If you hadn’t already noticed, I have just pushed out a new redesign for this site.

The differences are pretty substantial, too.

Just a heads-up: I’ve made a few changes/additions to this site.

Comment Approval

The first thing I’ve done is turned on moderation for comments. Anyone posting a comment will - by default - have to wait for their comment to be approved. However, you will also be given the option to create a “TypeKey” account. If you are a regular commenter you may want to create a TypeKey account when prompted to do so - that way, I can set it up so that your comments are automatically approved without intervention on my part.

If you’d like to create a TypeKey account right now, you can do so here.

I’m sorry for any annoyance this causes, but I have increasingly little patience for trolls on my personal site. On the negative side, whenever you run a closed commenting system it inconveniences civil people and contributes to the average troll’s martyr/persecution complex. On the plus side, this will also help control garden variety comment spam, which is always good.

MobLog

An addition I’ve made is that of a moblog (”mobile weblog”), which you can see at the top-right corner of this page. The idea behind this is to allow me to submit entries from remote - from my cell phone, which also includes a built-in camera. This will allow me to post about things when I think of them and am away from the computer, or just to provide a random snapshot from my daily life as it happens.

MobLog entries will, by necessity, be a lot shorter than my normal entries. Most of the time they will be comprised of nothing but a few words and a picture, or at best a few sentences (typing on a cell phone sucks). I’m really not sure what will end up on it, but it will be an interesting experiment either way.

Note: I wrote the script used to do this from scratch. Once I get all of the kinks worked out and the code cleaned up, I plan to release everything under an open-source license so that it can be used by others. I want to get it working consistently well first, though.

Photos

Not exactly new, but I have also recently started posting stuff to the “photos” section of this site. I’ll be adding more over time.

I’ve added some more pictures to the ‘photos’ section of this site. You can view them here. I added a collection of photos from a martial arts tournament that Glenna competed in this July, as well as the return leg of our trip up to Washington State (visiting family) right after.

Yes, that is indeed Stonehenge - or a reasonable facsimile thereof - that you see on the upper-right-hand portion of the above collage.

On the top and bottom center boxes, you can see our cats - Mau and Neko, respectively. The top-left box is none other than the Golden Gate Bridge, which we passed over on our way home. True to its reputation, San Francisco was largely covered in fog - that’s some of it that you see in the picture.

To the left/middle is Multnomah Falls - a popular landmark known to anyone who travels to Portland through the beautiful Columbia River Gorge. The sun was peeking out from above the falls, which tower 620 feet in height. This picture is a bit washed out due to the sun and spray, but the actual scene was pretty striking.

On the bottom-left is one of the numerous “Tsunami Evacuation Route” signs that could be found up and down the Oregon coast. On the right-middle box is one of the many highways we traveled upon during our trip, and on the bottom-right is an incredibly washed out photo (but still one of my favorites) of Glenna taken while we were surveying the desolate landscape and ancient petroglyphs to be found around Lava Beds National Monument in north-eastern California.

In the center is a picture that Glenna took of us by holding the camera out the car window. I was too busy navigating a rather challenging mountain road to even notice.

(note: for those people who don’t know me personally: you probably won’t care about this…)

I finally got around to finding and installing a gallery script, so it’s now reasonably easy for me to add stuff to the ‘photos’ section of this site. You can visit the gallery here.

I haven’t added a whole lot yet - just some pictures from our recent trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

For the techie among you: The script I used is Simple PHP Gallery, a very simple (hence the name) PHP gallery script.

I have found that most of the more popular gallery scripts out there are overkill for most uses (seriously - how many people need the ability to rate pictures anyhow?), but this one works great. It integrates pretty easily into an existing site, generates cached thumbnails, and doesn’t depend on a database on the back end.

This is kind of humorous. I was doing some stuff with the site this morning only to find that some MySpace-using kids were directly linking to one of the images on here.

Now, I don’t care if someone downloads a copy of stuff like this (an image I did not create myself), but it’s rather annoying to find someone directly embedding an image hosted on your site to use within theirs. It sucks up bandwidth - which someone, somewhere, has to pay for - and litters access logs with spurious requests. Simply put, it’s bad web etiquette.

There are some technical solutions to this sort of thing, but it’s much more entertaining to pull a little trick on the offending users. If you create another image with the same name (and rename the original image so that you can still link to it), you can alter the content of the offender’s web site. This is a great opportunity to send them - and their site visitors - a little message.

With that in mind, I changed the source image (which some of you might recognize from an earlier entry):

…to this:

Yeah, I couldn’t help but put a little dig there about MySpace, the current trendy spot that all the kiddies hang out on these days. The service has already supplanted LiveJournal as having the most annoying and banal content possibly imaginable, and it’s no coincidence that over half of the people found hot-linking the image are MySpace users. I honestly couldn’t help poking fun at them a bit.

For those of you who may be visiting from MySpace - don’t take it too personally, I’m sure you’re a fine human being. In the future, though, be sure to upload files to your own web space and link to them from there (and, if you’re not sure that the copyright owner wants their images distributed, be sure to ask them if it’s okay first).

Update (2005-08-03): These MySpace guys just don’t give up! Now, people are linking to the original one, still on this site. I’m not giving up, though - as per Brett’s suggestion, anyone doing this in the future is going to give their site a heavy dose of goatse.