Tag Archives: Ecto

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Unattached No More!

“Yeah, I know Frances, it’s awfully ‘precise’ of me. Can we just leave aside that conversation for now and enjoy some shit?” “Ok, Other Frances, we can, but I’m not sure what everyone else will think of you…” “I’m just gonna leave that ellipsis hanging.” “As you like. Your decision.”

On and off for months/years, I’ve been porting the first I dunno how many years of supernaut properly into WordPress. When I gave Moveable Type the boot—and later ecto, opting to work directly in WordPress rather than with a haha ‘blogging client’ (remember when blog software was so crap you needed a blogging client rather than suffer the web browser?) I had all those years of images to deal with, assimilating them, attaching them to post, blahwork. Weeks of blaaahwork. Done. Fucking finished right now. 6312 images are all unified and fuck me if I ever have to change to another blogging platform it’s gonna be a piece of piss compared to this. Or I will throw my arms up and walk the fuck out of the internet for ever.

This is archaeology. The remainder. The images that weren’t attached, had no home, were left to languish in the dim recesses of my server. Jacques Derrida would probably find these telling. Bin Lang girls from Taiwan, I think from an exhibition, or they might have been actual workers in Tainan or Taizhong. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, I think from when I was in Taipei and was told about what Gen was up to—also introduced to the novels of China Miéville. A page from a comic called Dragnet? I think one of those mid- late-’00s types when tranny was a word we could still throw around without the Queer Police putting a fucking * on the end. That “Jesus Loves You” one … fuck knows. Maybe from Emile? Fuck Gender might even be a photo I took at some Queer* event in Berlin. Or Vienna. Dunno. Thought it was cool at the time (maybe, fuck knows, no memory here), enough to photograph, though not enough to blog. Don’t think it’s cool anymore. Lambs. Baaaaaaah! Was from Christmas 2008, with the mob all in Berlin, around the time I photographed a Nativity Scene. This is definitely one of my photos.

Finally I can remove that shitful “sorry things are broken” apology at the bottom of supernaut.

supernaut addendum

Aside

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Oh grep! I spent some of my spare time the last days grepping the crud out of supernaut’s database. Much excitement, of course. The result is that now all the image file paths point to the default WordPress uploads folder, organized by year and month, and also all images are in the Media Library. So my slow task of disentangling supernaut from its previous years in Ecto and Movable Type, and hooking it properly into WordPress (which should mean if I ever decide to swap to another platform will mean less pain) proceeds slowly.

I decided for the manual path for coping with all the rubbish html surrounding the images as the thought of properly grepping all that caused my eyes to water, so currently I’m working my way through June, 2004. Shall take months, I’m sure.

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supernaut wordpress

Six months ago, deliriously annoyed with Movable Type, and deeply envious of all those people using WordPress. I install WP, throw a theme framework on top and promptly run away, terrified of what harrowing coding ordeals would ensue when I tried to make new look like old.

I have an end of year list of things to do. Coding for some, editing for others, rsync, asr, and other delights of command line backups for still another. For me, one was to use the brilliant, entirely CSS 100% background image for francesdath.info. That took all of 40 minutes or so, mostly in cleaning out my old junk from when I decided to code that version in an afternoon.

The other, of course, forced me to look at supernaut once more.

I’ve been using WordPress for all my projects lately, and the more I fall into it, the more I love it. A while ago, after much looking around, thinking, reading, and even a couple of trials, I decided on Blueprint CSS as the typographic CSS framework to build sites upon. Rather than lose time that could be spent sleeping…

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

— Blueprint

… and a Photoshop layout to build designs upon that then can be transferred ridiculously quickly into a real site.

Of course the limitations are firstly of setting up a WordPress theme with all the necessary IDs and classes. Lucky someone else did that for me. Combining the Sandbox theme framework with the WSB Child Theme…

WSB is a Sandbox child theme that provides tight integration with the Blueprint CSS. This is the conclusion of the method of integration discussed here. Using WordPress functions file, Sandbox template files, and Blueprint CSS files creates a excellent minimalist theme that is a very strong starting point for further theme development and customization

— Nedsferatu.com

… I began this afternoon and lazily poked at some CSS, a little hackery in one or two of the functions.php, some shuffling of the Sandbox templates php (which I could have done in css and left all this untouched but I was feeling lazy – much cheese and chocolate). To be pedantic, I began around 18h and it’s now 2315-ish, and with a good hour or more break in that time, so perhaps 4 hours of actual conscious attention, supernaut went from before to after.

(Mostly.)

