Figleaf is in the wild

I just finished up Figleaf: one way to place an overlay on top of any/all Flash movies on a page. Check it out, and please tell me what you think about it. It’s well-done and works most of the time.

— Garvin

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So I kinda like Twitter

As you can see, I’m not by any means a regular blogger. I just don’t have that much to say about [stuff] that I care to cast in digital stone. To both paraphrase and mangle Ralph Waldo Emerson, my opinions are like the cells of my body: constantly in a state of flux. And like my body, although there’s plenty going on inside, the outside appears (relatively) the same.

Which is to say that I don’t want the me of today to be held to the utterances of the me of yesterday. If I wanted that, I’d write a book. Or rather, I’d publish the book I’ve written. Working title: “Huh?”

Digression over.

Twitter – although terminally cute & hip & decidedly web2.0-ey – is the perfect solution for people like me (and we are legion) who want to throw shout-outs to the masses, but can’t be bothered to sit down and think about how we want to say it.

Another thing I like about Twitter is it’s decidedly post-literate. That whole capitalization & punctuation thing is so 20th century, dude. Thankfully, I’ve witnessed no leetspeak to date.

Join the sweaty, texting masses. I ain’t no fanboy, but I like it. Next passing fancy: Sched.

— Garvin

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new domain, other changes a-comin'

I finally retired my old domain, cmgarvin.com. Long may it live. The new one, obviously, is garvinggarvin.com.

Why, you ask?

Several reasons, none of them particularly good. First and foremost, I go by “Garvin”. Oh, I have other nicknames, but that’s the one I actually pay attention to.

Most importantly, though, is that Garvin G. Garvin is sort of an alias. I’m also thinking of having my name legally changed to it. I like the ring of it, especially the vestigial middle initial. It’s all Fred G. “for Georgeous” Sanford.

Oh, but that’s not all

Along with the domain name, I grow weary of the look of this site. I’m glad I made the switch to Textpattern, but having done so just made me rather loath the way this thing looks. It’s not bad, just kind of dated & out of it. And this must not be.

So I’ll give you peeks and updates as I mosey along in my new design. It’ll probably be a few months in coming, as I’m in no particular rush. Time will tell.

— Garvin

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Textpattern + some plugins = broken feed

I’ve read quite a bit about Textpattern’s annoying habit of creating RSS/Atom feeds that browsers download instead of display, because I’m relatively new to Textpattern and was experiencing the same problem. It turns out that the problem is in the plugins, kids. I’m sure a lot of you already figured this out, but knowledge unshared is only useful to one person. So I shall share my (mercifully brief) RSS odyssey.

broken how?

First off, I think I should define the problem before I explain my solution.

The feeds that are generated by Textpattern “out of the box” are of the MIME types “application/atom+xml” and “application/rss+xml” (depending). These feeds work fine and dandy right after you’ve successfully installed Textpattern. Take a closer look at the source of one of these feeds. The very first line should look something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Note that the “<” in “<?xml” should be the first character in the file.

Now take a broken feed – one which you’re prompted to download instead of your browser displaying it (as is normally & should be the case, barring plugins, XML handling app’s, etc). Since I’ve already primed you on what to look for, you’ll notice that there is a space just before the XML declaration.

blame yourself

As I said, I’m new to txp. So naturally my first thought was that one of the custom plugins I’d written for my site was the culprit. At the time I had them in a ‘plugins’ directory, so I simply removed them, then removed all mention of my custom tags from all pages and forms. ‘Went to my feed: same thing. Stupid space.

blame the Maker(s)

So being the PHP dork that I am, I decided that the problem must be in the Textpattern code itself. My reasoning was thus: I haven’t done anything truly earthshattering with my Textpattern install, and there was hardly anything worth finding in the Textpattern forum, to say nothing of their FAQ. There are two unhelpful FAQ entries related to feeds, but they weren’t very helpful and were written in a decidedly angry/defensive tone (and have perhaps unintentional factual errors):

• Textpattern’s Firefox tries to download my RSS feed FAQ
• Textpattern’s Troubleshooting Feed Issues FAQ

I’ve tweaked quite a few open source projects over the years, so I dug through an entire trace of what goes into the serving of an RSS or Atom feed in Textpattern. What a magical odyssey that was. But to no avail: there was nothing I could find that would directly and obviously cause that damnable space. Does PHP’s eval function have a tendency to insert spaces? Not if the code being eval’d doesn’t, as far as I know.

blame others

So if Textpattern wasn’t to blame (at least not directly), and I wasn’t to blame, chances were that one of those dang plugins was doing it. And it was, though for the life of me I don’t know why. It happened to be the cbs_article_index that i had in my plugin cache directory in this case, but as it seems so many people have had an issue with Textpattern’s default feeds, I seriously doubt it’s just this plugin that’s the problem.

When in doubt, hack.

