Aarrgghh!!

Meta Blogging Archives

Moving to a New Site

For several and various reasons, I am moving all of my professional content over to a new site: TerrenceRyan.com. If you're subscribing to this site for web development, ColdFusion or other web development matters, please point your RSS readers and aggregators to TerrenceRyan.com.

Basically, I was looking to do a redesign and purge a bunch of outdated content. I also wanted to divorce some of my personal content from my professional image. I've also gotten a few complaints from my friends that they have ceased to understand any of what I'm talking about. I've had TerrenceRyan.com for awhile, and figured it was time to put it to use.

Part of the move was also a switch to Mango Blog from MovableType. I have to say AsFusion have done a great job with it - it's so easy to configure and customize.

Anyway, switch over, and for those that like my personal nonsense there should be more of it coming. For those of you looking for CF information more is coming on that front too.

November 6, 2008 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 3:05 PM

ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Web Development,

New Blog for Export Reports

If you are interested in my new venture ExportReports, we now have a blog you can follow what's going on and give feedback.

March 28, 2008 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 10:21 AM

Basecamp CFC, ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Web Development,

Movable Type 4

I updated the blog here to Movable type 4. It was extremely painless. It even inspired me to fix a whole bunch of stuff that was wrong with it. Specifically email subscriptions to entries now work.

The new backend it very cool. It took me a little getting used to, but now that I've got the hang of it, I'm extremely pleased. There's a lot of new features, and I'm looking forward to giving them all a try.

September 1, 2007 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:52 AM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

New Design Done

To distract myself from peeking at Christmas gifts, I pushed ahead with a new design. You might need to refresh your browser, to see it.

From the start I decided to do it a little different. First I did a site map, figuring out how all of the content was laid out in my site. I figured out that a few sections were extraneous, so I excised them, and consolidated others.

Then I did a wireframe. I figured out that I wanted a 4 column layout. I wanted navigation to be a vertical list on the left. I wanted a side "ad" or high attention section like before. I also wanted a fixed layout. I need to brand on to my hands "You don't design liquid layout sites that you yourself like" so I stop trying to do one.

Once all that was done I started working on a design. I started first by letting go of all of the previous colors in the site. Instead I looked for a pretty neutral palette. (I've been watching too many home flipping shows.) Once I had something I liked, I went back and added some color.

Finally, I decided on fonts, specifically, I picked Calibri to be the main font of the site. I know it's a Vista font and most people don't have it yet, so I've gone back and made sure it looks okay in Verdana and Helvetica. One thing I don't like about Calibri is that it's decidedly smaller at a given font-size than Verdana, or Arial. I'm sure someone who knows something about fonts could tell you exactly why. I am not that person.

Once the design was done, I found that I could do a few other things that I had wanted to do for a while:

  • I incorporated Google Co-op powered search. Which is awesome if you haven't played with it.
  • I added my latest blog content to the static sub sections of my site. RSS rocks.
  • Got the download footprint of the site to be next to nothing.

I have few other things left to do, like prune away all the old sections of the site, but for the most part I'm done.

December 26, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 3:13 PM

ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Web Development,

Spammers 1000, ME 0

After trying pretty hard to not have to institute anything that makes commenting harder, the spammers have forced me to do something.

I tried to install a MovableType Image Captcha component... It completely fragged my MovableType install, and I had to blow it away and reinstall. I bet this wouldn't have happened to me if I was a good ColdFusion developer and started to use Blog.CFC.

After getting everything back up, I installed the Comment Challenge text-captcha plugin. It's accessible, and it doesn't, you know, completely hose my site, but I'm not sure how effective it will be. If anyone runs into any problems commenting, please drop me a line via my Contact page.

