Things specific to the GCW websites and related technologies
In case anyone cares, I upgraded Great Castle Wiki to the latest version of PmWiki and gave it a shiny new look based on the abitmodern skin.
Because we all know: style is everything. 😉
Note: Great Castle Wiki is no more, but I am using a DokuWiki instance as the root for GCW now, so I may copy over some of the old content eventually.
Ok, so I have finally figured out how CSS works.
As a test, I bashed the main Great Castle Wilson site to use CSS for all structure and formatting instead of the old code, which was a bunch of nested tables and embedded text attributes. The new version of the site is quite similar to the old one, with a small number of “upgrades” to the appearance, such as rollovers in the nav bar.
What they say about how using CSS reduces the size of the files is true, even for small pages. The old index.html file was 4,068 bytes. The new index.html+style.css files together are only 3,121 bytes.
Anyway, for reference, the old index.html file can be found here.
That’s it.
On a separate note, the current sweet spot for HDs is 250Gig, 16Meg ram cache, 7200rpm for $100.00. Unbelievable.
Since I switched to my most recent anti-spam tool, it has caught 528 spam comments for me. In all that time, I have had to manually mark exactly 2 comments.
Hey spammers: Go somewhere else; on this site you are denied!
I believe Deblog, News from Great Castle Wilson, Great Castle Wiki, and The Wilson Family History and Ancestry site are all up and running again. Some highlights of the effort were:
HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC- line in the hostconfig file, adding HOSTNAME=mikew.ca really will force the host name appropriately.register_long_arrays and short_open_tags off.In any case, I think we’re good to go now, so let me know if you see any oddities.
Wow, what a battle!
I was tired of my G5 being so badly misconfigured that I couldn’t even install a new printer, so I completely erased the HD and started over. That was drastic medicine, but I’m hoping that it will be the right answer in the long run.
Of course, in the short run, I have had a full day of terror, getting things back together, and I’m not even close to being done with that. I did manage to get the blog live again though, as evinced by this post. I’ll check in again once I’m “done”. In the mean time, if you are looking for something on our site and you can’t find it, be patient, it will show up eventually.
Well, I’m still on the trail of the definitive WP2.0 theme for this site. Nothing that’s absolutely jumped out at me yet, but there are certainly lots of interesting things being done. I noticed that there is now a WP2.0 specific theme competition in progress over at kcyap.com. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something cool.
As you’ve probably noticed, I can’t decide what I want this site to look like. You’ll just have to bear with me a bit longer. Hopefully on the weekend I’ll find some time for this.
It’s actually pretty easy to add a picture to the site with WP2.0, but I’d still rather have the Gallery2 plug-in working. In the mean time, here’s a blast from the past added using the built in support:
Unfortunately, the old hacked style I was using didn’t make the grade. What I should do is actually design one of my own, but that will be a bit of a “learning experience” so it will have to wait. For now, this new style is quite pleasant — it just needs to integrate a picture of the castle.
The next step is to install the new-and-improved spam filter, and then re-connect Gallery2 (which may be interesting).
Update: As I suspected, WPG2 doesn’t seem to work with the WP2. I know that ozgreg it looking at it, so hopefully the 1.1 version of WPG2 will make everything right again. For now, you will see a few broken image links. Oh well.