Cameron's Thoughts

I've made a decision to start a rewrite of this entire site from the ground up. Cameron's Thoughts 3.0 will be the next generation code base that this site will be based on. I started a wiki to track progress and to record idea's and such. When I created Cameron's Thoughts 2.0, I didn't have my idea's well organized and it became somewhat troublesome near the end. I got things together and everything turned out fine, but this project will be way more immense and I have a much better idea of what I am in for now, so I am able to better plan ahead. The following is my current info taken from the wiki.

History

There's a detailed history on Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 changes that happened after it was released at Cameron's Thoughts - About This Site.

Basically, I first started Cameron's Thoughts as a default install of Movable Type on June 22, 2003. There was a number of changes made to the stylesheet and templates, but that was about it. I then decided to rewrite all the stylesheets and templates from scratch.

Thus, Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 was born. It was about 9 months of work total. The first few months were basically total research. This was research into how to properly code to produce 100% valid XHTML, full accessibility and also for search engine optimization. Really, if you do the first two properly, the third one pretty much falls into place. I also had to really learn CSS as I only had limited understanding of it at that point. On June 21, 2005, a day before the two year anniversary of my site, Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 was launched. This was an exciting day for me as it was the completion of a number of months of hard work. Plus, I actually made a deadline I set for myself. Since the release of Cameron's Thoughts 2.0, I have become very strong at coding with PHP. The initial Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 code had some PHP, but it was limited. I've released numerous enhancements since, including a fully database backed image system, a user/authentication system, and moved the comments off of Movable Type and onto my own code. There are tons of other things also added since then, and the site is mostly written in PHP now.

Problems

Coding for Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 started in 2004 and fully completed my dream of what I wanted back then. Four years have since past and the site does not seem perfect as it once did and doesn't live up to my current standards.

• Speed

Speed is a major issue with the current site. On a entry page, it takes an average of 0.93 seconds for the page to load. This may not seem like a lot, but most other sites will average under 0.2 seconds. Basically, I feel it's noticeable enough and makes the site feel sluggish on a high speed connection. I've spent a lot of time optimizing code where I've seen potential to improve things, but from what I can tell, the problem is with the core design of the site and my current efforts have been fruitless.

• Code Maintenance

At this point, the code feels hacked together. There is limited organization. Every time a new system is added to the site, it's mostly just been hacked into the current code. The authentication system is a prime example. It's one of those things that the site should be designed around, instead it was place on top of everything else. I feel it's well integrated at this point, but the back of my mind tells me that there is got to be some problem somewhere in the implementation that I'm not seeing as nothing else was coded with it in mind.

• Modernization

The site doesn't utilize any modern site features such as Ajax. And adding these features on would be an immense project.

Goals

Here are the basic goals that I have lined up for Cameron's Thoughts 3.0. I will add more detail in the future.

• Continue to use 100% valid code and follow accessibility standards.
• Use Ajax to improve user experience.
• Make sure any use of Javascript degrades gracefully and is fully separated from the structure.
• Move away from Movable Type and use a completely homegrown CMS solution designed specifically for this site.
• Develop a caching system that will help combat any high load situations (I have already been working on a caching system for another project that will work well here)
• Migrate some of the current system such as the stats, authentication and comments and better integrate them into the new code.
• Develop a templating system for the CMS this site will run on. I have also tinkered with this before.
• Possibly create a plugin system so future site enhancements will be easier to add on.

The comments are now turned back on, though at this time you actually need to register an account on this site to use them. I hope to have guest comments working soon, but I need to get some anti-spam measures in place first. This also means that the account registration feature is now functioning on here. I've spent a lot of time getting this working lately, hopefully I will have some nicer customization features here for people who are logged in.

I have disabled comments and trackbacks on the site for the time being. I will soon have them back up. I am in the process of implementing my own registration and user system, and the comments will be a part of that when they come live again. I'll still allow for guest comments to be posted, but I wanted the comment system to be seamless with the user logins that will soon work. The new user login system is going to be pretty cool. Setting changes will be able to follow across computers, you'll have lots of control over the site's appearance, such as turning off ads and turning off different sections.

I have finally surpassed the $100 mark for ad revenue coming into this site. During that same timeframe I spent close to $125 to actually run the site. But, now that I passed this mark, I will at least finally see the money come in the mail.

I'm thinking I need to overhaul the look of this site. The current look is essentially the same since June '05 when I released Cameron's Thoughts 2.0, I'd like this to be more along the lines of Cameron's Thoughts 2.1. I don't want to make any underlying changes to the site, just something to update the CSS and maybe some minor content and layout changes. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

I have redone my other website, Cameron.Bulock.com. It is now based on some CMS software that a friend of mine, Dan Krause and I have been developing.
There are some plans to have a comment system added in the near future, so, it's a possibility that I may replace Movable Type on this page with this CMS. It's pretty exciting at this point because we are adding new features everyday. If you would like your own site to be powered by this software, for the time being it's only commercial, there is no free version. That may change at some point, it's being discussed.. If you would like a license for the software, let me know.