December 6, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 12:13 PM

ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Word 2007 and Movable Type

You can use Word 2007 (Beta) to edit your blog entries, even with tools other than the ones Microsoft says they support. I use mine to connect with my Movable Type Blog, and here's how to do it:

  • Click the Big Button thing on the top left (they have a name for it, but I can't remember it. )
  • Chose New
  • When the New Document interface comes up chose "New Blog Entry"
  • The stripped down blogging version of Word will appear.
  • Chose Manage Accounts on the ribbon.
  • Create a new Account.
    • Enter the username and password you use to blog.
    • For API Chose "Metaweblog"
    • Point the post url to your mt-xmlrpc.cgi file
    • If your blog admin file is http://www.someblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi this file would be at: http://www.someblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
  • It should ask you which Blog you wish to edit, and you're done.

Note that it doesn't handle categories, and I don't think it will handle posting notifications, so I typically chose to "Publish as Draft" which is available by clicking the small triangle under the "Publish" command on the ribbon. Once that is done, I use Movable type to add categories, and publish. I recommend you do the same. The way I see it, this isn't too bad because Word gives me excellent spell checking, grammar checking and undo. This all speeds up my blogging process immensely.

I also recommend you install the NaughtyWordChars plugin from Andy Yaco-Mink, as "smart quotes" might screw up your blog entries.

June 29, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 3:10 PM

ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Testing Word 2007

I just installed the Office 2007 Beta. I noticed that Word 2007 has a blog editing section. So I figured I will give it a try. No thoughts on it yet, other than it seemed to work pretty well.

Update: It doesn't handle categories, or setting the text formatting properly, but you can 'publish as draft' which might just work well enough for me to use it.

May 23, 2006 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:28 PM

Meta Blogging, Web Development,

Added MT-Notifier

After putting it off for awhile, I finally got Movable Type notifications to work. I now know when comments are posted instead of having to obsessively check my blog configuration page. After that I figured it wasn't that far a stretch to open up notifications for everyone else.

To that end, I installed MT-Notifier from Everitz Consulting. If you would like to subscribe to a particular post, just check the "Subscribe to This Entry" box on the individual entry page. You have to confirm your desire to do so, but then you're in business.

You see, I don't suffer from delusions that everybody is eager to subscribe to Aarrggghh!!. However occasionally people ask questions in my comments, and I'm never sure what the etiquette is. Do I email them back, or do I just comment back and let them find it when they feel like it? Now, I don't have to worry, the reader can make that decision for themselves.

December 13, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 12:21 AM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Running Man Clock Update

Janice pointed out to me that with Arnold's defeat in the various proposition elections in California, that the Running Man Clock needed updating. After conferring with the committee of scientists who vote on Running Man Clock issues, we have decided to change the time to midnight.

It is now 10 minutes until midnight, where midnight is defined as creation of a real world Running Man show.

November 23, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:38 AM

Meta Blogging, Politics, Random,

Yet Another New Design

As you may, or may not have been able to see, this site has been redesigned. Nothing big, I just got bored of the old look.

I've removed Sifr. Not because of a problem with the technology, just because I didn't need it.

Explore. Enjoy. If anything looks wrong (or I didn't format for your browser) drop me a line.

November 19, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 6:28 PM

Meta Blogging, Web Development,

Not Dead

Haven't posted in awhile, I know. I've been busy. Finally hiring someone, but I got set back by jury duty last week. I'm only now getting some breathing room. I'm also working on a redesign of this site and another Christmas movie (to join "It's a Wonderful Mensch" and "A Christmas Party") . This is all in addition to writing at Filmfodder. So I've been a bit run down.

Expect to see the redesign within a week or two, and the Christmas movie in about a month. Also expect a new cigar review within a day or so - because it's alternative happy hour Thursday again.

November 17, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 4:19 PM

Meta Blogging, Personal,

Lurkers?

Last week Matt from Tattered Coat posted a thread encouraging lurkers to say hi. I'm so totally copying off of him. Not just because I wanted to be cool and copy off him, but because I got introduced to someone today, who said "Oh yeah, I 've read your blog." So I'm curious.