But this is where open source kicks gluteous. Good ol’ Noam Samuel has published a handy, dandy Textpattern feed hack. It’s specifically for RSS. Does anyone know if will work for the Atom feed, too? I sure don’t.

conclusions

After some tinkering, I finally found the problem. The issue has to do with plugins in your plugin cache folder (commonly, textpattern/plugins).

For whatever reason, a space after the “?>” (end of PHP) ending or after any newline (\n) after the “?>” is resulting in a space being inserted before the intended first character of Textpattern output. So: the solution is to make absotively, posolutely sure that there is nothing after the plugin’s “?>” ending.

It seems that there’s a need for some clarification by Textpattern regarding best practices with plugins.

At any rate, I hope that this helps someone out there, and that some bright spark can figure out exactly what and where this is breaking. Happy blogging.

12/14/07 Update

fixed!

That was fast. I put it on the Textpattern Forum (log in/register first to be able to see it) once I’d gotten it all figured out, and wet kindly fixed it within… minutes, seemingly. Squeaky wheel gets greased I guess.

— Garvin

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I'm all Textpattern now

As I’d mentioned , I was pretty fed up with my crappy little homegrown CMS-wannabe. I’m not even making it accessible any more. The commenting frameworked I’d rigged attracted link spam like gnats to a sweaty face, and frankly I was too disheartened to prevent them. (‘Still getting “hits” to those nonexistent comment pages, actually.)

So, I made the switch to Textpattern. Why, you ask? Well to be frank, WordPress and the more-web2.0-than-thou fan-stink just seems elitist, and it’s really more than I’d ever want for a dorky little site like this. Ditto Drupal (which in my opinion is just aching to be WordPress) – although their documentation and support equals or exceeds WordPress. Again: it seems to have more than I’d ever want, but isn’t flexible (and simple) enough for me to just poke around and try things. XOOPS was right out, as the learning curve and planning-overhead involved isn’t a great fit for someone as busy as yours truly. I have a life, and while I don’t mind learning new things, I want to get paid if I’m going the kind of time and attention that these systems involved. I just want a blog that I can tack stuff onto.

Which brings me to Textpattern (known henceforth as Txp for the sake of my carpals). One thing that Txp had going for it over most of the others was that setup was nearly instantaneous and – barring user silliness – foolproof. I literally had it running within a minute of downloading it. The results speak for themselves, I think. I’m very happy with their selection of features and the support of the Textpattern community. Sure it has its problems, but they’re interesting problems, at least. And if I really get a wild hair about any of them, I can just write a plugin.

— Garvin

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'Wide stance' indeed

Larry Craig is such a [let’s say “dork”]. Not only does he stay put when everyone on his own team wants him to leave the Senate ASAP (which is the definition of an asshole, I’m pretty sure), but his PeeGate excuse is that he has a wide stance?! He’s kidding, right?

But who knows? Maybe he does have a wider-than-average stance. But I have a few problems with his defense.

zero (0) credibility

First off, I know of no one who would willingly plea guilty to anything just to make it “go away”. And if I did know anyone who did, I’m positive said criminal would not then try to take it back unless s/he’d just won the lottery & gotten some badass lawyers. Which he has (gotten the lawyers, that is).

And is he going to quit or not? The man pleads guilty and says he’ll quit the Senate, then takes it all back, saying he won’t quit or leave office. Flip-flop.

the hypocrisy

It could be irony, or maybe just poetic justice. But I think we can all agree that there’s just something funny about his entire situation. I’m sure those who have a problem with his voting record on gay rights find his dilemma – real or right-place-wrong-time comedy – particularly delicious.

I know I do. Not because his voting record makes him look like an old-guard Republican hack (though it does), but because nearly every action he has taken in the Senate makes him appear to be the kind of blindly idealistic pro-business, anti-people bastard I truly loath. I sense I’m not alone in this.

and finally: my stance on the Stance

Even if he was not the kind of man he is, but just some normal joe, I’d still have a problem with the excuse/plea of the “wide stance”.

People with the ol’ wide stance are suspect IMHO. It’s a possible indicator of deeper pathologies:

• a maladjusted alpha-male tendency (perhaps drunk on his power?), or perhaps just drunk
• a spraying, splattering tendency
• severe, antisocial personal space issues

And these folks are all under informal investigation by me of being the person(s) who pee on the rim/seat. That’s what the Ethics Committee hearing is really about.

— Garvin

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Columbia, MO makes the headlines

For those of you not from around here, Columbia, MO has a serious monkey problem. In fact, our monkey is so vicious it made the Report. Check it out.

I love this story for so many reasons, but mostly because a friend of mine had seen said monkey crawl over the top of the car in front of him while he was sitting in traffic. We, of course, told him he was full of it and questioned his sobriety at the time. His vindication & others' pain is now public domain amusement.

