Checksum Arcanius

I decided I’d finally release Bernzilla Comments, the WordPress plug-in that I first mentioned a little while back. While writing up the page about it, I realized that it wasn’t very customizable in its present form, but I could very easily make it more so. So I spent about an hour removing dead code and rewriting the function so that it would be much easier to fit it to other blogs. I like the result.

Go check it out, and feel free to use it on your own site, or modify it to suit your purposes!

Well, Bernie’s at it again. He’s done gone and inspired me to upgrade my site. I can’t imagine it was even intentional. Anyway, I think the new category heatmap page is especially cool, as are the newfangled permalinks (although the old ones still work!). I had tried to get this sort of permalink with WP 1.2 several times before, but it always broke my feeds. That doedn’t seem to be a problem with WP 1.5. Additionally, I moved my burgeoning archives to their own page, freeing up room in the sidebar for a recent comments section. This recent comments section is actually where I started this whole update process, after making this comment at Bernzilla. FYI, I made my first WordPress plugin to get the recent comments the way I wanted them — its called “Bernzilla Comments.” I hope you don’t mind, Bernie. Inspiring!

Check out the live comment previewing I just installed. Not only was this the easiest Wordpres Plugin I have ever installed, it is also one of the coolest!

I highly suggest it to users of WordPress, to avoid whoopsie’s like half on my comment disappearing over at Passive Digressive, and shots in the dark like my recent comment at Bernie Zimmermann’s blog (even though that one worked).

This weekend, I took a real stab at Gallery2. It has an immense yet well-managed feature set, it is spectacularly modular, and it is highly configurable. Unfortunately, underneath its glossy exterior, it is depressingly slow, and, if I dare demean a feat that I in no way consider myself capable of accomplishing, the software is very poorly done under the hood.
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I have been on a upgrading streak as of late, and my Blog was the most recent target. I have now officially – and finally – upgraded to WordPress 1.5.

Upgrading while maintaining the same look took a little bit of work, but it was not over the top. My favorite new feature is the paging system, which replaces my partial post hack.

Of course, this means that my other main WordPress hack – the “I am Human” comment checkbox – is also gone. We shall see if the auto-whitelisting system works out. If not, you may see me hacking away once again. In fact, I already hacked WP 1.5 once already – to remove the annoying <h2>’s surrounding the link categories.

If anyone discovers any strangeness after this move, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

Future plans include an upgrade to Gallery2 along with the WPG2 plugin which combines WordPress and Gallery 2. However, so far, my experiences with Gallery 2 have been less than stellar. For example, I hate the sidebar and want it to die, but haven’t found that option yet, if it exists. Also, I have been unable to find where to change the name of the main Gallery. Stupid, but vastly annoying. If anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be great.

I returned a 19″ LCD screen to Fry’s today and ended up picking up a gigabit Ethernet PCI card and a gigabit Cardbus card. The PCI card is now in oasis, so now I can load silverfir.net really really really fast. Actually, the reason behind the move is primarily that I moved my 100gb hard drive from an external enclosure connected by firewire (which enclosure I believe was beginning to fail) to an internal slot in oasis. So now the data is always available 24/7 and I don’t have any of the annoying startup issues I as seeing where the drive wouldn’t be recognized for several minutes. And its super duper faaaast.

SilverFir.net now run on oasis.

This means:

• Intel Pentium III 500 MHz -> AMD Athlon 600 MHz
• 128 MB RAM -> 640 MB RAM
• CD-ROM drive -> DVD-ROM drive
• 43 GB total storage -> 143 GB total storage

Among other things. Long live the new host of Silverfir.net!

Appropriate pages will eventually be updated. This project took most of my weekend, due to technical difficulties that I might get around to describing some day.