Random Brain Dump

I’ve added a Twitter widget on the sidebar. So now my tweets are published on Random Brain Dump as well. Next up, is to integrate a Facebook plugin.

After putting it off long enough, I spent some time this weekend tweaking my blog.

First, I hacked some plug-in code to get the random posts in the format I needed. I had to go all the way to making changes in some SQL queries. While WordPress’ APIs are getting better, I still find myself going all the way and hit MySQL to get the necessary data. It’s not ideal because this type of code changes will break with schema changes. Oh well, it is a hack I guess… Finally, I tweaked the CSS to fix issues that had been bugging me. Some were minor issues like color and font inconsistencies; some were layout issues.

Some of results are:

• The sidebar is re-arranged around a bit. More useful data is pushed up and space efficiency was taken into account.
• The new list of random posts, with excerpts, appears at the bottom of the sidebar.
• The footer is now rendered a lot cleaner than before.
• The new list of most commented posts appears in one of the footer columns.
• More consistent link hover styles for both black and blue backgrounds.
• Time/Date is now displayed with no wrapping.

Next thing I want to tackle is to build a better Flikr widget than the one I’m currently using…

Recent upgrade to a new version of WordPress involves database schema changes. This causes some of my plugins to break, particularly you’d see database error when leaving a comment! Good thing comments were saved okay though. I finally got around to fix it, so commenting now works perfectly.

Apologies from yours truly…

I got tired of the old skin, so I configured a new one. I am always partial to black background, but just haven’t found many skins I like. But I generally like this one with its blue dominated bold design. Don’t have time now, so more customization have to come later.

It took me long enough, but I had decided to take the plunge and upgraded my blogging software. I wanted new functionalities and a new look to the site. Change is good…

I migrated my blog to WordPress 2 years ago. It’s the best blogging software I’ve used to date. It serves me well, but recently my blog was deluged with spam bots. While WordPress doesn’t make spam comments public, I got tired of having to delete hundreds of them daily. The newer version contains a plugin that fight spam very effectively so far (none has made it through!). In addition, some of the new extensions seem really cool.

So I upgraded the blog system and will be experimenting with various things. I’ve de-installed Gallery which I used to run my photo galleries. The photo galleries don’t render and some links are broken for the time being. In its place, I plan to install a flash-based system. I’ve taken a look at a few of the free ones out there, but haven’t seen anything I like just yet. I may just have to write one myself…

For the next few weeks, I’ll be hacking the site a bit. So put on the hard hats and please pardon me until the dust settles!

Some interesting (to me anyway) 30 day stats (6/28 – 7/28) on rexlam.com:

Hits
Total : 13066
Unique: 956 (unique)

Platforms
Indeterminable 57%
Windows XP 41%
Windows 2000 2%

Browser
Bots 40%
Firefox 1.5.0.4 20%
IE 6.0 12%
Firefox 1.5.0.5 2%
IE 5.5 1%

Search Referrers
blo.gs 77
google.com 69
search.yahoo.com 34
pslranugget.blogspot.com 17
my.yahoo.com 9

Search Strings
audrey woulard 39
rex lam 7
futurama 6
Audrey Woulard 4
herzbolla 4

Countries
UNITED STATES (US) 9282
Indeterminable 2456
JAPAN (JP) 390
FRANCE (FR) 194
TURKEY (TR) 142
MALTA (MT) 118
GERMANY (DE) 113
MALAYSIA (MY) 110
THAILAND (TH) 62
KOREA, REPUBLIC OF (KR) 39
HONG KONG (HK) 38
MOLDOVA, REPUBLIC OF (MD) 27
CHILE (CL) 18
AUSTRALIA (AU) 17
CHINA (CN) 14
CANADA (CA) 10
BRAZIL (BR) 10
UNITED KINGDOM (UK) 5
SPAIN (ES) 4
EUROPEAN UNION (EU) 3
NETHERLANDS (NL) 2
SINGAPORE (SG) 2
INDONESIA (ID) 2
INDIA (IN) 2

You’ll notice that the header above got a long-deserved redesign, finally. The banner image is updated with pictures of the kids from this year. It’s about time. If I don’t do this 4AM Saturday morning, I’ll probably will never get around to it…

It’s been months since I add any new functionality to my site. The last thing I did was adding a rich WYSIWYG editor (only to deactivate it later since it doesn’t work across all OS’es & browsers).

Anyhow, I configured my blog to display related posts when displaying an individual entry. It’s pretty cool. If you’re using WordPress and interested in getting this piece of functionality, check out Alexander Malov’s plugin.

When Google announced earlier this year that they’ll be offering GMail service for other domains, I jumped and registered for the service. Bluehost is a great web hosting company but their web mail interface just sucks. I reverted to using a POP client and in the end, stuck with my GMail account mainly because google’s nice web interface. So with this service, I get to use my own domain with the GMail’s web user interface. In addition, GMail supports POP3 too. All it took was a simple change in my MX record on Bluehost and GMail was up in no time and serving emails for my domain. It’s awesome.

Oh yeah, the service is free…

I’ve installed a rich WYSIWYG HTML editor on the system this morning. No more entering HTML tags when posting comments. The editor is an open source implementation called TinyMCE and it’s 100% Javascript. It enables you to visually format text, specify colors, create lists, insert images/flash and creating tables. It even includes a dialog for inserting emoticons!

I did some quick testing on IE & Firefox and everything seems to check out ok. I expect Opera and event Safari on Mac OS to work okay as well.Your browser needs to enable Javascript to get the rich editor. If disabled, you just get the normal simple text editor.

Please let me know if you’re running into problems posting comments (let me know the OS & browser you’re running too).