Notes from James

New Blog

Still playing with it. Much more versatile than Thingamablog, but not as cute and friendly. Anyway...

Here it is!

Change in the Future

I'm looking to change my blog to Pivot. It seems to be really nice and configurable, and more or less what I'm looking for as a web based alternative to Thingamablog. I plan on keeping the remnants of this blog around for posterity, and for people looking for interesting information. We'll see if it happens, though. When it does, I'll post a link.

Considering Leaving Thingamablog Again

As you may know, I write this blog using Thingamablog, a Java based blogging tool. It seems to work pretty good for what it's for, but I am always considering leaving it to "upgrade" to another set of blogging software such as WordPress, or, SimplePhpBlog or FlatPress, as I am not enamored of SQL based blogs. However, after I poke around a bit, I decide to stay around still as it still fits my needs. It may not be perfect, but I still like it better than most of the stuff out there.

Maybe I'll just clean up my theme again.

Chumazik

If you haven't seen Chumazik, the Russian "Dirty Guy", then you're missing out. Seriously.

The best part, in my opinion, is the video.

Thingamablog Future

Every so often, I like to ping Bob Tantlinger, creator of Thingamablog, about the future of this wonderful tool. Here's his latest response:

Hi James,

There's been lots of progress, but it's still not quite there yet. As things stand right now, a lot of the big stuff (persistence layer, template engine, etc) is pretty much ready. But there's still a fair bit of busy work and loose ends to tie up. I know I'm really terrible at time frames, but If everything keeps rolling along as it has been, I'm hopeful that the first alpha should appear around September at the latest.

Sorry about things being so silent lately. As soon as I get some free time, I'll post a progress report along with some demos of some of the new stuff.

-Bob

Found Some Old Comments for the Blog

Hello ErieBlogs!

Got a link to here from ErieBlogs...lots of different blogs there about Erie PA. On an unrelated note, I added a neat header to the ghofulpo.com homepage. Maybe I'll add it to the blog webpages. I'm still deciding which pages to clean up and move into the updated (well, forced to be updated) website.

Happy Memorial Day!

More Recovery

Still haven't found the files I was looking for with the comments embedded. Most of the website is a disaster...lots of missing pages, lots of old information, and lots of...well, junk. Time for spring cleaning, I suspect. I did redesign the main page and add a link to Sneakatron's website. The rest of the website needs a thorough cleansing, though.

More Website Woes

Well, I seem to have lost 99% of all my comments. Bummer. And it also appears that they are not recoverable. Hopefully I have a partial backup somewhere, but I definitely lost a fair number of them. Guess just another reason to back up your computer. Or, if you have a server out there somewhere, back that one up too.

Pay Your Bills

Don't forget to pay your bills. Somehow I did, for this website, and lost quite a bit of it. Plus, at the same time, they were in the process of migrating to a new set of servers. Hopefully, I'll get it back sometime soon. At the very worst, all the comments were lost. :-( Anyway, at least I got my e-mail address back again so I can receive huge amounts of spam like I did previously.

More Thingamablog Commenting

Added some maintenance functions to my commenting script. Not pretty to work with, but still workable to remove junk (i.e. lots of debugging statements!).

Thingamablog - Archiving Settings to Fix Upload Issues

One of my complaints about Thingamablog is that it seems to try to upload every web page all the time. I changed my archive settings and it seems to behave better. Here's how I'm doing it now.

Commenting Within a Thingamablog Post

Note that this is in reply to this post.

Let me start off by staying that I'm not a PHP guru by any means. However, if you want to have the comment for Thingamablog included after the post, you should add the following PHP script to the Thingamablog template after the comment. Modify accordingly if you have tweaked your add_comment.php file.

Please note that I have not tested this! But it should be close.

<?php
// Change mailto to your e-mail address, or leave blank if you don't want to mail notification
    $mailto = "xxx@yyy.com";
    $mail_program = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t";
    $post_key    = "123456";
    $origin = $_POST["origin"];
    $title="<EntryTitle><$EntryTitle$></EntryTitle>";
    $permalink="<$EntryPermalink$>";
    $article="<$EntryID$>";
    $base='.';

    echo "<form action=\"add_comment.php\" method=\"post\">";
    echo "Your Name: <input name=\"user\" type=\"text\" /><br />";
    echo "E-mail (optional, will not be posted): <input name=\"email\" type=\"text\" /><br />";
    echo "Web site (i.e. www.xxx.com): <input name=\"www\" type=\"text\" /><br />";
    echo "Comment:<br><textarea name=\"comment\" cols=\"70\" rows=\"20\" ></textarea>";
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"post_val\" value=\"$post_key\">";
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"article\" value=\"$article\">";
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"permalink\" value=\"$permalink\">";
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"title\" value=\"$title\">";
    echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"origin\" value=\"$origin\"><br>";
    echo "<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Submit\" />";
    echo "</form>";
?>

Thingamablog Woes

I reduced the size of my archive templates in Thingamablog by removing unnecessary junk that I wasn't using, like the calender. It seemed to update faster, but didn't seem to help my problem of getting the 'null reply from server' error message.

Test Comment for Antispam

This is a test comment to test if my lame antispam comment filter is working.

Thingamablog Update - Latest News

Unfortunately, nothing new to report.

Hi James,

So far so good. Unfortunately, not much new to report- Still working on it.

-Bob

Playing with the Look

After checking out Sneakatron's Thingamablog website, I was inspired to play with the look a bit. Hopefully nothing major is broken, but at least the front page has a new look for a change. Maybe a bit cleaner.