As you may notice, this site is now stylesheet-less. This will only be for one day as it's the First Annual Naked Day. I'm not afraid to show off the content of this site though. If you can't stand this, there are some style links on the menu above to setup a stylesheet for the site.

There isn't much here yet, but soon I am working on a new site with the tentative name of Cameron Bulock .com. This will be a place where I can do some experimenting with different web projects and things and will be a place where I can do some web-based things outside of the scope of this blog. Any way's, just wanted to get this link out, come by and check back at this site sometime in the future.

Good news for my hosting bill last month. My intentions have never been to make any money off of this site, but I would love to someday break even on my costs for running this site. Each month I get closer and closer to that goal. Last month, with the money I got off of my Adsense ads from Google, I only ended up $0.87 short for the month. That is so close. Yes, the hosting was only 87 cents for the whole month. Of course that's not counting all the time I put into this site. But, soon, this site at least won't give me any financial burden. That's always a good thing.

As you probably have noticed, I setup a Christmas theme on this site. I know, I totally suck when it comes to stylesheets and even if I knew what I was doing, I don't really have much of a taste for design anyway. But, I figured, what the hey. I spent over six months rebuilding this site earlier this year, I might as well take advantage of some of the things I built into it, like easily swappable stylesheets. So, I threw together this new theme. I pretty much just swapped the colors out with red and greens and found a public domain Christmas tree image and threw that in the background. Maybe I will try to improve on it before Christmas comes around. Oh, I also added a menu at the top there so you can switch back to the normal stylesheet if this is too distracting.

Last night I updated the picture galleries on Hailey's and Brett's webpages. I this was a big step as I upgraded them to the Gallery2 software. This is the same software that it was running before, but version 2 is a complete rewrite, and is much improved in a number of ways. There aren't any new pictures yet, I have a couple I need to upload. I just got finished setting up the pictures so they still randomly display over on the right hand side of the page. This was somewhat easier then before as Gallery2 was a built in random picture module, and a way to use it externally. But, the URL rewrite module was not giving the correct URL's for the pictures. Also, there was just a lot of extra HTML in the built in random picture module. But I cleaned that all up and it's now mostly how I want it. I may do a few more tweaks still.

I have been using the SimpleComments plugin from Adam Kalsey for a while now. When MT3 came out, there was an update required since moderated comments were still being displayed. After Movable Type 3.2 came out, I noticed that trackbacks that were sent to the junk folder were being displayed. They wouldn't display right away, but if something else triggered a page to rebuild, the trackback would display. I notified Adam about this, but I know he is probably busy, and me being impatient, I decided to try and tackle this myself. It actually only required a minor update to two lines of code. I hope this is working right. So far it seems to work on my installation. I have never done any Perl programming, so, use at your own risk. Here is the updated plugin I created that should fix the MT3.2 trackback issue.

SimpleComments 1.321

This is also open source BTW, MIT License

UPDATE: (9-9-2005) I updated the code for the plugin and it now contains the code based on the work done by Joe D'Andrea. This one should work no matter what version of MT you have, though it isn't needed unless you have version 3.2.

Today I upgraded Movable Type, the software that does much of the work behind the scenes to this site, to version 3.2. This is still in beta, but is on the 4th and what is likely to be the final beta. I am very impressed with the update. To all the people who were bummed when MT3.0 didn't really have any new features, here you go. MT3.0 was a complete redesign of the software that allowed for what they have now come out with. This is the feature release everyone was waiting for. I actually disabled MT-Blacklist for the first in a long time and an going to go with just SpamLookup and the new built-in spam security features. I guess we will see how that goes. Also, I upgraded to a beta version of MT-Notifier. That is what is used to subscribe to entries. It doesn't seem to be working, so I will have to investigate that. Right now, the subscribe checkbox does nothing, and if you subscribed before, you will not be notified of any new comments.
One thing to note, not technically a bug in MT, but they have gotten more picky on templates having valid code. I tried rebuilding my site and my mobile site errored out. This was actually my fault as I was missing an opening MTEntries tag. But, that must have been like that for a while and MT never gave me any trouble. So, if you have sloppy templates, you may find that they don't work like they used to.
The only other thing that is bothering me right now, is they have gone back to sans-serif fonts in the Movable Type control panel. This is what they had back in MT2, and it seemed to be a nice little improvement. I usually use HTML-Kit to edit the templates, so it's not a big deal, but most code editing is done with serif fonts, so that seems more natural. I may edit the Movable Type templates to get the fonts back, but that will be a project for another day.

Last month when I finished my site redesign, one thing I also ended up doing was recreating the Livesearch feature I have on here. This was not something I had planned on doing, but I messed something up with the old one and I was unable to fix it.

Just for some background, my original Livesearch was based on some Javascript and a PHP search script for Movable Type. What had happened, is I messed something up rendering the PHP search to no longer work. I spent hours going over all the code and going through my database to try and find a reason, couldn't figure it out. So, instead, I decided to set the Livesearch to work with the built-in Movable Type search instead.

