Muddling about, cleaning things up a bit and getting a few more bits and other bobs standardised. Fixing old broken image links, having another whack at the CSS width issue, re-tagging artcles more approriately (eg the new 18xx tag), etc.

Welcome to the new old blog.

In short I’m moving off Wordpress and moving to a static-HTML solution built atop Nikola. Why? Because it doesn’t come with the load and security concerns of Wordpress, PHP, database servers, XSS, etc. Smaller, simpler, easier and rather more care-free, not least across upgrades.

The old blog:

Some features are being lost in the transition:

• dict integration (I’d link keywords to their dictionary definitions) is gone. Mayhap I’ll get around to writing an extension for PyMarkdown for that, but it won’t be now.

• Automatic cross-linking of keywords and phases to other pages/sites. This mostly means that a lot of links to BoardGameGeek for various game names have fallen out. The names are still there, but the links are not. Again…maybe I’ll write an extension some day to do that.

• Comments. They’re gone. Sorry. I’m not yet sure what I want to do here. Isso is a strong possibility – not least because I’ll have a possibility of porting the old comments over – but I don’t want to hang up this migration with the larger question of what comment system to use.

• Image galleries are not quite so nice. Sigh.

And of course there was an excuse for a visual redesign. I so rarely do UI work; this was rather enjoyable.

Ahh well, I now see 20 things to fix 5 seconds after hitting deploy. ‘Tis ever thus. If you notice any problems, please feel free to drop me a note at the email address in the footer.

Kanga.nu and its services have been moved to a new host. This marks the final decommissioning of the box I built from parts while working at VA Research. It has been a long time..and it is somewhat sad to see her fade into scrap.

If you notice problems or inconsistencies, please comment below or email me.

I have enabled OpenID account creation and login support. Now you don’t have to maintain a separate login for this blog in order to post comments!

Enjoy.

I’m about to start a site-upgrade for Wordpress and a few other key packages, moving from Wordpress 2.5 (plus a long list of security patches) to Wordpress 2.7 (plus a shorter list of security patches). As I hand-wrote the Wordpress theme this site uses, and several of the plugins were extensively edited away from their defaults, things may look odd or broken for a while. Please bear with me…

I’m currently fiddling about with integrating my iPhone, various supplemental iPhone features (eg camera), Twitter, Facebook and this blog. There will be some noise and dust. Patience!

One of the Muck & Brass playtesters has been unable to post comments using Google Chrome. I don’t know why as I can’t test here with Chrome as I don’t run Windows on any of my machines. I’ve tested with multiple test accounts under Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx and W3: all have been able to post comments without trouble.

Comments are moderated in order to trap spam. When you post a comment, the next page should show the original entry and its comment thread. The last comment in the thread should be the one you just submitted, along with an annotation that it is being held for moderation:

Author: Test User | Date: Saturday 21 February 2009 | Time: 11:20

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

This is a test comment.

If you are having trouble posting comments, please email me directly with the details.

Ooops. I just noticed that one of the side effects of nesting the game-project categories is that the RSS feed URLs for the categories have now changed to represent the nesting. Arghh. Sorry guys. If this is a real problem please comment below and I’ll stick in some Apache rewrite rules to handle it.

In order to ease managment and overview of the site I’ve created a Game Project category and moved all my design projects under it. Aside from some resultant sorting and nesting of the category list, there’s also now an RSS feed for just my game projects. See the This Category link in the sidebar when viewing the category.

The tool I’ve been using to footnote definitions of terms some readers may not know has a problem. It can result in broken RSS and Atom feeds which don’t validate, usually due to non-UTF8 characters in strings which are defined as UTF8 strings. In turn this causes various RSS readers and aggregators (eg Bloglines and Technorati) to fail to import the feed. Ooops.

For now I’ve removed the offending definition linkages (suet and jocund) and am on the lookout for a replacement WordPress plugin, preferably one based on dict¹.