I know a bunch of you, especially the ones that comment a lot (Scott, Dan, Becky, Ryan, obviously Janice ) But who are the rest of my readers?

After subtracting all the search engines. I average about 200-250 visitors a day. Many of them are people searching for pictures of wisdom teeth, pictures of Eeyore, or pictures of hair cut before and after shots. They are a bit creepy. However, I really hope the sum total of my readership does not consist of wisom teeth fetishists.

So drop a comment, and let me know who you are.

September 29, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 4:04 PM

Meta Blogging,

Philadelphia Blogs vs. Philly Mag

Noel Weyrich has an article about Philly bloggers and the whole LaToyia Figueroa case. Summary: He's not impressed. Will Bunch of attytood does a great job of arguing against him. However I'd like to add an addendum to the argument.

This was about something larger that Weyrich seems to miss. A larger group of people than the circle of traditional media editors decided this story was important. They then advocated it, and brought it to mass consciousness. Weyrich is somehow attacking the story as not important as the blogosphere made it out to be. It's his right to say that, but then again, his magazine recently did an expose on the nuances of the Philadelphia accent. So I don't get where he thinks he's got the grivitas to decry our issue as trivial.

September 27, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:49 PM

Meta Blogging, Philly,

More of that Blog Article

The Blog Article from the Philadelphia Inquirer is realling making the rounds. Scott has it that it now appears in:

This in addition to the three other spots I listed earlier, and in addition to the original article.

All in all this has taught me one thing: If I ever start a newspaper, I will eschew "Inquirer," "Times," or "Post." Instead I will start the "Philadelphia American-Statesman!"

September 20, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 1:49 AM

Meta Blogging,

Bars in Which to Have Cigars

Cigars on my porch are fine but nothing is quite as good as sitting on a comfortable couch and having cigars in well-ventilated room. Since I graduated from Penn, and no longer could justify spending large amounts of time in the Pine Room at the KA lodge, I been looking for a good place indoors to smoke a cigar. The search intensified when I moved in with Janice. Occasionally I used to smoke in my apartment, but that's a non starter in our house. For all these reasons, I've looked to bars where I could smoke.

Consequently I'll be highlighting a couple of my favorite places to grab a smoke in Philly over the few weeks. I say "Bars in Which to Have Cigars" instead of "Cigar Bars," because most of the bars are just places that happen to let you smoke cigars, not full fledged cigar bars. The first bar I chose to highlight is perhaps the highest quality place to go (and the only real cigar bar on the list). It might not be a great value, but I will get to good values in later entries.

If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

September 20, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 1:22 AM

Meta Blogging, Philly, Places to Smoke,

Film Fodder Progress

I'm coming up on the end of my first full week posting at FilmFodder.com. I'm happy to say that getting the hang of it. I'm writing faster, and I'm going to hit the lower threshold of my weekly target (10-15 posts a week.) Here are the posts I'm happiest with:

Addtionally this guy lifted one of my articles, which is kinda cool cause he kept my credit in it.

September 15, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 10:31 PM

Entertainment, Film, Meta Blogging,

The Legend of Blankbaby Grows!

Scott has it that the article that he did for the Philadelphia Inquirer (in which I am mentioned) is being syndicated to a couple of new places.

The article is being syndicated to:

Very cool. I hope the list grows, and "to be Blankbabied" evolves into an internet meme.

September 13, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:53 PM

Meta Blogging,

Movable Type 3.2 Finally!

Powered by Movable Type 3.2

Finally, Six Apart got back to me with a fix. Under their new fix, I did not have to involve my hosting provider. They gave me a customized Bootstrap.pm, and required me to create an IIS virtual directory. It was a much more elegant solution than the one they gave me on the first try, and it actualy worked, so that was pretty cool. It has something to do with IIS not setting the working directory for cgi correctly.

So onward with Movable Type 3.2!