To do this, you will still want to follow the installation instructions to get the HTML setup on your page and the Javascript setup. There's going to be one change to the livesearch.js file I will mention later.

To setup a search template, you will need to upload a new file to the search_templates folder of your MT install. The file should be named livesearch.tmpl. Here is what the file should contain:

<MTSearchResults>

<MTBlogResultHeader>
<strong>SEARCH</strong> : Results for "<$MTSearchString$>"
<ul class="LSRes">
</MTBlogResultHeader>

<li class="LSRow">
<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
</li><!--LSRow-->
</MTSearchResults>

<MTNoSearchResults>
<ul class="LSRes">
<li class="LSRow">
No results for "<$MTSearchString$>"
</li><!--LSRow-->
</MTNoSearchResults>

</ul><!--LSRes-->

The next thing you will want to do is open your mt.cfg file and add the line "AltTemplate ls livesearch.tmpl" without the quotes. This will tell Movable Type to use this search template and gives it an ID of "ls". Now all you will need to do is edit the livescript.js file. You will need to look for liveSearchReq.open("GET", liveSearchRoot + "/livesearch.php?q=" + document.forms.searchform.q.value + liveSearchParams); and replace it with liveSearchReq.open("GET", liveSearchRoot + "/mt/mt-search.cgi?SearchElement=both&SearchCutoff=99999&MaxResults=10&Template=ls&search=" + escape(document.forms.searchform.q.value));

You may need to adjust that line so it points to your mt-search.cgi script. Also, the SearchElement=both can be changed to SearchElement=entries if you don't want comments included in your search and the MaxResults can be what you would like.

Once you've done this, you should be all set to go using Livesearch on your Movable Type-based site.

Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of Cameron's Thoughts. I have completed the site upgrades as planned as you can now see. If anyone has any comments or thoughts, please feel free to share them. This has been a huge project for me, and I have learned a lot about PHP, CSS, XHTML, and Movable Type. This has been a lot of fun, I still have many more ideas I plan to implement in the near future. This new design will make it very easy for me to expand upon what I already have.

Big news! On the 22nd, Cameron's Thoughts will hit the two year anniversary. I have been working on a site redesign to be released on that date. Amazing, I set a schedule on different parts of the upgrades needed to be completed by, and I actually followed it through. Today was the big day. Today was the next I set for the actual coding to be completed by. I think everything is all set. Over the weekend I will be doing final testing and working out any bugs. Then next week I will transition the new design over to the live server. I'm pretty excited about all this. This has been a huge project that I have been working on for a long time. I am happy for this to be coming to a completion. This will be a fresh clean and simple design. The underlying code is standards based and very accessible. It will be very easy for me to improve in the future also. All the underlying templates used for this site are completely modular and I can be used over for new additions and upgrades. Plus, a simple module change will affect all pages, no need to change endless numbers of templates for each minor change.
More details will follow, but, get ready for the 22nd.

I have updated my sitemap and the new one is now based on Niall Kennedy's template that he created. This template outputs the exact same sitemap I had setup before, but that one was using the sitemap generator and a config.xml file along with a urllist.txt file that was outputted using Movable Type. This new template just outputs the XML file straight from Movable Type. The template I created outputs the main index page, all individual archives and also monthly and category archive links in the sitemap.

Here is my latest template:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<MTEntries lastn="1">
<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></lastmod>
</MTEntries>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Individual">
<url>
<loc><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTArchiveDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</MTArchiveList>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<url>
<loc><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
</MTArchiveList>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<url>
<loc><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</MTArchiveList>

</urlset>

To set this up on your own installation, simply copy the code into a new index template and set it to output as sitemap.xml or whateveryouwant.xml.

Update:I made a minor modification to this template so that the main index template also gives a lastmod time. This is based on what Anders Jacobsen had created for a Sitemap template. I might setup his comment idea too, but not right now. To see my latest template, this is the actual template I have in live use.

It seems that Niall Kennedy has also posted a way to setup Google Sitemaps on a Movable Type blog. His method is much simpler actually, though it doesn't currently have a way to do more than Indivudual pages. Maybe I will modify my way so it just uses that single XML file. When I first read the protocol specs, I thought that the XML files had to be gzipped, but I guess thats not a requirement. So, there is no real need to use Googles python script to zip the files up.

