Lumpy's Corner

Well this took like two hours but I finally got the CSS working, FTP working, and even figured out how to set the time... Everyone is even leaving the lockergnome chat room. I am just like too excited to sleep. Three valid pages on my site. ALL valid XHTML and now a blog. Too kool!!!

I really should just go to bed. But I know that is not an option. I am obsessed right now...

Well 34 hours later and I think i got everything all debugged. I do have a valid CSS. After I post this I am praying for the valid page.

I got to meet Foofy finally. But i really didn't get to say much to the blog master because i was too busy trying to work all the kinks out of this. It was really a mixed bag because I also got to meet Randy....

I see what you mean dil... My n00b ass even had to kick him around.

Maybe i will extend this in a bit but i am more concerned with validating the code tonight than much else...

l8tr

What this site is about.

For those of you who have visited here before, you will have noticed things have changed much. I have opted to go with a simpler cleaner look in blog format. I owe much of this look to Blogmaster Foofy, Dilandou and Geek who have all helped me in their own way.

First off Foofy's site Blogstyles.com is where I got the style sheet and templates for this site. This made the whole process much easier than had I started from scratch.

Then there is Dilandou. I aptly refer to this man as "Dil the Jedi Code Master". He sat for hours in front of his PC an ocean away and coached me through the process of writing my first page of valid XHTML code.

Dil convinced me to go KISS and I promptly burned my "Dreamweamer" CD (with lighter fluid) and switched over to GVIM. This really got me going. Then he brought up the idea of using a style sheet. Again with Dil online, a simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) emerged next. It was this direction from then on. Of course, school comes first.

Sadly it was going to have to end. My course load would be just too demanding. But into a certain chat room entered a Canadian nicked Geek who likes to blog and even has a blog-support IRC channel. By the time I met him, I was ready to try "Movable Type"... Guess who walked me through that process? So I then had a blog running as an experiment. I blogged and liked it. Lumpy's Rabid Rants and Lunatic Ravings was born.

Actually folks, it is the assimilation of several of my old looks. I am finished with the switch upgrade to Movable Type 3.15 and have imported everything into just one blog. It shall remain a few more days in this state of disarray but I shall have it looking decent again soon.

Lump has a busy boy. (Okay Sin, maybe better put a busy dirty old man.) I guess some one's writing tempted me to get busy with my site's CSS and such.

The site is now up and valid.

I hope to have a few more post up in a day or so.

Well, it should be simple enough.

All I want to do is take the content from a textbox, preserve its formatting and output into a php page. (Now, if you do not understand any of this, read no further.)

First of all there was this security issue of having it query the sql db and not allow an injection attack. Mucho thanks to Helio and Usrbingeek for help on that little issue. (And no, I did not forget, Helio does not have a website.)

I am not really doing much of a blog here. I am playing with my site's CSS and wanted to test something right quick.

I know it is not much but in the future any links which go to photographs (warning this one is REAL ugly) should look different than the other links on the site.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

Well it can, at times, be annoying. That is getting a web page to look the way you desire it to. I think, for now, I am content with the current look of this site.

I simply love CSS! It certainly beats the days of inline coding and having to re-invent the wheel for each and every page you did.

Links are now the color of this text and in bold. After you visit them, they end up normal weight and strikethrough style. Links to photos are a shade of blue, which is just a tad bit darker than sky blue and underlined. After you visit them the underline goes "poof" and it is strikethrough style. The collections of links to your right and left are now delimited by black text to make it easier to sort out.

Editing one file did all of this. Thanks to CSS it impacts every page on this site that links to that file. Yeah! CSS rawks!

Well, I fixed the comment spam... kinda, sorta, maybe?

Lump's ongoing battle with the spammers is a saga which reads a bit like this:

• Lumpy's Corner starts to get barraged with spam. Not any type of spectacular spam or anything like that but just your garden variety typical spam.
• Lumpy deletes the posts
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes
• Lumpy notices a pattern
• Lumpy takes advice from Geek and upgrades to MT3.15
• The spammers return
• Lumpy deletes but takes joy in the fact that none of their comments actually got to the server because of comment moderation and enjoys the ability to delete enmasse
• The spammers return and trackback spam begins
• Lumpy deletes but with less joy
• Lumpy renames his comment script and trackback script
• Lumpy enjoys 10 spam free days
• Some "paster" starts to spam
• Lumpy uses IP banning
• Lumpy notices he is not getting anymore trackbacks
• Lumpy wonders if he dorked something
• Exios tries to set a trackback to me
• The trackback is dorked

Lumpy is a bit lost here. I dunno if it because I renamed the script or if it is a bug in and of itself. I took care of the entries in the config file, hid the index and can run the script. Track back just doesn't seem to be working.

Sorry, be patient while I figure this one out.

Yours in SPAM CyberSP4c3,
Lumpy

I know it does not really look too different but I have changed things around here at the corner again. Some of the changes are:

• First of all, I have upgraded to Movable Type 3.2. I know it took me a while but I have just been busy and have had less than optimal connectivity. It is a good upgrade. So far, I like it very much. Other than being a total n00b dork with a pound sign, install was easy.
• I tried to install a captcha and dorked the server. No biggie.
• I found this neato RSS to JavaScript converter. Kudos to Amy Gahran at Contentious for bloging about it. I am now using this service along with Delicious to add some things to this site.
  • Off to the left there is now a list of my more recent comments.
  • Just below that is a list of my more recent additions to my delicious account.
• I put some of the old stuff back up on this site. I did so because of popular request. I added a table below the blog body for this stuff. I think it looks cluttered but, if it bothers you, do what I do. Just grab the RSS feed.

Still playing with it and making suttle and not so suttle changes. I like this theme. I doan't like some of the issues with widgets. NTL I shall make it submit

Sometime life is so ironic. I was planning to visit my folks this weekend but my cat kookie decided it would be best for me to stay home and deal with his infected eye. Instead of getting better after visiting the vet on Wednesday, the poor feline's eye was only getting cloudier on Saturday. The vet gave me additional instructions. Meaning more frequent applications of eye irrigation and eye ointment.

Now both of my feline roommates are very well behaved and docile animals. This however matters little when the animal does not understand that the "treatment" going to benefit him. His only though it "God gave me claws, you are not putting that stuff on my eye!"..

I have found that the only method I can deal with the furry spastic fearful ball of fur is to toss the poor little bugger into a military laundry bag. The draw string allows just enough cloth to bunch up around his neck so that he can't get those claws into me and ruin another set of pants but not tight tnough to choke him or bind his neck. He is actually adapting well to this new 5 time per day ritual. He hasn't hissed and growled since Saturday now.