Juxtaposition

I also finally started using the excellent PromoteThis plugin to create the nice links to digg.

Also, I had to install the MTStripControlChars plugin, but an updated one from an entry at the VOIP and Gadgets Blog to keep Windows 1252 encoded characters (mostly quotes and double-quotes) from creeping into postings. It happens a lot with pasted in text from websites. Ugh.

You know, it's kind of irritating that the MTAmazon and MTBlogroll plugins aren't XHTML compliant yet. I may just contribute some fixes to do proper URL entity encoding. I had a ton of HTML cruft from migrating from various template versions and bad Sidebars I didn't test. Fortunately, the browsers didn't seem to mind. All of the HTML I could clean up should be cleaned up now, save for some possible issues from Performancing-edited posts. Can't wait for the revival of Performancing...

Posted by at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finally fixed my modified Vixburg style for Movable Type so that it makes use of wider browsers. Many times, quotes or pictures or preformatted text get chopped by the small center column. I tried for hours to get a decent 3 column layout where the center column will be fluid and take up as much available space as is there, to no avail. Best I could do was set 65% as the width and that does most of what I hoped for, at least for a 1280x1024. The true holy grail is at this site, but would require me building a whole new style to match kind of what I have using this as the base http://www.glish.com/css/7.asp The right column does not flitter away underneath the content as happens with mine when the page is sized smaller. *sigh*

Anyhow, take a look at my css for my tweaks at the bottom and I hope this makes things more readable.

Posted by at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was having the same problem as in this posting to the MT forum after upgrading to the new 3.2 templates by copying them in from the default_templates directory or from the movable type templates website:

The footer on my main index seems to be incorrectly displayed: %%time"> | | (0)

1- %% shouldn't be displaying
2- It should say Posted by xyz on August 19, 2005 02:00 PM | Permalink | (0)
3- '>' shouldn't be displaying
4- the permalink should be displaying

It turns out that the problem is due to the fact that the new templates in MT 3.2 are really templates for templates in that they contain special tags for internationalization that need to be parsed and replaced with the real template content before you use the templates. So, the default_templates cannot be just pasted in directly.

The simple solution: Create a new blog. This will have the default templates by default (funny how that works). You now have available any of the default templates that have been fully localized to your blog's language and can now be copy and pasted right into your existing blog.

Posted by at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have gotten two spam blog posts (aside: so, should blog spam be called spog or splog?) recently that I can't figure out what the person's motivation is. They were very similar in style:

• They were both posts consisting of one line of text
• They both had a first name as the user name
• They both included a URL that was not registered or accessible that was related to their name
• They both used name-based hotmail IDs (not sure if they are even valid) for email addresses
• They were both posted within just over 2 hours of each other
• They both were posted to old posts
• Neither had anything to do with the post itself

All of these factors lead me to conclude that they were bogus and so both were rejected.

(MT-Blacklist ROCKS, BTW!!!)

One of the comments said simply:

"Does this form work like a guestbook?"

The other said:

"First time reading this blog, just wanted to say hi."

I could perhaps understand if the URLs they provided were valid, but otherwise, I can't understand what these posts were trying to do. Perhaps they were just trying to see how they could slip in under the radar for future spam attacks?

Other evidence culled from the logs confirms my suspicions that these are not legit:

The first one has a user-agent of PERL's LWP module:

69.193.88.30 - - [03/Nov/2004:13:08:11 -0800] "POST /blog-bin/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.1" 200 1794 "-" "libwww-perl/5.65"

Hmmm. Same thing with the next one, but from a slightly different IP and using an older LPW module:

69.193.101.102 - - [03/Nov/2004:15:23:23 -0800] "POST /blog-bin/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.1" 200 1794 "-" "libwww-perl/5.64"

Posted by at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, this site has gone stagnant for almost a year now for reasons that I'd rather not go into.

But that's not the important thing--it's back online, on superfast hardware now, and should get more regular updates.

Hope you enjoy!

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Juxtaposition has rocketed to the top of the Google search results for the word 'juxtaposition'! Strange, given that Juxtaposition is nary a few months old.

Sadly, a link search (for link:juxtaposition.axley.net) returns no hits though.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=juxtaposition&btnG=Google+Search

Posted by at 5:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been so busy with work and other things that I have amassed a large queue of articles and little nuggets over the past few months. You'll probably see some old news come through that I still wanted to share or comment on.

Cheers,

-core24

Posted by at 5:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You may have seen this error crop up in your movabletype blog:

Ping 'http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2' failed: HTTP error: 500 read timeout

I found plenty of sites through google where people were asking about this but nobody offered a solution that I saw. Well, I found a solution that was posted on the MT support forum just an hour or so ago:

movabletype.org : Support Forum

below is a unified diff so that you can patch your site. The patch seems to work most of the time, although I have had at least one of the same errors crop up. That could have been due to something else though.

--- XMLRPC.pm   Tue Feb 11 16:15:03 2003
+++ lib/MT/XMLRPC.pm  Fri May 23 16:29:04 2003
@@ -68,8 +68,12 @@
             "HTTP error: [_1]", $res->status_line ));
     }
     my $content = $res->content;
-    my($error, $msg) = $content =~
-        m!flerror.*?(\d+).*message.*?(.+?)!s;
+# quick fix to weblogs.com RPC error in activity log.  See blog entry for details.
+#    my($error, $msg) = $content =~
+#        m!flerror.*?(\d+).*message.*?(.+?)!s;
+   my($error) = $content =~  m!flerror.*?(d+)!s;
+   my($msg) = $content =~  m!message.*?(.+?)!s;
+
     if ($error) {
         return $class->error(MT->translate(
             "Ping error: [_1]", $msg ));

Posted by at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I just found out some very simple instructions and a sample template to make a parallel WML version of this site for viewing on my mobile phone (I do work for a wireless phone company, after all). Check out the result: Juxtaposition mobile edition

I started by finding this WAP & WML thread at movabletype.org

This discussion pointed me to two solutions for two different problems:

1. Nicely Toasted Mobile, which generates wml versions on-the-fly for WAP-based mobile devices
2. Mark Pilgrim's solution which was designed for more intelligent mobile form factors, like the palm. This is how you can create Avant-Go compatible content for offline browsing with tools like Plucker.

I chose the first option as this is the one that I really find lacking right now--the ability to view my own site from my Ericsson t68i. I can view the regular site just fine (with the exception of the style sheet, because Pocket IE does not support CSS...) in my Siemens SX56. But cannot even coax the Ericsson to view the RDF version.

I made just a couple of tweaks to the Nicely Toasted template to customize the content and make it generic enough to be used for any other blog, including: making the Home URL relative, changing the blog name using the tag <MTBlogName>

I think that the next step will be to further customize the template to include hyperlinks to the rest of the story content.

Posted by at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)