Oh yes: my daughter is now officially freaking out now that this monkey will somehow get into the house and bite her in her sleep. I wish it would (get in the house): we've got three cats and a high-strung dog. That'd be the last b&e that simian would ever pull.

Filthy little creature.

— Garvin

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I'm a sucky blogger, it's true

I know, I know: this “blog” sucks! You’re looking at it, you know. I really am going to do better, I swear on a stack of of bibles. Yea verily, I will not take this guy’s wonderful advice in vain. But I have to tell you honestly that it’s not going to get much better with the hashed-together backend I constructed for this site. As I mentioned earlier, it’s time to grow up and use the mature junk. Right now I’m thinking about Textpattern and WordPress. I’m leaning heavily towards Textpattern for its ease of setup and maintenance, and its bare-bones simplicity out of the box. Me like simple. Then again, WordPress has got so many toys out there, it’s also hard to resist. Time will tell, dear reader(s). Time will tell.

It’s not so much that I refuse to write blogs as that I have not really codified it as part of my routine. I hereby proclaim that I will do so… soon. I’ll even track that baby & let you check me on it. I will not break the chain.

I really don’t know if it’s going to be a how-to or a hey-look-at-this or an I’m the expert type of deal, but I do know one thing: I will probably not take any smarmy advice and proclamations from the ‘pros’. I mean, I want to be blocked in China as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day it’s just not that important to me. If I get kudos, money, fame: hey, great. If not, at least I’ll have an online diary that my friends and enemies can keep track of me with.

— Garvin

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Manpower candy

There are many like it, but these are mine.

Surprisingly decent English.

8/28/07 Update

I had to share this one, too:

Wow: manpower candies. Man, that’d be a great band name, album name, book title, nickname, softball team name, whatever. That’s brilliant, and now I want a job writing this stuff.

Is it perverse to give free advertising to spam? And will I get penalized by Google/the-powers-that-be for posting this stuff? Would I know it if I was?

— Garvin

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sick and/or tired

I should tell you that I'm not too bright. Well, I am, but not too. I make dumb decisions, and they usually end up costing me. I'm referring here to web design, though less-specific and -nerdy examples abound.

Many of the projects I tackle are exercises I use to keep in top form, programming-wise. I see or think of something that I'd like to try, and I try it. Sound simple?

uh...

I wish. I mean, the experience and the know-how are invaluable; this goes without saying. You don't get better at doing anything except by doing. We all only wish we could do the Lawnmower Man/Matrix thing and just download a set of skills, but if wishes were horses, we'd all be neck-deep in horsey poo.

Which is all to say: the old roll-up-your-sleeves DIY thing is all good and fine, but when it comes to web design, I seriously question its usefulness past a certain point.

Take this website, for instance. There's not a whole lot to it: a few sections, some content, this lame blog. So you'd think that'd be easy as heck, right?

Wrong. To make it "easier" to add blogs & projects & reviews, I set up a whole back end. This thing is basically a home-grown CMS, now. Not too complicated, no. But did it take a while to think it through and debug all of the code? You bet.

standards

Standards? Don't talk to me about standards. (OK: do, but softly.)

You need to implement standards from the start, I've found (again, and again!). Otherwise, you're basically rewriting the entire site. Luckily, with this site I'd implemented HTML & CSS best practices almost across the board... more or less. Otherwise, I would have been redesigning this whole thing (this is the fourth incarnation, believe it or not). Even the limited amount of fancy-schmancy JavaScript and Flash is extra: if you don't have either, you can still get around the site. Although it may not be as pleasing of an experience IMHO.

the point

"So what?" I sense you thinking. "Quit your bellyaching!" Well, my tummy is upset. But I digress. Here's my point: doing it myself, though edifying, has set me back.

Don't get me wrong: doing websites the hard way is good for the brain. More often than not, it results in faster, cleaner design, better search results, and greater usability. Since you're "down in the trenches", you really, really know how things are put together. And I think that this step is a must for beginning designers. In fact: this should be a required step before novice designers are even allowed to use bloated web design products like Dreamweaver or the several Microsoft behemoths. (I have found, however, that sites designed this way are either really well thought out, or a mishmash.)

But once one gets past that step, it's time to use well-established, mature solutions to common online products. Want a blog with all the trimmings? WordPress or [any of a hundred other products] out there should suffice. A complete content management system? Already done. Picture galleries, ad management, to-do lists, calendars: it's all been done! As long as the documentation is good, the end product is stable and secure, and the thing is configurable (as any product of a certain level of maturity should be), why reinvent the wheel? The icing on the cake is that a lot of these tools are standards compliant or easily made so.

Doing it yourself has it's advantages, sure. But that's mostly a learning exercise, and should be treated as such. Once you've passed that level, it's either time to adopt someone else's better and immediately available solutions, or roll your own. Not to mention: there are plenty of ready-made solutions that are hardly as easy to install and configure as advertised. Applying your programming prowess to that would be worthwhile indeed.

— Garvin

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