This entry is actually out of date now. I have a more up to date version found here

I just seen that Google came out with a new Sitemap feature. This is kind of cool as it allows you to basically tell search engines what pages you have available instead of them just having to find them. So, I went ahead and setup a sitemap using the Python script they have made available. To do this, I simply downloaded the script, copied the sitemap_gen.py to a folder on my server. Then I created the following config.xml file and saved it in the same folder:

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

<site
base_url="http://www.cbulock.com/"
store_into="/home/cbulock/public_html/sitemap.xml.gz"
verbose="1"
>

<urllist path="urllist.txt" encoding="UTF-8" />

</site>

What this does is looks for a urllist.txt file that contains all the URL's for the map. It then outputs a sitemap.xml.gz file that search engines (just Google currently) can use. To create the urllist.txt file, I created a new index template in Movable Type. The index template simply outputs the urllist.txt file to the same directoryas the sitemap_gen.py and config.xml. This template just outputs all the Individual, Monthly, and Category archive page links. I also placed a link to my main index page to. The Movable Type template looks like this:

http://www.cbulock.com/ changefreq=daily priority=1.0

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Individual">
<$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> lastmod=<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$> priority=0.8
</MTArchiveList>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> changefreq=weekly priority=0.7
</MTArchiveList>

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> changefreq=monthly priority=0.5
</MTArchiveList>

The changefreq and priority attributes can be changed. All the details on how to use those can be found on the Sitemap Generator instruction page.

After you have the script uploaded, the config.xml file setup and the urllist.txt outputted by Movable Type, you can then run the script. This requires telnet or SSH access to your server. The commands are also listed on Googles instruction page. I have setup a cron job that runs the script once a day. And that's about all that's required to get this up and running.

There is still some more work on the template that I plan on doing. For instance, I have a number of pages that are generated by a seperate blog. I will need to add those to the map and also set it up to give the lastmod attribute to every page. I only spent about 20 minutes on the template so far. To see my latest updates to the template, here is the latest copy of the template that I am using.

Not that this is something that is needed, but I just wanted to test this out. I created a Mozilla search plugin for this site. This works in any Mozilla-based broswer such as Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, or Netscape. Simply download the plugin, and searching this site is a breeze. I plan on making some more, and updating some existing plugins that no longer work. Check out this page for a link to install the plugin.

I have really been slacking on posting recently. I have not really been motivated to post anything worthwhile. Nothing has really been going on in my life other than the same 'ol, same 'ol. Family is doing well.
But, today was my day off from work, and among other things, I have a couple of new website upgrades to mention. The first, I got setup a couple of days ago, but haven't really tested yet, so I can't say for sure if it works or not. That is the comment subscription service. When posting a comment on any post, you will now receive an email when anyone replies to that comment. This is a nice feature as normally there is no way to know if someone responds back to a comment unless the site is visited again. This does require that an actual email address is provided (email addresses are not displayed on this site and are not distributed in any way, only used so I am able to contact you back personally, and for the subscription to work.) This feature can also be turned off if you don't want to receive these emails by unchecking the "Subscribe to comments" box.
The next big feature is what I was working on today. Though there is not really much need for this, like many features on this site, I set it up to learn how it works and so I can use this in future projects. Now, every post is available in Adobe PDF format. If you are at the posts individual page (if you are not there, you can click the title of a post to go to it's individual page. Here you will find a PDF download link. Like I said, not to useful here, but a more professional site could really take advantage of this since I can easily add a post to this website, and without any coding, it is now posted in a number of formats including PDF. I can't think of an easier way to create PDF files. Plus, at Six Apart ProNet there is a tutorial on how to auto generate MSWord DOC files in the latest WordML format. So, it would be very easy to use Movable Type and instantly publish not only to a website, but also auto generate MSWord files and Adobe PDF files.
Anyhow, maybe I will write up a quick tutorial on how I did the PDF setup. It's fairly simple, only requires Movable Type and PHP.

There is an all new search feature on this website. It uses the same type of web technology that Gmail uses for it's site, Javascripted XMLHttpRequest requests in realtime. It's showing up on a number of sites and is called LiveSearch. It is supported by the major browsers such as IE5/6 on Windows, Mozilla/Firefox on all platforms and Safari on Mac. This is something that Opera does not support and is one of the reasons that it's getting harder and harder to support Opera. But, if your browser is not supported by the Livesearch, you still have an improved search feature. It no longer uses the built-in Movable Type search and runs off of this script.
But, if you have a supported browser, simply click in the search box and start typing. Your results will appear instantly in real time without loading any new pages.
I am still working out some minor details on how the results are displayed. For instance, if you press the Search but o the enter key to load the results, I haven't got any CSS on that page yet, so the results are just plain text. But if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to post them here, or to send them to me personally. I would like to make this as good as possible and I don't always have the best design sense. I am fairly pleased with how everything is running so far though.

Wish I had seen this, TypeMover, before I had moved my MT install from version 2.661 to version 3.11.