Twitter

I've been playing around with Twitter, a sort of mini-blog thing where users post simple one line statements as to what they are doing. It's kind of interesting, but I'm still not sure what the point of it is. Maybe the point is to waste time and watch other people wasting time.

Thingamablog Update

Latest news from Bob Tantlinger, author of Thingamablog:

Hi James,

Still working on it. Other than that, there's not much news for 2.0 at present. However, there will be a small bug fix release for 1.0 here shortly. The newly released Java 6.0 causes a nasty bug in 1.0.5....

http://tantlinger.f2o.org/archives/2006/12/entry_13.html

-Bob

Julkalender

Julkalender is going ok so far. I'm only an episode or two behind. I forgot how much work it is, putting it together. If you are wondering why it's taking so long, well, rest assured that I'm going to finish it at some point, it's just keeping moving that's difficult.

Julkalender 2006 Intro

It's started! Here is the site for Julkalender 2006!

Julkalender 2006

Julkalender 2006 starts in a few days! I think I'll use the old Julkalender 2005 feed to start the new one...I'll have to see how it works out....only a few days left to prepare the show and record a few episodes! Time to get busy. I recorded the theme song, so it looks like it's going to happen!

Haven't done any Coverville Idol - 1973 Edition work yet...hopefully I'll have time for that too...too many projects again.

More Recovery

Found a few more articles...I wish I knew where they had gone in the first place.

Thingamablog Recovery

Well, I managed to find a lot of the old articles...I don't know what happened to them. At least I was able to repost them.

Update to Thingamablog Commenting

After checking out Steph's site, I added an optional e-mail and web page tag to the comment submissions page.

Image Tooltips in Firefox

I wanted to add "Tooltips" to the commenting functions below, as well as the permalink. This way, when you hover the mouse over the button, you know what it will do. Firefox expects the "title" tag to be used in the img statement, where as Internet Explorer pops them up with the "alt" tag. According to various sites, the "title" method is the way to do it. I just did it both ways, and it seems to work ok.

Thingamablog Lost My Entries!

Somehow Thingamablog lost some of my old entries...not sure what happened....maybe I made a mistake...but I realized that some of the comments that I had previously were appearing suddently under unrelated topics...the articles had vanished! Ack! How depressing. I know I lost my nice biscuit recipe. Not sure what else vanished.

Thingamablog Commenting

Ok, here's what to do to add PHP comments to Thingamablog.

1. Download this code and put the two files into the 'web files' directory.
2. Modify the 'add_comment.php' file to your e-mail address, if you want e-mail notification.
3. To our styles-site.css (or whatever your CSS file is called), add .comment_sender and .comment_body to the style sheet for whatever look and feel that you want to have.
4. For each of the templates, add the following code whever you want to have commenting:

<?php
$article="<$EntryID$>";
$base='.';
include 'comments.php';
?>

Note that Thingamablog puts the files in different subdirectories, so you will have to modify the $base and include lines to '..' and '../comments.php' in some cases to get the comments to work correctly for some pages. This is because all the comments are stored in the main blog directory (as are the scripts), but the web pages can be stored elsewhere. It is probably best to use relative pathnames (../.., etc) rather than absolute paths in case you want to move your blog in the future.

Note that I am not a PHP guru, so this code is probably not the most secure. However, it works for me. However, I don't have enough traffic to get blog spam (yet).

German Thingamablog Community

Check the German Thingamablog Community out here. Looks pretty good! Even if my German is very poor.

PHP Commenting

I'm busy adding PHP commenting to the Thingamablog templates. This allows a bit more user interaction. I still like Thingamablog and want to keep it running, but now I can get some integrated commentary. This entry will probably be used a lot for comments and testing.

Progress?

Well, I screwed around even more with the blog look. The calendar to the right looks almost centered now. What a pain. I don't know if I do anything with this blog except play with the look. Even William has updated a cartoon on his blog. At least I think I'm learning CSS.

I need to update the music section soon. I wonder if I should just do a static page (as it currently is), or make a new blog, or just more blog categories.

So is this blog useful? I don't know...

More Screwing Around With the Blog

Changed some colors on the Haloscan comments and tried (yet again) to add some space after the calendar on the right side. Seems like I keep on screwing around with that but never get anywhere. I'm sure I'll try again later...

More Blogging Fun...

Playing with the blog again. Changed a bit of the layout, hopefully fixed (again) some of the archives. Hopefully, I didn't screw up anything.

Notes From James - One Year

I was playing around with the blog (again) and noticed that I started this blog almost exactly a year ago. Well, it survives on!

More Thingamablog Isn't Dead

Yuji Okamura sent me a link to a Japanese translation of my posting. You can check it out here.

Thingamablog Isn't Dead!

I was worried about the status of Thingamablog (the wonderful Java program that I use to write this blog). I sent an e-mail to Bob Tantlinger, the main author, and asked him if the project was dead, in hiatus, etc.

Hi Bob!

I've been using Thingamablog for quite a while now and have noticed that the project seems to have died. :-( I remember reading about Tablog 2.0 a while back, but can't seem to find any trace of it. Is the project really dead? (Of course on sourceforge, it's never really dead, but...)

Thanks for such a great program!

James

Almost immediately, he sent me his reply:

Hi James,

Thingamablog isn't dead :) It is being rebuilt from the ground up, which, sadly, is taking a lot longer than i'd hoped.

Sorry about there not being any news updates, or anything. I guess when I get my mind wrapped around new projects, I tend to push the old ones to the side. I should be better about that.

Anyway, stay tuned. The new version isn't too far away.

So to all Thingamabloggers, don't give up hope! And stay tuned....

Updated: 20 Aug 2006

Check for updates on Bob's weblog here.