Site Redesign

Yep, something does look a little different around here. I've moved Leoville.com to Wordpress (it was PMWiki) and integrated it with my blog (which I moved to Wordpress a few months ago). This new template is Brian Gardner's Revolution and it makes magazine-style pages like this possible, making Wordpress suitable for web sites as well as blogs. I'm sure you'll find numerous bugs, both cosmetic and serious. Please let me know when you find something off (you can leave a comment on this post). I'll be tweaking the site for the next few days and weeks. Thanks for visiting!

A Little Help Here

I love the "This Day In Leoville History" plug-in. On a blog like this with nearly seven years worth of posts it's fun to go back in time. But you've probably noticed that a number of the entries are 404: file not found. They're there, it's just that they have punctuation in the title. For some reason Wordpress can see the entries, but the links don't work. For example, today you'll see "2001: I’ve been farked" - something about the apostrophe throws off the permalink. The actual page is there but I can't link to it. Anyone have any experience with this? Got a fix? Maybe some sort of MySQL script to encode the non-text entities? Or a change to the default encoding? I'd appreciate any help you could offer. It's kinda bugging me. UPDATE: Ben had the right idea. I was using "pretty" permalinks that had the post title in the link. I changed it to year/month/day/post_id and that fixed the problem. Thanks for all your solutions!!

LOL Colophon

For those who are interested I've published a colophon page for this site here, including a complete list of the plug-ins I am using.

Plugin Mania

I've tweaked the site in a few more ways. Adding a print link, post ratings, an online user page (all from Lester Chan), and a mobile version that's particularly tuned to the iPhone (but works fine on other cell phones, too). By the way, did you know you can listen to my podcasts right from this page? See that Radio Leo block to the right? Click one of the triangles. Cool, neh? That's Angsuman Chakraborty's Taragana's Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin. I did all this while watching the Niners win a squeaker on Monday Night Football while Henry "did his homework" next to me. My idea of a perfect evening.

Tumbléo

Dvorak calls me a "joiner." Someone who signs up for every new site he sees. True dat. But sometimes they're really worth signing up for, and how do you know until you do? I'll give you an example.

I've always wanted to do a Tumblelog, somewhere - not quite as formal as a blog - to stick all the random cool stuff I come across day to day. The coolest example out there is project.ioni.st (don't click that link just yet because you'll never return - it's that engaging), but there are several others like the original, Anarchaia.

The canonical way to do this is to install Ruby on Rails and Ozimodo. It's very easy unless you're using Apache. Then it gets a little harder. I just don't have the nerve to mess with either of my production servers (TWiT.tv or techguylabs.com), so my dream of creating a TWiT tumblelog has been thwarted. Until now.

tumblr.com makes it trivial to create a tumblelog. Merlin Mann did it first. He inspired me (in more ways than one) to use tumblr to create tumbléo.com. I'm not cheating on you Vox, honest. I can love two blogging engines at once. Hey, I've got six sites running on three different CMS systems and two different forum engines right now.

So now between Vox, Twitter, and Tumblr, there are no limits to my self-expression.

Ideally all this stuff would be collected into a single site. And someday I hope to do just that.

The first step is to move the the radio show site and my home page, both now in PMWiki, to Vox's sister platform, Moveable Type. Once that's done (hello Apperceptive, where are you?) I will merge all my old blog postings (now in Expression Engine format) into Vox and crosspost into MT.

Phase two will be to find a Tumblelog template for MT (got one?) and incorporate tumbléo into the site.

Twitter will just have to stay a widget on the site.

That's three sites reduced into one. What about the other three sites? I don't anticipate moving TWiT in at this point; Drupal is working so well for it. And the message boards for TWiT and Leoville will stay where they are, twit.tv/forums (running Vanilla) and leovilletownsquare.com (running FusionBB), respectively.

Meanwhile enough voxing around, I've got some cool stuff to post on tumbléo.