This site is now running Movable Type 3.11. I did a fresh install working side-by-side with my old install of 2.661. That way I could test the new install before releasing it into the wild. Good thing as there were a number of minor things that needed to be resolved. The only thing that I haven't fixed is the code that does the 'related posts' on my indivual post pages. So that is disabled right now. That uses Brad Choate's MySQL plugin, and it isn't mentioned on the MT Plugins page whether it's supported my MT3 or not. But I wasn't getting an error though either when using that code, just nothing was outputting, so I might have to research the error a bit more. It's more than likely some minor mistype on my part somewhere.
One thing I realized. Movable Type needs some way to do a complete import and export. It was easy to export and import the actual entries themselves. The templates on the other hand were a PITA. Unfortuantly I decided to make everything on this page in little pieces, so I have a good 25 or more templates. Fortuantly they are all linked to a file so I just needed to create the templates and copy over the links to the template files. Still was not simple though as I also have to reset up the preferences and the archive file templates. At least I could copy this info from my current version 2.661 install. If I had to set this all back up from scrath, I would be screwed. I have backups of all the entries and templates, but that isn't quite enough.
But, after installing all that, I had to move on to the plug-ins. I went through and found out which ones I was using, then had to investigate any possible conflicts MT3. The only one that seemed to have an issue was the Rebuild plugin that could rebuild pages set using a crontab. It seems there are likley easier ways to do this now in MT3 since the backgrounds task feature is built in and there are ways that plugins can do tasks using crontabs. Also, there might be a SQL plugin issue, but can't verify that yet.
So, if anybody finds any issues with anything, please contact me. I have spent a lot of time today trying to make sure this was a smooth transition, but I have no doubt I missed something somewhere.

I think I have worked out the bugs on my WAP version of my page located at wap.cbulock.com. Of course, that page is not designed to be viewed through a standard browser, but instead a WAP enabled cell phone. Seems that most decent phones at least offer this feature. Unfortunatly I am unable to test this page as it seems that either T-Mobile disabled my WAP browsing or GPRS service is currently down right now. But, if you have a WAP enabled phone, point the browser to wap.cbulock.com and tell me what you think. I'm sure there is still much to improve, but at least the pages should all be viewable. If some pages don't load, that means that I didn't catch all the bugs yet.

I now own four domain names, cbulock.com, bulock.com, cbulock.info, and bulock.info. There is a great deal right now where you can get free .info domain names. Apparently this deal is only good until the 9th, so if you want your own domain name, hurry. They don't seem to have this advertised anywhere on their site either, but if you put a .info domain name into your shopping cart, it will show as being free. This is for one year, and after that the prices are $6.99 a year. Not sure what I will do with the .info names I acquired, so far they just point to this page. Well, in the next 24 hours or so, once the names propagate.

Man, Movable Type 3.1 looks like it rocks. Now there is a lot of good plugins, especially MTBlacklist, the greatest plugin of all. Might almost be worth paying for. Dynamic PHP pages, made by the coolest MT guy and now employee of SixApart, Brad Choate.
Yes, I am very tired while writing this. Long day at work, and a long week taking care of a sick daughter, all equaling no sleep, lot's of drain. At least I have tommorrow off of work.

Have been working on more site upgrades recently. Nothing real big, but I do have a WAP version of this site almost finished, so if your cell phone is WAP enabled, you can browse here no matter where you are. I actually started to write the templates for the WAP page myself, had to learn WML first. But after starting, I decided to search around and see if anybody else had already done this. Sure enough, I did find some site that had pre-made WAP templates. I have them on this site already and if you want to try out a beta version, you can point your cell phones browser to wap.cbulock.com. Right now, some pages are generating fine, but other pages are not rendering correctly. I haven't nailed down exactly what is causing this as I only know basic WML (I have spent maybe like two hours with the code), so, it looks fine to me, but there is likely something that I am not catching yet. I am testing the pages on my Nokia 3650 and my wife's Motorola v300.
I think I might go back to finishing up my own WAP templates for this page, instead of using these other templates that I found since I think the way I was going to do it was a little more how I wanted it, and if I write up the code, it will be easier for me to fix any issues that come up.
The other update that I added is the random picture that shows up on the side of the page here. It will display a random picture from Hailey's photo album.
I also added a page that give info on this site. The about this site page will also give a look at what I plan to add in the future.

This is an issue that I have been pondering for a little while. How could permalinks in Movable Type be changed. By definition, permalinks should be permanent. But, what if all those all links still worked while at the same time completely redoing the URL scheme.
BTW, assume I am talking about the Apache webserver unless I mention otherwise since that is what I am using.

There are a couple ways this could be done. For instance, if the filename is generally going to stay the same, say, changing from http://www.yourwebsite.com/archives/000255.html to http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/entries/page0255.php then you could write a single rewrite rule in your .htaccess file that would handle that. I know very little how to do this, but with the knowledge it should be fairly simple.

But, I want to move my files from the default /archives/000001.html scheme that is setup to a more natural and organized /year/month/page_title.html. The problem is every page title is unique and only Movable Type would know what those are and what the year and month is for the posts. Had I known more about Movable Type before I started my website, then I probably would have gotten this right to begin with, but it was much more fun to jump into it and learn as I go.

