Jared W. Smith

Not sure what happened earlier when I posted my missive about IE 6, but Apache lost its mind and ground to a halt earlier today. A quick look at some vitals indicated that the issue was related to the Twitter API (which points to the Twitter Tools plugin which has archived my last four years of tweets). Interestingly, my disk IO skyrocketed at the same time. Nuts. Anyway, here’s hoping that was just an isolated incident and that I won’t have to troubleshoot this site again for another year and a half because I really don’t have time for that. :)

Managed to add another page to the About the Site section, this time covering the tortured development of what would have been Realm 5.0, the fifth generation of my old personal site that was supposed to bring world peace and end hunger on four planets. That didn’t work out, though…

I’ve finally started closing out comments and trackbacks automatically to posts over 120 days old that haven’t seen approved activity in a reasonable amount of time. This’ll cut down on how much moderating I have to do. To paraphrase what authorities said when justifying the 2am bar closing, “nothing good happens after 120 days.”

I’ve instructed Twitter Tools to begin doing a daily digest post here of my tweets for the day. Sometimes they can be pretty useful as little mini-blog posts. They’ll show up as asides, and thus won’t clutter the homepage.

Additionally, I’m auditioning the “post tweet when I post a blog” feature of Twitter Tools. I’m not sure if it will last beyond this post, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Not going to post a new tweet with every blog. I think that if people really want to keep up with my blog, that’s what the RSS feed is for. Twitter can be information overload enough as it is…

Fixing stupidity (finally, the individual post headers for full posts is spaced properly in IE, and you can now once again see the year on each post) and adding new features, like displaying my latest played track from last.fm in addition to my Twitter status, is just so, so satisfying.

I took a minute and got away from writing the site history and gave the weather page a nice overhaul. I’m now linking to my weather blogs from there and bringing in the conditions from my station as Weather Underground feeds them out. Also, if you hover over the “weather” menu item you’ll get the current conditions on each page within the menu. Very cool — that was in the original vision for this redesign. Was nice to get it finally kicked over. I’m going to work on the conditions panel some more over break and get the background image to reflect rain, etc. But for now, it’s pretty cool.

I’ve been working on documenting the history of my Web presence. I’m up to five pages, and have documented the entire run of The Realm up to when I closed it. I’ll finish it this weekend, probably. It’s a pretty cool read if you have seriously nothing to do and are interested in how I evolved in my Web authoring skills.

With any luck, I will able to crosspost to my MySpace account now. This is one I’ve wanted to get going for a while. (Edit: Negative. Foiled again. I hope that MySpace joining OpenSocial will help to make interoperability with other sites possible. Again, this is one of the many reasons why it’s hard to take MySpace seriously as a legitimate social networking platform…)