This morning you may notice some changes to plutor.org (unless you’re reading this in an RSS reader, in which case I invite you to check out what I’m talking about). For the past few years, my Twitter posts, photos, links I’ve found interesting, and occasionally music that I’m listening to have all been intermingled here as a life stream. I will no longer be featuring those things so prominently on this blog. Oh, they still exist, on Pinboard and Twitter and Flickr and elsewhere (you can find links to all of them on the bottom of the homepage).

But I’ve decided that this website should be more focused on my nerdly projects. You know, the visit all MLB parks and expected value of a Powerball ticket things. I’ve heard that people like those posts, and I like those posts, and I’d like to encourage myself to make more of them. And rearranging my online life is the best way I know to do that.

I just updated plutor.org to Wordpress 2.9.2 (from the antiquated 2.7). It went smoothly on my end, and it looks like everything’s still up and running, but please let me know if you see any smoke.

Those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed will notice that this morning’s link had some link spam in it. It appears that my previous policy of never updating WordPress or any of its plugins finally led to a security breach. I dropped all work that I get paid to do, and I’ve now upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Unfortunately, this is a very new release, and it has broken the fancy del.icio.us and Flickr integration I worked so hard to setup. Hopefully, a FeedWordPress update will be out soon, and you can once again enjoy my nonsense at full-bore.

Update, 6pm: Well, it appears I was misinformed. FeedWordPress works just great. Thanks to Graham Leuschke for bringing the spammery to my attention.

There’s a serious dearth of FeedWordPress filter plugins out there. I aim to rectify the situation. FeedWordPress Collapse Filter will collapse multiple posts being imported from a single feed into a single post. I use it here on Plutor.org to keep Flickr photos (which I frequently upload by the handfuls) from overwhelming everything else. Each syndicated feed can be separately configured to collapse (or not) with a different time threshold.

Download FeedWordPress Collapse Filter 1.0

In celebration of what was apparently Plutor.org’s sixth birthday a couple weeks ago, I hereby unveil version 2.0 7, let’s say it’s version 10 of my blog. Simpler, cleaner, no more silly orange stripes or fixed menus. I hope the individual pages put more emphasis on discussion, and I hope that in the future, I spend more time writing than linking.

Thanks to Brian and Chris for being the actual impetus behind this change. They staged a webdesign intervention, and to them I am grateful.

Some behind-the-scenes stuff: I’ve finally upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.4. While I was at it, I decided to install the coComment plugin, so that you can follow your comments with coComment. They have a new Firefox extension that makes it even easier than before. Almost trivial, in fact.

Update, 13 Aug - I've created a small plugin to add the slash:comments element to my RSS feed. That should fix the discussion counts on my home page, and it's a cleaner solution than hacking the WP code directly.

Welcome to WordPress. This is my first post with the new system. Things are going to be a little hairy here for the next week or so, as I make things work the way I want them. But the important things are all set.

I’m abandoning Moveable Type (the blog software I use right now) for something less.. er.. big-endian. I’ve been having issues with MT lately, and I’ve heard good things about Wordpress for a long time. Also, using MT templates and plugins to make the integrated home page is a bit complex. I’m thinking about switching to something like Planet. While I’m at it, the design for the page will likely be simplified and tweaked, but I’m going to try to keep it largely recognizable.

I think I’ve made this kind of announcement in the past, but this time I’m serious.

Update 8 Nov: The home page and the uberfeed are Planet-powered, now.

Update 10 Nov: And now everything is Wordpress. So long, MT.

I just spent the time this morning making a single over-arching RSS feed for Plutor.org. It should now include my Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and moblog and blog posts, like the HTML version of the site does. Please use the new URL to follow my incoherent ramblings and unrelated links. For the uninitiated: What is RSS?

Eris (my webhost) is doing some rolling OS updates, and I’m having some problems with the front page of Plutor.org. The blog portion still works, but the “links” will be missing, as will my most recent Flickr photos. I’ll get it working as soon as I have a chance.

Update 6 Sep: Fixed. Perl wasn't finding my custom modules, but now I'm not sure how it ever saw them.

Update 7 Sep: I've updated to MT 3.2, and I'm hoping that this will simplify some stuff. I'm going to be doing some ongoing cleanups over the next few days when I get the time, like making a master RSS feed, and maybe moving moblog stuff to a dedicated MT blog, so that it can be commented on.

I hope that I don’t regret allowing any of the E3 folks to moblog to the front page here. The new design makes it really easy to integrate new sources of posts, like the E3 moblog, or the “standard” moblog.