---

So, what I have come up with was this. Create a new index template that will generate Apache redirect commands that can be placed into a .htaccess file. The template code will be in this format:

<MTArchiveList>
<MTEntries>
Redirect permanent [Current Archive Path][Current Archive File Template]</MTEntries> <$MTBlogURL$>[New Archive File Path, if any][New Archive File Template] </MTArchiveList>


Basically, the same tags used to create the master archive page, but modified to output the 'Redirect permanent' statement that the .htaccess file in Apache uses to redirect the pages, then the path to the old names using the default archive scheme, then followed by the new scheme. This of course could be modified to whatever current archive format you are currently using followed by the new format you will be changing to.

Here is how my code looked:

<MTArchiveList>
<MTEntries>
Redirect permanent /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html</MTEntries> <$MTBlogURL$><$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/"$><$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.html </MTArchiveList>


One thing to notice though, for this to come out right, you will want to use the MTArchive tags, but when you edit the Archive File Templates in your Movable Type system, you will need to use MTEntry tags.
So, my Archive File Template will look like:

<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

If you have never changed the Archive File Templates, you can do this my going to the Movable Type Control Panel, then going into the 'Weblog Config' and clicking on the 'Archiving' link. I am changing the Individual archive template here, so in the box that says 'Archive File Template' is where the changes would need to go.
You might also want to change the archive URL on the 'Core Setup' section of the weblog config. That is what I have listed in the this color. My original archive URL was http://www.cbulock.com/archives, so all the archives were behind that. My new setup just has http://www.cbulock.com as the archive URL since I just wanted the archives to be organized my year and month, but still having an archive URL is okay, it just has to be considered when changing this all around. Also, make sure to be careful of any other archive file templates you might have if you change the archive URL, since they will also need to be changed. I forgot about this at first and it messed up my mobile version of the site.

All that needs to be done now is for the template containing the code above to be built. The outputted file will contain all the redirects that can be pasted into an existing .htaccess file. If you don't already have a .htaccess file, you could probably even have Movable Type directly output it.

---

The other method I had would have a similar effect, and this could be done using any webserver since the redirection is done on the visitors end and not on the server. You can use a Meta Refresh. If your not familiar with this, a Google search will give a lot of info. The main thing is the META tag as shown below in this color. This tells the browser what page to redirect to and how long to wait. By having content=0, this will happen immediately. But, since some browsers won't automatically change the page, you can also put a direct link in the actual page content. If I was to use this method, I would want to set up a new individual archive template with the following code:

<html>
<head>
<title><$MTBlogName$>: <$MTEntryTitle$></title> <META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=<$MTBlogURL$><$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/"$><$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.html">
</head>
This page has been moved.
<a href="<$MTBlogURL$><$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/"$><$MTArchiveTitle dirify="1"$>.html">If not automatically redirected, please click here.</a>
</body>
</html>


Then, as long as this new individual archive was set up to build with the same settings as the old files, Movable Type will rebuild this template over your old files.

---

I had to decide what I wanted to do, use .htaccess redirects, or meta redirects. The problem with .htaccess redirects is that every page that loads on the server now has to go through that file. So I am not certain how bad that impacts the server by adding hundreds of redirects to it. But, with meta redirects, you have to first load the redirect page, then load the new page. Plus, this can be somewhat sloppy since this is done client-side, so if the page doesn't redirect, the visitor has to manually do so, and it makes the site look amateurish. The final factor that made my decision was this page about META refreshes. After reading that, I decided the Apache .htaccess redirects were the way to go.

One year ago today, I started this journal of mine. It has come a far way since. I have documented my life since becoming a father. Also, the site has had a number of incremental updates along the way. I've had a lot of fun with this so far and am glad I am still actively posting. I was afraid I would get bored and quit eventually, but I don't see that happening anytime in the near future.
Oh, and I also finally added a way to contact me from this page. There is a link on the right hand column, or you can just click here.

In four days, this site will celebrate it's one year anniversary. It's been a great year and I have learned a lot about modern web design. Things are a lot different now then they were back in the days of writing HTML 3 code in Notepad.
If anyone has any idea's about new things that should be added to this page, or and changed that should be made, please just post a comment below or throw me an e-mail to cameron at bulock dot com.

Yeah! Today, this homepage validated as 100% compatible XHTML 1.0 Transitional code.

This was a big project as at the beginning of the day, I had over 130 errors on the page. Nothing major, as the page looks identical now as it did then. But all those errors weren't "proper" coding and I had to go through them one by one. Actually, a number of them could be eliminated by writing some code that does some code conversion on the web server end. Cause we wouldn't want to have an ampersand in a URL without using the correct code for an ampersand. That would just be wrong. But, as for now this page is valid. That doesn't mean it always will be as who knows if I will make sure every post I do will be completely valid code. But, the main code that this site runs on is now valid. Most of the indivdual posts should be valid too. Some posts don't have correct code inside the actual body of that posting, but that's just too bad. I'm not going back and re-writing the entire website.