September 6, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 8:43 PM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Movable Type 3.2 You Torment Me!

Movable Type 3.2 won't work for me. I got support from Six Apart, but the fix ended up breaking all cgi-scripts in my server space. Six Apart gave me a detailed fix that involved changes to the IIS web site properties. It seems like it shouldn't be that involved a fix.

I have to say Dataride, my hosting provider, has been really cool with this. They've been much faster to repond then Six Apart. So once again I heartily recomend them for Cold Fusion Hosting.

Oh well, cognitive dissonance has set in, and now I must have it! I will make it work. As soon as Six Apart gets back to me... whenever that is.

August 29, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:45 PM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

No Movable Type 3.2

Installing Movable Type 3.2 totally failed. Tried a couple times. Glad I was paranoid about backing up. I got a "Bad Gateway" error when I tried to run it. There's nothing about the problem on their site. So I've submitted a help ticket. I'm waiting now.

August 26, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 12:03 AM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Movable Type 3.2

I know what I'm doing tonight:

Announcing Movable Type 3.2

August 25, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 3:01 PM

Meta Blogging, Movable Type, Web Development,

Wikipedia Showdown

I've writen before about how sometimes the amount of content in wikipedia on certain subjects disturbs me (here and here.) I have off for the next few days and was looking to work my brain a little bit and wrote this little application that will compare how many characters are written about any two subjects in wikipedia. So for example you can discover that more is written about "blankbabied" then "zombo.com". So check it out, and come up with and comment on your own crazy showdowns.

Wikipedia Showdown!

In order to do this, I had to rely on CFHTTP to get the job done. I've included the cfc that handles grabbing the input from wikipedia in the extended entry.

Continue reading "Wikipedia Showdown"

August 23, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:47 AM

ColdFusion, Meta Blogging, Random,

Blankbabied

If for some reason the whole establishing Blankbaby as a verb meaning "to get hired because of one's blog," doesn't work out, you can always try and get it listed as a verb that means "to try to hard to establish an internet meme."

I'm just kidding, Scott, or am I? Or am I just giving you two attack vectors. You won't know until it's too late.

August 22, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:46 PM

Meta Blogging,

Perhaps a Day Too Late for Me

Jeff Porten posted a link to a guide for blogging legal advice. Hopefully, I still don't need it.

August 21, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 9:58 PM

Meta Blogging,

Blankbaby's in the Paper...

There's an article on the Most Influential Blogger in Philadelphia, in the Philadelphia Inquier this morning, and I'm quoted too. Evidently, I'm told by people that read the paper in actual paper format, it was front page, below the fold. Very big deal, congrats Scott.

Scott has more on the article.

August 21, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:45 AM

Meta Blogging,

Slight Updates

I've made a few updates to the site. Mostly minor, they constitute the 10% of the 90/10 redesign I did a few months back. The site was mostly updated, but a whole bunch of the small features were not looking entirely polished. I, therefore, fixed the following features.

  • Comment Preview now shows you the comment as it will properly look.
  • The Trackback view now looks like the rest of the site.
  • The Comment Approval form now looks more like the rest of the site, and the Aarrgghh Guy will give you a random quote as he tells you to be patient.

August 6, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 10:07 PM

Meta Blogging,

Cigars

I've decided to start writing more about cigars. I'm doing this for a couple reasons.

  1. I've been smoking cigars for twelve years.
  2. When I'm focused on cigars, I stay off the cigarettes which are a lot easier to abuse.
  3. A lot of what's out there about cigars tends to be a bit pompous, and that's a space I feel I can work in.

So if you have any questions about cigars in general, or have any questions about specific brands or countries of origins, let me know. I've smoked most of the major brands, and would be willing to try a brand in the interest of blogging. So stay tuned for more nictoine news.

July 26, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:05 PM

Meta Blogging,

MIT Survey

I didn't want to, but Dan and Scott were so convincing. Bob, you're next!