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moving…

I have spent a lazy Saturday transferring supernaut over to WordPress (more on that there). The result of that for the moment is the old Movable Type site exists at supernaut.info/index1.html and in the static archives while the new at the usual address.

This means also the RSS feed has changed, so for those of you who like feeds, I am now at: https://supernaut.info/wordpress/?feed=rss2.

I won’t be deleting the old version yet, as the new one needs a lot of construction I shall only have scant time for, but distinctly odd weirdness (like this feed showing garbled rubbish for instance) would make a good moment to email me with the offending instance.

Movable Type was good four years ago, but in the intervening time much has changed and it is too much of a hassle to work with any longer. I hope I spend the next few years enjoying WordPress as much as I have over the last while, and find maybe some new ways to blog.

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from ecto 3 to wordpress 2.8

uuhhh…

When I started finding odd stuff in my Movable Type install for supernaut I knew the end was near. I’ve been putting this off for a long time, especially doing projects for others using WordPress and thinking, “uuhhh… this is so much better…”.

Something made me decide to do it today… teaching myself about .htpasswd and so on, and crappy MT plaugins, I wondered… “If I install WordPress in its own directory then link it to supernaut’s SQL database, will that work?” Immediately before trying I realised it would/wouldn’t, so set up a new database (the bit that wouldn’t) installed WordPress (would) messed around for a bit…

… dumped a file called index.php in the root directory pointing to the WordPress install…

Hell-0 )))!!!

Funnily enough, that was all. Everything seems to be here, much is broken, obviously the old theme has yet to make the jump (shall wait on that…), but words and pictures!

So then I decided to get ecto, my looooong time trusty blog client to work. Messed around, lost 1400 entries. oops…, I thought, hope they come back… Found them again. More messing around, wondered if ecto 3 would be worth a try. More of the same…

Hello blogging from ecto 3 to supernaut on WordPress 2.8. Total time it took was about an hour.

I have no idea what might not be working, but shall continue like this.

Oh! RSS feed! supernaut RSS feed.

In the meantime, I shall mangle this theme a little to see if I can at least have the existing content… umm… re-exist.

Keywords? ecto doesn’t seem to support keywords with WordPress, instead using Tags, which still work, but not as fast for me as entering a string of words. But, contra that, the 1500 tags I have I can search and so perhaps shall be a bit more economic in inventing.

Aaaaanyway, I am rather impressed how simple it was to get this far with so little work, and shall thank Berlin for that.

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oops teach me to be stupid…

That will teach me to brazenly copy-paste with no thought to the consequences. Wondering why new posts weren’t showing up, I discovered I’d replaced the index page template with the entire contents of my darling blog’s statically-generated page through some rather careless editing. Oops. Lucky I backed-up the templates, no?

It all looks… err… normal now, none-the-less, I stil get the delightful XHTML 1.0 Strict (oh yes it is), error that “there is no attribute ‘name'”. Well either I live with being invalid, or you live with no search function. Perhaps to entertain yourself by reading the stuff at the top of the right column? Yes, it’s coming along nicely.

(Meanwhile, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of being whipped from behind as I run for candy which is Things. I do love Merlin, but it’s a bit clobbering-ish for simple tasks like, ‘wax your legs’, and ‘fix the damage you did to your blog’.)

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ftp blah…

I have no idea why none of my FTP applications are able to run LIST -a while using Internode’s wireless connection and trying to do something simple like blog. What this means is I can’t get to the images directory and upload images, nor create new monthly folders, which makes all my entries kinda suck.

Lucky I can still upload using ecto, but the thumbnail images seem to have a rather large file size. All round kinda sucky and I need to find an non-crappy (-internode) connection to find out what’s going on. Not that you really need to know, it probably looks all the same to you, just annoying my sense of order and elegance.

Image

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1111101000

Twenty posts ago was my 1000th post. Celebration. Unfortunately the absinthe was only chocolate and the cheap sex was a solitary adventure. I thought, “Imagine when I get to post 10000!…” Then I realised that at 3 years per thousand it would take until around 2033 – minus a year cos it really took 2 years and 11 months to get this far. I conjecture the likely improbability of a blog such as this in 30 years time.

So.

While the post count was 1000, the actual number of published posts was a few short, for whatever blah who-gives-a-fuck reason, mostly due to dropped network connections while posting and resulting double posts entailing deletion of offending twin and thus an absence where there should be something.

I think there is one post lurking here (being ecto) that hasn’t made it to here (being supernaut), because ecto says this is post 1001. Anyway, it’s like a marriage in a registry office all this sentimental anniversary-ising of post counts.

