We Interrupt This Blog to Complain
Extended grappling with code to get that new sidebar working ate up another evening, and I’m still not done: there would be Facebook status updates there as well, if only I could get their bizarre and obscure RSS feeds to display on an ordinary webpage using PHP. There are some handy PHP scripts around, but they all seem to be based on the same core code, which doesn’t work on my server (possibly missing a plugin). I can slurp my blog and Twitter feeds into Facebook easily enough, but that would be wrong. Facebook is the sideshow! This is the main stage! [Jumps up and down, waving at crowd from behind.]
If you can’t see the sidebar, by the way, it may be because it’s only on the main blog page, not the archive pages, or because the CSS floats it below the rest of the page if your window is too narrow. More elegant designs would have meant more extensive overhauling of this template, and that would mean even more evenings gone. I’d rather post some more photos, myself.
Spammers rediscovered this blog the other day, complete with its out-of-date back-end without Captchas and Gotchas and Aha!s and Begones, and left a bunch of gibberish comments linking to the homepage of Mr. Mxyzptlk. All gone now, but it’s an annoying price to pay for keeping the lines open. As for switching to a more robust and up-to-date system, which would mean completely different templating, see above. The search functions are still offline from a 2007 hacker attack, too. At every turn, unending vistas of wasted time spread before me...
And now I don’t even have time to finish this whinge properly. Quick, hit post and be done with it, before it goes stale.
27 January 2009
Spammers obviously don’t read anything on the blog except “Send”, because they were back over the weekend. This is fast becoming even less fun than the last time of No Fun. I’m going to switch off comments on everything except the latest entry as I go, and if that doesn’t work I might throw in the towel on comments altogether. So much for designing for community.
Added by Rory on 3 February 2009.