Random Brain Dump

If you’re like several people I know who are currently considering running your own blog, check out this smackdown of 3 blogging systems: WordPress, MovableType & TextPattern.

I’ve only use 2 of the three. After a few years running rexlam.com on MovableType I stopped using it for two reasons. First, I don’t like the new complex licensing. The free version is restrictive. Second, I was inundated with comment spams which requires hours of maintenance a month, despite various anti-spam plugins I tried. I switched over to WordPress this summer and so far am happy with it. WordPress is easier to use but is also easy to hack around. One thing I also like is WordPress generates its pages dynamically, as opposed to MovableType which I was required to rebuild the site from time to time.

I used some bad tags in one blog entry that causes the site to prompt for user id & password. It didn’t mean that the site requires login, just bad coding on my part. I started to see it last week but I had dismissed as a bug on Firefox 1.5 beta. Whew, glad that was fixed 🙂

Thanks Truc for dropping me an email about it…

My server has been a target of a DOS attack as of this morning. My hosting provider is working on fighting it at the moment. Access to the site will be unreliable until the attack is averted.

UPDATE (11/4/05):
Looks like the attacks subsided somewhat, while everything isn’t yet back to normal now, web access seems okay. There’s still some weird behavior with the databases…

ZDNet reports that Firefox topped 10% of the browser market, though I’ve read reports that growth is slowing. It gives you an idea how hard it is to topple IE dominance.

On a related note, Firefox 1.5 release candidate is out… Navigation seems a bit quicker in the new version.

I have been using Coppermine to manage my photos last few months. While powerful, its cool features are eclipsed by the overly complex interface. In addition, I had a hard time trying to integrate it with my blog. I ended up with two completely different skins for the blog & the gallery.

I stayed up late last 2 nites redoing my photo gallery. I dumped Coppermine and switched over to Gallery mainly because a plugin called WPG2 that enables photos from Gallery to be embedded within my blog. Finally, I used Peter Near’s theme for get the same look of my blog for gallery.

I had to spent a few hours hacking things a bit to get everything working together. So now, what do I get for 2 sleepless nites?

• Uniform look for both the photo galleries & blog
• Random image in the sidebar
• Albums can be embedded in the blog
• Individual photos can be embbedded in the blog

A few broken links here & there but I’ll get to fixing those later. I’ll take me a while to migrate all the photos. For now, things should be more seamless now. I’m quite satisfied with the result! 🙂

So, after a 3 month-long downtime, I finally spent the time bringing my blog back online. I was forced to shut it down mainly because we moved in June and was without net access for some time as a result. Between the move & new job, reviving the blog was buried deep in my long to-do list.

Finally, it’s time to get to it and this time, I decided to stop running my own server– these pages now are being pushed to you by bluehost.com. First thing I will try to do is to post pictures from our Hawaii trip last week. It will take a few weeks before I manage to migrate my old blog content over and finish the design of the site. So in the meantime pardon the dust…