Nonetheless, CHAMPAGNE!!!

Oh and the title is 1000 in binary (god, no wonder I never get laid).

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1000

A while ago I taught myself to count to 1023 using only ten fingers, in binary. I thought that was pretty special, and I guess if I close all my fingers at the end, that could be 1024, but … mmmm numbers.

1000 is a quite nice number to look at in decimal, balanced in a kinda asymmetrical way, and is the subject of this post, because as ecto, my delightful blogging client that I use to dump large bits of pre-formatted html code into whatever post I’m writing making blogging 100% less painful, tells me, the previous post, Sunday tranny-blogging (and spitting in China) was number 1000.

I’m going off to get wasted on absinthe and cheap sex.

(Anyone like to help, otherwise it’s going to be a solo adventure.)

As a purely numerical aside, Movable Type tells me I’ve only posted 981 times, and ecto announces I have 991 entries. I could either assume only one is correct, casting into doubt the genuineness of my celebration, or suppose all are right, and in a few days repeat aforementioned getting wasted on … etc.

As a further aside – kinda like the windbag at the Academies who won’t piss off even when the music has been playing for several seconds, I’m happy that the 1000th post was about both trannies and China. I’ll shut up now. (goes off to brush teeth.)

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a new beginning … same old whoring

… i know i’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but i can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. i’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. and i want to help you…

Hello from my new blog which is actually my old blog with a new name supernaut.info, more of the same once I’ve finished uploading several thousand images and 700 or so old posts, which I think is going to take a while on dial-up. While you’re waiting don’t drink the water in Guangzhou.

-edit-

I’m holding off for a couple of days on uploading all the old entries, which are still at www.zeroballet.info/supernaut, due to some weird stuff when I publish a post, which rewrites relative links as absolute. And because absolute links on the old blog is the reason for the delay in the first place, I don’t want to replicate ‘worst-practice’ lack-of-standards all over again.

I’m also moving everything to XHTML1.1 standards. I don’t think I have the energy to rewrite 700 entries of malformed HTML, but I will redo all of December’s posts when I get to them, and update my templates to make it a bit easier to post if the format. Anyway, enough of that, back to the regular slandering of nations and individuals.

-edit- 27 December

I’ve begun to re-upload my old entries, and am currently on May of 2004, and averaging 50 entries a day. The slowness is because being slightly prone to bouts of obsessive perfectionism, I’ve been editing the crap out of every entry. Initially, I was just changing the file paths to the images. Then, in a fit of annoyance at the crappiness of my coding methodology, I made a template of an average entry and rewrote it until it was XHML1.1 valid. Now I’m going through each entry and cleaning the code. So, I’m adding Keywords/Technorati tags to each entry, correctly formatting all the HTML (especially ditching deprecated code), making sure all the site links work, and then validating the whole thing. It was as painful and slow as it sounds, but once I worked out a process, it’s pretty fast now.

In some ways, I really wish I’d done a backup from Movable Type, instead of just relying on Ecto, even though I could just reformat an exported .plist file of all my entries to fit Movable Type’s format, which would be a couple of hours work. But there’s something in me which look at manky HTML and just feels nauseous. It could be I just need a good screw though, and China Mieville has been distracting me alot lately…

So, at the moment I’ve almost finished the first two of twenty-one months of entries, and all the images are uploaded. I’ll keep updating my progress here, and some time in January will have a new site design… so I guess that will make this supernaut3.0, or something. The old version with all the archives is still at www.zeroballet.info/supernaut.

-edit- 01 January

All the entries up till the end of October, 2004 are now up. I’ve also redesigned the handheld/mobile css so hopefully it will look alot better now on those screens than it was until now.

-edit- 31 January

I’m up to February, 2005, with the addition of everything from last year in the hell category. I’ve been very busy with the performance of hell the last couple of weeks so editing and uploading entries has been low priority. I’ll resume the upload bonanza later this week.

-edit- 20 March

So I’m fairly lazy, no? After messing about for ages and not really bothering, I’ve now uploaded to the end of June, 2005. which means about five months to go…

-edit- 25 March

With Guangzhou weather keeping me inside, I’ve uploaded to the end of August, and the remainder of December, 2005. That leaves three months minus the hell entries in November to go, about 100 more…

-edit- 25 June

Half a year later, and 676 entries have been recoded to XHTML1.1 (minus a few errors I’ll check some time) and all transferred over to here. Finished. If I ever have to do this again, I’ll stop blogging.