Category: overt

overt

doinking

As I seem to do every couple of years, I’ve once again undertaken to fix up overt a bit. As you can see, things look a bit different already, but as all web developers do, I have more and bigger plans in the offing.

captcha

Yes, it has come to this. To comment on overt now you have to prove that you’re not a machine. I’m using both one of those type-in-code thingys and also running comments through Spamassassin. Always with the arms race, naughty little spammers.

gallery2 live

Long-time overt readers will remember when I rolled my own photo gallery using ColdFusion and an Access database. A few years ago I replaced my own software with Gallery, a PHP-based photo album that was way better than anything I wrote could ever be. It had it’s faults, like storing everything in flat files and being kind of ugly, but it was very functional.

A couple of years ago they started on a rewriting of Gallery from the ground up, based on a mySQL backend for speed and all CSS’ed up for prettiness. It’s taken a while, but the code is finally ready for prime-time so I moved overt’s gallery over to the new version. Such excitement! It looks exactly the same! But it should give a lot more flexibility in the future, plus I get to stick these nifty “random photo” blocks everywhere now (see right). Let me know if something looks borked to you. I know that viewing comments on pics still kind of sucks, I’m thinking about writing something myself to fix it up.

nyc coverage soon

We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.

Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.

new overt on the way

So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.

postnuke to wordpress converter/importer

So, I just recently switched my website from postnuke over to WordPress. As part of the process, I wrote a simple PHP script to convert all of the entries from the postnuke site over to WordPress. Although postnuke is a pretty heavy-duty CMS, there might be a few people out there who will make the same switch, so I decided to clean up the script a little and post it on the site for anyone who needs it. You can get it here. I put it under the GPL, so you can probably use it with no worries. If you do use it, send me an email or post a comment or something. I should add that it would be generous to say that I’m a novice at PHP. I’m sure there’s plenty I did wrong writing the script, but it works (for me), and that was enough.

Update 12 August 2005: I should have mentioned that this script was written for WordPress 1.2, and will require some massaging to work with 1.5. Check the comments for more info.

wordpress

Here it is. It’s still not totally done, but close enough that I wanted to transfer all the old posts over. Please let me know if you encounter any errors or explosions or whatever. And yes, I’m going to change the pic up top…