The old location of the E3 moblog is also available, if this page is too ugly for you.

I never liked the side-by-side bars on plutor.org very much, so this morning I spent a bit of time using the mt-list and mt-rssfeed plugins to create a page with blog posts, del.icio.us links, and flickr photos intermingled. I like the simplicity better, and I think it’ll be easier to glance at and determine what’s new.

If I still like this design in the morning, I plan to migrate all of the archives and such to the new design at some point in the future.

Had a little time this weekend to do some HTML hacking, so I got rid of the much-derided orange header. Mount Everest forever! I think I might come up with some way to rotate the header image, too, but then again it might stagnate like the Metablog. Reply if you see any funkiness with the new header.

Update 18:55 - Fixed some IE issues

Just to allay any fears, I have not forgotten this blog. There’s a huge new site launch next week for which I’m in the middle of configuring and tweaking 50 Linux servers. I’ve heard some people say that this is our single biggest launch since the dot-com bubble burst. I can believe it.

I was called for Jury duty (petit jury, thank goodness) on May 3. As a heavy-duty Law and Order fan, I look forward to watching the real thing from the inside. Believe it or not, I actually hope I’ll get picked. I just hope it doesn’t interfere with E3.

Okay, so maybe nevermind on the whole del.icio.us thing. I like being able to keep single links through there, but I don’t like the dialy upload process, and it makes the blog look pretty boring. I’ve been meaning to redesign this page slightly for a while, and this might be a good excuse to do that. It’s harder to put aside time for web development when you’re a Sysadmin than it was when you’re a web developer.

Update: Set aside some time. What do you think so far? Still to do: integrate my flickr photos and some sort of simple del.icio.us links list.

Dear spammers: I had been perfectly satisfied with allowing you to plop your online gambling and pharmeceutical links in my blog from time to time. Every couple of weeks, I’d take a look at the comments interface in Moveable Type and delete anything that didn’t look like a legit comment. Then you had to go and ruin that by posting 300 spams Christmas Eve.

Now I’ve installed MT Blacklist. It’s got about 2500 spam filters defined, and when I see one sneak through, it reports it to a central server and everyone else who uses MTB gets to know that you’re blog spamming.

I hope you got a lot of click-throughs for those comments, because you won’t be getting many more.

I’ve imported some ancient plutor.org blog entries from a text file I came across this morning. Now, you can start from the boring beginning!

This weekend, Justin upgraded PostgreSQL on Eris (translation: the database software on my webhost). Best-case, this will solve all the weirdness that I’ve been experiencing with rebuilds, but more likely it’ll cause more problems until I can actually fix the tables. Again, reply or email me if you see anything seriously funky.

There’s something big wrong with plutor.org right now. Things aren’t rebuilding right, and some templates got reverted weirdly, and there are all sorts of other issues probably related to the Moveable Type update I did last week. I’m going to do an export-and-clean sometime this week to fix it. Please be patient.

I just upgraded Moveable Type to version 3.1. The upgrade borked because Postgres 7.2.1 doesn’t support “ALTER TABLE foo ALTER COLUMN bar SET NOT NULL”. I had to do some jimmying by hand, and now I’m getting strange errors in strange places. Let me know by reply or by email if you see anything seriously sketchy.

This is a test of the new method for photo entries. Please ignore it for a while if it goes wonky. Looks like it’s working. Hooray for MT. (A sample post with the new photos-in-blog method.)

Right now marks the official launch of the new Plutor.org site. Powered by Moveable Type 3.0 and a mess of plugins, I hope to keep this place updated now. I’ve got my own sorta-blog, but the focus of this site will be my coding projects. Ironically, that’s the one part of the site that I haven’t yet finished. Hopefully early next week I’ll figure that out.

So it looks like Moveable Type might end up doing what I want it to do. It’s not my favorite solution, though. I was trying to protest the 3.0 license changes, since it kinda keeps Coolass from being able to upgrade without paying $70 or 100. Blosxom was pretty close to what I wanted, but web-based management out-of-the-box is really nice, and the templating in MT is second-to-none.

Need to get commenting working, need to get a few other things looked at, and I’m going to do some experimenting with MTPhotoGallery.

This is a test of the MT blogging system. Dear God, I hope this ends up working.

(Hey, just testing the extended part.)

SNET conspired to create a full month of downtime for coolass.net, plutor.org, and wsvw1u.com, among a few others. Now that this has been resolved, and it appears that everything is working again, I can sleep.