This site is powered by a very nice piece of software called Movable Type. Big news has been that the next major release of the software, version 3.0 is in the testing stages and going to be released soon. Well, that time is now.
Six Apart, the company that produces the software has released a developers version of the software that anyone can use right now. But the big news that has caused a lot of controversy has been the announcement of a new licensing scheme. This is a huge change. Movable Type in the past has been completely free for noncommercial use. And there will still be a free version now, but it is very restrictive. It only allows for a single author and up to three blogs. For many, this is too restrictive for how they are currently using the software. Not only that, but the lowest cost version of the software to purchase has a price tag of $99.99, on sale for 69.95 currently. This will allow up to five authors and five blogs, still for noncommerical use. That's quite a hefty price. I understand that the company needs to make money, but for the price to go from free to $100 and still be restrictive compared to what the free version offers is a hard change to transition to.
Plus, add on to that, version 3.0 will not really add any features expect for their TypeKey comment feature, something that I really had no intrest in anyway. Once again, I have no problem with the fact that this new version wasn't going to add any features. The big thing was that the foundation of the application was going to be completely rewritten to allow for better plug-ins and more powerful features in the future.
I believe that a fully-featured version of Movable Type would be something worth paying for. Throw in every feature they can think of, and slap a price tag on it. But, 3.0 is basically just like 2.6, but it costs money. So, for the time being, I am planning no software upgrades and will stick with what I've got.

Seems like everything is back to normal now. The weather and news is back on the side of the page since the server is now able to access that info again. This is good news as it means I don't need to move to a new server. Well, at least for now.

Seems that there was been a number of issues with this website recently. I think the main issue is that the server this page is hosted on has been under a DOS attack for the past week or so. This has been causing pages not to load and to timeout. It has also hindered my abilty to update the site. At the same time, the server seems to be having some trouble fetching information from other sites. This could be caused by some blocks the server admin has been putting in place to try and control the attack. So, this has caused the weather and news functions to no longer work. Now, I also seem to be having a bit of trouble with the Cost of War item on this page. Looks like these features will not be working for a bit. Hopefully all will be well soon. If not, looks like there will be another server move in the future. I really hope not though.

I have finished updating the family pics section of this site. I actually did most of this a couple weeks ago when I added my resume to the site. I had integrated those pages left over from the old pre-Movable Type based website. Now everything here except for the NX page is based on MT. I planned on doing that at one time, but gave up. I probably never will since it's pretty much just there for historical reference now since most of that info is out of date.
But I now have some better pictures and some more up-to-date pictures of my family. Hopefully more to come.

Yesterday and this morning, I worked on a ton more updates to this site. Nothing is probably noticeable at first glance. I did change the coloring, but I mentioned that in the last post yesterday.
I spent a LOT of time at work yesterday working on code. (It was slow). Really, the biggest things you can see are on the mobile edition of this page. I had set that up a while back for an easy way to access this page over a cell phone or PDA. Previously, you could see the last eight articles posted, and that was it.
It is now very functional. You can now not only view the posts I made, but also view the comments posted to them. Plus, I added an archive function to the mobile version so you can now view all the past posts that I have ever made. I hope to soon add a search feature too.

I've went ahead and updated the look of this page a little. I like it, but I don't know if that's because it's better than the old design, or just because it's new. I'd love to hear what others think. Should I stick with the all grey backgrounds, or go with this grey/black mix. I also plan on doing more design updates as I am starting to figure out this whole CSS thing (I'm still too attached to the old school HTML rules of web page design, but now that I am understanding CSS, I can see it is worlds better.)

Today I added a feature to allow a "sideblog" or "blogroll" to the side of this site. Actually, I will just be posting links to threads at ClieSource that I find helpful, funny or just crazy. Just threads I like for one reason or another. But, it's all automated and very easy for me to post to (otherwise I would never use it. ).
Special thanks to David Raynes and his the MTOtherBlog plugin for Movable Type.

Is my Blog HOT or NOT?
I have entered this site to be rated by whoever. If you like this blog, (or even if you don't) rate it so I know what people think. Give it a bad rating, and I will hunt you down.

Got some smilies working on the journal here!

That's all I got so far. Special thanks to Brad Choate and his MTMacro plug-in for Movable Type. Also, thanks to the girlie matters website for having the instructions laid out in a way I could understand. I had all the macros set up, I didn't realize I need that 'apply_macros' tag to be added. All better now.

Is anybody interested in having their own Movable Type blog hosted for them? Or even an image gallery? I have been thinking of doing a hosting service where I would do all the setup of an image gallery like the one I have set up for Hailey. I could install all the software, and do some basic configuration. Even set up a domain name for it. This would be for a small fee of course. Plus, I could do some blog hosting. This blog here is using the Movable Type software and is very customizable. Right now I am hosting a friend of mine, Neil Vitale. For an even smaller fee I could do a blog hosting with a domain name for that also, and you could get some web storage space and your own custom e-mail . Basically, whatever you wanted. Well, if anybody is interested, just post a comment here, or e-mail me cbulock(at)cbulock(dot)com.

