T-P-L.com

.. So I’m moved at last .. took a little while to get the DNS to point through properly .. but all my services are now switched over to my SliceHost account. Now I just gotta stabilize everything and actually deploy something new.

(please use my referrer link if you choose to sign up for SliceHost

I’m tired of not being able to properly run rails apps on Dreamhost (not really so annoyed with their recent downtimes as just not being able to run rails properly .. don’t believe them when you see “fully supported rails” on their website)

Long story short, they have aggressive scripts killing persistent processes (such as fastcgi’s) .. so even fcgi rails apps end up slow .. since they need to boot up rails fairly often on lower traffic sites ..

I came across a post on the onrails.org blog explaining their switch to a new VPS based host called SliceHost .. I took a look, liked the idea of a $20/month VPS .. and am in the middle of a switch .. I’m slowly switching services over and settings up things on the VPS .. I switched my name servers away from dreamhost’s back to Enom’s so I regain control of their locked records .. so thats switching around the world as I post this.

I started switching all the svn repositories over, and I’ll be switching dev.t-p-l.com over soon .. so in the unlikely case of someone using them .. thats why they’re down =)

I’m also going to take a plunge and switch my email to gmail hosted .. should make things easier .. just have to ease in my users to the switch before I flip the name servers (I’m going to have to end up needing to find some gmail hosted notifiers for windows .. oh well .. shouldn’t be that big of a deal)

p.s. if you end up choosing to get a slicehost account because of reading this blog, please put my email address as your referer when signing up its: piotr/dot/banasik/at/gmail/dot/com (of course turn this into a valid email address, use my my referer link)

A lot of things happened since I last posted, for one I upgraded my Wordpress install to the new release 2.0. With that I actually put in some more effort into the site too. The old image gallery is back, it can be accessed here, it has been redone with a Wordpess plugin called Lazyest Gallery, it sort of takes a simmilar approach as Mig, leaving it to you to arrange your photos in a folder hierarchy, and it’ll display galleries based on it. Another mod, Filosofo Home-Page Control allows me to not show the Blog page as the home page, making this into something more like a website. I use Fold Page Menus in order not to show all the page clutter. And to remove the classic Register/Login links on the sidebar, I use Admin Menu to instead display a bar actross the top of the site. And lastly, a small touch, links get prettyfied (by having icons added to external links among others) via Link Indication.

It took me a while to get to it, but I finally updated my site to new Wordpreess.

At first I was expecting to do it similar to the way I had done it before, take just the blog and put it on the blog page, and wrap it in a new layout. With this version of Wordpress I was able to use the Pages feature, and a custom Theme to recreate the old site layout. I ended up needing a few plugins, among them one that allows entering php code right in the markup of the page, allowing me to integrate some of the more complicated pages I had before right in (Resume and Gallery). The mig I used before didn’t want to integrate into this new setup to well, so I ended up replacing it with a simple Wordpress plugin instead.

At the same time I replaced the RSS feeds on the site with Feedburner feeds so I can track who reads my Blog better.

I still have some styling left to do since I essentially restyled a bright theme to a Dark theme, but its readable right now so its not too bad. I have all my old pages back too, so it wasn’t too bad of a conversion.

Total this took me around 4 hours, I went to sleep at 2am, just to get up the next morning at 6am to get to work, so I’m prety tired right now .. yea.

I redid my logo into lighter colors, I’ll end up using it on the new version of the website made with Ruby on Rails

As mentioned below here, I was moving. I finally got the server back up!

Just added the FireFox button to the site. Please do your share to spread the fire.

So I decided to ditch Serendipity .. spent some 5 hours yesterday clobbering together WordPress and the site. The end result isnt too bad, I even converted over all old posts in Serendipty to WordPress.

Pioneer, the box the site and my mail and such are hosted, has dedided to die on me recently. Had to run without email for a day, then downgraded the box to its old stats (Celeron 466), atleast I had mail again. Since it decided to die the night before Canada Day, I couldnt even get replacement parts for it. Finally 2 days later I got a new motherboard and ram for the box, and now the box runs on 512M of DDR, a fair bit of improvement from its old ram back at the board that fried. Also, just about the same time (a few days before), the power supply on pioneer fried aswell (well the fan died). So now pioneer has a new power supply too.

As fate would have it, the new board and the new power supply, and the case didnt go well together. The intake fan on the power supply ended up right above the cpu fan. Suffice to day they were competing for the same air, and if anything the power supply ended up sucking in the hot air from the cpu. Thus pioneer ended up needing a new box, conveniently on my junk pile I had my old desktop case, so pioneer grew a fair bit in the process of being repacked to a new box. I’m going to make and post some side by side photos of the old case and the new case.

here is the link to the gallery

• I’ve integrated Mig – "My Image Gallery" into the site and it can be found at http://www.t-p-l.com/mig.php.
• Also I did a lot of retheming, it seems I got all of the frontend for the blog themed. Now I need to fix the backend, because the theming broke it.

After at attempt at starting and coding up a blog system from scratch, I gave up, there were way too many features I’d need to code to spend the effort on it. Instead I reinstalled serendipity. To my dissapointment, I found that the nightly build of FireFox I was using has an issue in javascript onClick handling on A tags. And the current Nightly builds have a broken DOM inspector. Finally I ended up settling on build 20040501, which has a working DOM inspector and that JavaScript bug is fixed.

In this upgrade I lost serendipity’s pretty editor, oh well, will have to do my html by hand .. I can manage.

Or not .. just needed to link in a few more files .. this “embedded” version of serendipity is a pain in the ass.

• get sidebox support working in the embedded template
• clean up some more stylesheets to match the site