A couple of days ago, someone asked me why the search function wasn’t working here. The answer is Spam.

Dreamhost emailed me two weeks ago to say they’d turned off the Movable Type search because it was getting pounded by requests and thus putting a heavy load on their server. I had a look at my web stats and there was no way anyone could search that quick or in such a disconnected pattern from groups of single IP addresses unless it was automated, possibly cycling through single entry pages to spam the comments, which I haven’t had open or even installed for years.

So, currently no search until I get around to optimising it. You can always use Google like this: “search query” site:supernaut.info.

Which brings me to other bugs and miscellaneous detritus of supernaut #3.

Not having MSIE, I can only check that this looks ok by using BrowserCam, which it does. I do have some CSS tweaking to do, particularly in terms of writing in the hacks for MSIE rather than using separate stylesheets. As I have craploads of grants/funding stuff/days embedded in Microsoft Word, don’t expect any of this to get done just because you won’t use a standards compliant browser.

Other miscellany: the “read the whole thing …” link needs to be styled. “…i whore for art” is not quite flush with the right margin when using sIFR. The navigation column underline below “About” sits 1 pixel below the underline for the first date entry, again because of a difference in using sIFR instead of HTML fonts. The “supernaut” title does a page jump under xhtml1.0strict doctype, when sIFR loads, probably the most obvious and ugly of all the bugs. Any image thumbnails prior to #3 aren’t fully styled because I had to put a div around them to get the solid background, and I can’t be arsed – yet – going through 1000 entries and fixing this. Finally, the full archives are so NOT finished. I haven’t really decided how to format this page, so it’s just sitting there getting moldy.

I’d love to have had a strikethrough for all of these kinks last month but … wtf, I do this out of an irrepressible compulsion/sense of obligation/attempt to create meaning in an empty life, not because I get paid, so either quell your browser-rage or give me a job. And of the almost 50 000 “Distinct Hosts” and 140 000 “page requests” I’ve given pleasure to this month alone, at least one of you must have some kind of commodity/currency exchange I can fulfill , even if it’s the second word after the ellipsis in supernaut … i whore for art.

edit …

(early april)

The full archives are so finished. In keeping with minimalism, they are now almost nonexistent.

I opened comments again, so now a whole raft of annoyances such as: I need to rewrite the css instead of having different sheets for different browsers, it’s too complicated, so hacks it is. XHTML strict doesn’t like the ‘name’ attribute, and prefers ‘id’, not much of a problem except it means redoing the comments javascript. I also need to put in some anti-spam measures, Comment Challenge I think.