All 'Site News' Posts

Changes and updates to this website are reported here. Feel free to ignore them if you’re following along via feed.

New Server @ DreamHost

May 11 2011

Apparently I’ve been moved to a new server at DreamHost. Let’s see if that solves any of the performance problems that I’ve been having. I still have an account at MediaTemple that I’m paying for, and haven’t gotten around to moving things over to just yet

Running WordPress 3.0 alpha

Mar 08 2010

I’m now running the development version/alpha of WordPress 3.0 on this blog so that I can get a feel for any changes (and fix any bugs!) before the official release. So far so good, the upgrade was clean and nothing significant is broken. This release is going to be awesome!

dntd.cc URL Shortener Active

Aug 11 2009

Last night I set up my new domain http://dntd.cc (it’s not very exciting if you visit it) to handle all my own URL redirections from now on. I’d been meaning to do this and in light of Tr.im’s imminent demise I thought it was prudent to go ahead and do it now. This is not (and will not become) a public service, it’s purely for my own use.

Read the rest of this post…

Changes afoot(er)

Aug 09 2009

I’ve been tinkering in the footer of this site a bit, check it out and let me know what you think. Nothing major, but I’ve…

Added some shadows to make the footer appear “sunken”,
Added some neato jQuery so you can collapse the footer if you’re not interested,
Added icons next to the header of each block.

When I get a chance I’m going to make another version of my current sidebar lifestream that will accept iCal feeds and create a simple, combined feed so that I can include Upcoming.org, Facebook and Meetup.com events in my events feed as well. That is all, carry on.

Simple Activity Streaming with SimplePie

Jul 12 2009

A few different people have asked me recently how I created the activity stream/life stream you see in the sidebar of Dented Reality. It’s actually really simple, and all it does is load up the feeds from a few different locations, combine them in date order and then output them on my page using an HTML “UL” (unordered list). Based on the source of each feed, it also adds a CSS class to each list element (LI) so that I can add an appropriate icon. Here’s the complete code that I use, and then I’ll explain some parts of it, and some of what makes it tick: Read the rest of this post…

Updated to WordPress 2.8

Jun 11 2009

I’ve just updated this site to WordPress 2.8, using my favorite method for handling a WordPress install, Subversion. Here’s what I typed at the command line to upgrade:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8/

Once that was complete, I logged into my admin panel and completed the DB upgrade, then I had to check some plugins. I had these problems/changes:

TinyMCE Advanced had an update available, so I did that,
One Click Plugin Updater seems to clash with the new Plugins page, and I don’t really need it now anyway since its functionality is in core, so I deactivated it and then deleted it
IntenseDebate seems to clash with some of the JavaScript now used in the admin, but I work with those guys now, so I’m working on a new version of the plugin to address those issues! My comments are a bit ugly while I deal with this, but I figure that’s a good motivation to get it done ASAP.

Have you upgraded yet?

2 New Projects

Dec 04 2008

I forgot to mention that I have 2 relatively new projects launched in the Projects section of this site:

TwitterProxy: Which allows you to do some cool filtering on your Twitter status feed (and then use it for whatever you want), and
Gravatar Shortcode: A quick WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode that you can use to inject a Gravatar into your Pages or Posts.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

Dented Reality v5.0

Nov 04 2008

You’re now looking at (I think) the fifth major revision of this website.

It’s been a (long) time coming, but I finally got it online today. I thought it would be fitting. It is a day of change after all. It’s definitely time for a change here at Dented Reality — the previous version was online for around 5 years (April 20, 2003 according to the WayBack Machine). I think it stood up quite well considering the changes that took place in the browser landscape in those 5 years.

Dented Reality v4.0

You may notice that there are a number of new posts here, which just magically appeared. That’s because I was posting while I was developing this site on my laptop, but I didn’t want to post to the old site. For the record, here are all the posts that are new as of today (oldest to newest):

There are going to be a lot of small tweaks to be done still, and I’m sure there are some broken links etc, but I think this version is quite a step up from the previous one. It reflects a change in direction for the site and I think does a better job of showing who I am and what sort of projects I engage in.

Dented Reality v5.0

Comments are now open (and powered by IntenseDebate), so please feel free to leave a note on what you think of the new site on this post!

Comments Disabled

Sep 01 2004

Well, I’ve had enough of dealing with blog-comment-spam for now, so I’ve decided to disable comments until I can come up with a satisfactory solution. I have 123 blog posts that I’m going to have go through by hand – AGAIN – to remove spam from. I don’t have time for this, but I refuse to be a PageRank monkey for these losers by leaving their links up and accessible on my site.

It really saddens me to have to do this, and I think it reflects very poorly on the current state of the internet. Damn the idiots who are blog-comment-spamming, damn them to hell and back. People like you are making the internet a worse place to be. We’d all be much happier if you would go away and die in a hole somewhere.

New Section on Site

Mar 17 2004

I wrote up an article/essay which is like an introduction to blogs and blogging, and I needed somewhere to put it on this site, so a new section has been born.

Head over to the Feature Articles section to see the first article, Blogs: What Are They Good For?. I hope to put up more articles in this section as I come across interesting topics, so keep an eye out here for announcements when a new one goes up.