OK, after a bit of work figuring out how to do it, I was able to add some RSS feeds to the right column here at my journal. I got the code from here. Was a bit complicated as the a couple of Movable Type plugins had to be installed, and the code had to be added to the page here and set up to fit in with the rest of the design. Then, I had to set up a cron job on the server since Movable Type doesn't dynamically update the pages every time someone loads then, they are rebuilt when needed (content is updated, or manually when code is updated). So, a cron job had to be set up for the pages to rebuild every once in a while (I have it set for one hour now, will adjust if necessary) so the news will be fairly up to date. Hopefully it will all update properly. I am also adding a GeoURL link to this page. It's a pretty cool service where you tell them the exact location your website is at (well, at least where I am at), and then it will show you other websites physically near yours. It's a pretty cool setup I think.

Today I have been doing a lot of updating to my website. I updated the About Me page here with some updated info. My biggest project for today was updating Hailey's image gallery to a newer version of the software. The newer version allows for a lot of newer feature including a user system where you can register. Then you can vote on images, and receive e-mail updates when the site is updated. I haven't even seen all the changes yet, but it's pretty cool. This software update also has a skinning feature, meaning the website also looks a lot nicer now since I really didn't spend much time editing the code to begin with. Now, all the work is already done. I am still in process of finishing some updates to this journal.

Well, it has been a bumpy month for this website. Due to a number of outages and basically crappy support from Cirtex Hosting, I decided to move on. They did provide me with free hosting, which was nice, but I was getting what I paid for. So, in some crazy error on my part, I moved the site to EQ Servers. Bad idea. Within days of getting the site up and running, a hacker broke into the server and defaced all the websites. No big deal, was able to restore. Then days later after I made a number of minor updates to this site (which I will be redoing here shortly), EQ Servers restored my site from a backup days before. So, days worth of info were lost. I contacted the host, Kane Hart, and he said he could probably restore the data from another backup. That was the last I ever heard from him. Now he will never respond to any support tickets or e-mails.
Well, now the site has been moved once again, this time to PersonalSites.org. They have some pretty nice deals and seem to have a good reputation. Hopefully this will be the last move for a while.

I put an add-on to my website today. After helping a friend get colored scrollbars to work on his website, I came across freemoby.com. While I was there I found a wealth of info about Movable Type (the software this website runs on). One cool feature is nice titles. It adds a nice little box to links that have a title tag in them. Unfortunately, this feature isn't supported in my browser of choice, Opera.

Had a few kinks I had to work out on my website update for today. I had a little trouble since I was actually working on both my NX page and my Cameron's Thoughts page at the same time. Don't know what I was thinking, but moving the NX page to a Movable Type blog format, and implementing the mobile version of Cameron's Thoughts within Movable Type at the same time didn't work out to great. At first I accidently editted all the template files for the NX page and created a mobile version for that by mistake. But all the links pointed to the Cameron's Thoughts page. So you might have seen some of the NX page on this page. Then, I had a minor mistake in the web site archiving that caused all the archived links to point to the mobile versions even on the full size page, and on the mobile page all the links didn't go anywhere. It all seems to be working for now. The main page seems to be working fine at least. The mobile page might have some bugs still, but none that I can tell right now. I guess we'll see once I get the NX page back up since I now have to go back and make sure none of the templates for that will overwrite any of these pages. I have the links all messed up now.

I have been working on a number of website changes today. One thing you might notice is my Clie NX page is not up right now. I am moving it over to a Movable Type based system like this page so it will be easier to update in the future. Right now I am in the process of moving content from the current page to the new page.
Also, I have made some modifications to my website and now have a mobile edition up. The address is http://www.cbulock.com/mobile. I hope everything works right with that page and it get's updated properly.

Long time, no update. Haven't been too busy, just haven't gotten around to posting an update. Mostly just been spending time with my family recently. Was working an creating a Clie NX version of the Clie UX Graffiti and status bars skins. Pain in the butt since the UX skins are vertically aligned and the NX skins are horizontal. And the skins just had to have a stupid gradient, so I had to go in and create new buttons with the gradients in the right direction, and then copy and rotate the icons to the right direction also. And this had to be done by selecting everything pixel by pixel. It's done now and you can find the skins in the skins section of ClieSource.com. I am still making a Japanese version of the Graffiti skin since someone requested that. I have never done that before, so that will be something new.
One thing I am going to be doing soon, and have already started, is something that I have been meaning to do for some time now. I am compiling past versions of my websites to create an archive here. Kind of a CBulock.com history. But this site has actually gone through a number of changes. It was originally called Omega's Lair and was hosted on Tripod. Then moved over to Freeservers and became Omega's Lair 2000. Then, at one point, I purchased the domain name CBulock.com, and then hosted the website off of a PC at my home. Now it's being hosted by CirtexHosting in it's latest incarnation. I know that Freeservers is still hosting my old website there, and I have found old CD's with some backups of my older websites. Soon, I will have them accessible here, I just have to get the pages cleaned up a bit. You'd be surprised how a just a few years how many links and such no longer work.