ll see.

Another Fine Mess

Now my wife Rochelle is in the mess, too.

OK, so it’s not bad enough I’ve started doing this myself, but now I’ve also set Rochelle up with one of these things. Should be interesting to see what she has to say when I’m not her editor!

Note: You can’t get to Rochelle’s Weblog from outside our home network, yet. Coming soon, if you pester her about it!

Site Details

Technical details of how I run and manage this site, using mostly Open Source technology.

This weblog is managed by the monaural jerk system. It’s a web application built in PHP, and uses the MySQL database as the back end.

The system seems pretty nice, though it doesn’t work quite the way I’d like it to. I’ve actually started writing my own application to manage a weblog, but don’t seem to have enough time to complete it. This’ll do in the meantime.

The server setup is actually pretty interesting. The MySQL database is running on my main system, a Mac running Mac OS X 10.1. Currently the PHP scripts are running under Apache on that same system, but I’ll actually be moving those over to our main web server at some point.

What’s cool is our in-house network makes that separation easy. All I have to do is change a hostname in a config file, and putting the Web front end on one server and the DB back end on the other is child’s play.

I love Open Source software!

Yet Another Waste of Time

Announcing the launch of my personal weblog, for better or worse.

Yes, another weblog. I guess I’ve been wanting to keep some kind of a journal, and provide some kind of ongoing news for friends and family.

From another perspective, I’m doing this because I’m a geek, and I had to install MySQL on my new Mac OS X system, and then once it was installed, I had to do something with it.

Still another way to look at this is I am procrastinating on a project for work, and decided that spending a few dozen hours getting a bunch of software set up, writing, and fiddling, would be a “productive” way to do it.

Anyway, for better or worse, I’ve started a ’blog. We’ll see how well I stick with it.