Take the MIT Weblog Survey.

 

July 12, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 10:57 AM

Meta Blogging,

Welcome to the new Aarrgghh!

Welcome to the new Aarrgghh!. I'm assuming you got here from the old site. Welcome, take a look around. New things will be coming.

Nothing much to the move, Janice and I wanted to setup a wedding site. I didn't want to keep putting personal stuff up here at Citizen Wumpus, so I figured I'd move Janice's and my personal sites over to the new domain. It gave me the chance to setup on a Cold Fusion host instead of a PHP site. I don't want to get into a war over technology, however suffice it to say, everytime I get an idea for the site, I end up dropping it, because it would take me 3 to 4 times as long to get it done in php as it would in Cold Fusion.

My new host is Dataride. Cool stuff, I get PHP, Perl, Cold Fusion 7, MySQL and MS SQL, and a good amount of space and transfer. They've been very responsive to support requests (Translation: I've been high maintenance.) So keep checking in, there will be more updates soon.

June 14, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 8:33 PM

Meta Blogging,

Updated the Site Again

Once again, I updated the site. I went to a rigid, non-liquid design, cause I was was tired of finding out little bugs with layout. Additionally Sifr works better with fixed layouts.

Finally, it gave me a chance to experiment with a colorful design. What do think? Too much? Good? Let me know.

April 20, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:31 AM

Meta Blogging,

Number 1 Baby!

I don't know how it happend, but it finally has. As of right now, I'm the number 1 listing for Terrence Ryan in Google.

I will have to do a screen capture. Wooooooooooo.

February 8, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:56 AM

Meta Blogging,

New Look

So I redid the site. Basically I was bored of the other version, and wanted to correct some errors from the first version.

  • While I liked the navigation of the first version, it was seemingly a bit confusing. I base this conclusion on some of the paths that people took through the site.
  • I wanted to put underlines back under the hyperlinks to conform with best practices.
  • I converted all of the css font information to relative sizes.
Also, I wanted to experiment with a liquid layout format. You might have to refresh a couple times to see the difference. Feel free to drop me a line and tell me what you think, or point out any formatting mistakes.

January 31, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 9:36 PM

Meta Blogging,

New Feature

I've decided to add a new feature to the my blog. It's called Who Needs a Cockpunchin' ? It's inspired by a random infograph that appeared on The Onion a couple years back.

So if you see this symbol, make sure your justice is swift and merciless. .. and violently directed at the aforementioned guy's dong. I realize that it's kinda sexist. However the only term for corresponding punishment that my friends and I were able to come up with is: 'Gina Chop and I couldn't edit up a graphic for that.

 

January 22, 2005 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 10:06 PM

Meta Blogging, Who Needs A Cockpunchin' ?,

Upgraded the Blog

Now running at the latest versions of my software:
Movable Type 3.14
MT-Blacklist 2.03

Let's hope this further helps me to reduce spam on the blog. I know some people out there criticize Blacklist, and it's not perfect, but it has blocked over 300 pieces of spam since I installed it, and that's spam I didn't even have to look at. I'm sure that's nothing in comparison to what bigger blogs get, but it's more than enough for me.

December 22, 2004 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 11:57 PM

Meta Blogging,

I'm Gaining Corn-Dog Boy!

One of my stated goals for this site, is to displace the corn dog eating guy as the Number 1 Google result for Terrence Ryan.

Currently I'm number 12 in Google ranking for Terrence Ryan. This is a big improvement from the high thirties I used to be when I started this site.

I'm coming for you Terrence Ryan Eats Corn Dogs. I'm coming for you.

November 16, 2004 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 2:21 AM

Meta Blogging,

Blog Upgraded

The Blog has been upgraded to a fully purchased copy of Movable Type.

This was mostly to reduce the ammount of comment spam we get.

October 4, 2004 Posted by Terrence Ryan at 4:57 PM

Meta Blogging,