After much prolonged agony, I got my rss feed to work with google reader.  How’d I do that, you ask?  I set up a cron job to download the rss feed every hour into an xml file.  For some reason Google can understand how to read that file, even though it’s an exact copy of the one it can’t read.  Go figure!

To the less technical members of my audience — if you didn’t understand what the above meant I’ll translate it for you:  “blah blah blah”.  Public service is my game!

When kind readers like yourself make a great suggestion in response to an entry, do I laugh and mock?  (sometimes) No!  I listen and follow the sage advice.

Today I announce that I have turned a comment into reality, and followed fluffy’s advice in a comment and got some premade meatballs which I will have with my next serving of pasta which is destined to be… tomorrow!

Miss me?

To celebrate my return, here is a picture of Margaret Thatcher with a hilter mustache.

Don’t expect your usual worse than hitler blog reading goodness for the next while eh?

[update:  If you pay them an entire arm and leg, they will give you wireless internets access.  So maybe I won’t be as offline as I thought.]

Except not with the Rome burning part. I tinkered with the css of this site a lot though, so you should be able to do fancy modern things like resize columns to a percentage of your browser width, and uh… well that’s it really. That took several hours, it was only with the aid of a very excellent guide on the topic that I got it working.

Why, you ask? Because, I say… because the wtf mac store photo was slightly cut off on the right side with the default column width I had before. Is that not a good reason enough to spend hours tweaking css properties that you hardly understand on your blog even though most of the few people who read the side do via RSS anyhow? OF COURSE IT IS A GOOD ENOUGH REASON.

duh.

[UPDATE: this did not work in Internet Explorer, so if you’re using that it just won’t work.  So use a better browser, eh?]

The internets seem to be back again so I happily return to my usual perma-connected behaviours!  Miss me?

My internet at home is down.  So is my phone line.  Also, so is my cellphone.

totally uncool.

Then this means that you have reached my new blog at the new location at http://worsethanhitler.org. It also means that you are browsing on my spiffy new server, which is also awesome. And now it’s time to sleep.

Please let me know if you find anything amiss with your browsing experience, as I’ve had only limited time to get this all working thanks to busy work and crappy home internet service.

You may have noticed a disturbing lack of posts yesterday.  The cause is that my new server is finally set up so I’m configuring and moving sites over to it one at a time, which means that I have slightly less time these days to tell you about the joys of Kansas City and the wonders of the Time Cube.  But don’t worry, I’ll still try to cover the basics and then be back in true form in a while.

I haven’t posted much, contrary to my “post early post often” strategy I’ve been employing over the past few weeks.  The last time I did a blog I hardly updated it at all and thus no one ever read it.  So I figured when I started a new one I should take the opposite tack and give people a reason to visit the site — even if there is no “real” content they will get a silly picture of a duck or something.

I think it’s working alright — contrary to the title I seem to have a few readers and I get a comment or two every day.  So that’s nice, overall I’m pretty happy with my blog.  I’m thinking about keeping things exactly as they are now, but moving the site to one of my other domains, worsethanhitler.org — most blogs have a title and mine is the bland old “ryan thiessen” which is accurate I suppose but not really inventive.  And why have a billion domains like I do if I’m not going to use them at all?

So what I’m thinking is to use rt.com as a menu and then pointing to my various other sites for subcontent.  Don’t worry, if I do switch over I’ll mirror the blog here for a while and then seamlessly redirect if I ever do fully 100% move.  And I know you were worried.

Now, a lot of people have been saying to themselves: “I’m pretty sure rt does the best podcast of all time, but I can’t go to all the effort to download and play back the individual track.  In this day and age, can’t he do something to make it a bit easier?”

I’ve heard your many pleas, and have installed the LoudBlog podcasting server on this very website that you are now surfing on!  So now when you click on a podcast episode you can have the choice to either download the MP3 file or play it back in a convenient and nifty flash interface.  Also for those of you who use podcasting software already (ha ha), or something like iTunes, I have a iTunes compatible podcast feed that you can directly load into your programme.  And if that wasn’t enough, I also have a website that you can go to, http://ryanthiessen.com/podcast/index.php where you can see how awesome all of the past podcasts were in case (teh horrors) you missed an exciting episode.

Enjoy!

I would go to Google Answers and ask the following question: when the [bleep] is the [bleep]in’ World Cup going to be over?  I’m so [bleep]ing tired of all of this [bleep]in’ talk about soccer!  To get this answer I would need to pay $2, but I was willing to do this for you, my dear readers, all in the quest of making a great blog entry.  Except that my one credit card is maxxed out until payday on Tuesday, and I lost the other one.

Sadly google will not just take my word that I will pay them later, so you will just have to take my word that there would have been a great post here, and you all would have laughed, and I would have been $2 poorer.  JUST IMAGINE.

What’s with all the politics lately?  You’re starting to annoy me, and I’m the one who writes this stuff.  Cut it out for a bit, eh?

It has come to my attention that for people using Internet Explorer this website has been unavailable for some time. I hadn’t noticed, as I avoid using Internet Explorer like the plague, which not coincidentally actually is a plague.

The bitter angry zealot in me says “serves you right for using a Microsoft product!”, but the me still clinging to reality says “oops. sorry.”

I had to delete the dinosaur comics section of the sidebar so that IE users can reach the site… but it’s still a bit messed up for them for some unknown reason.  But if you’re wondering what happened to the dino comics?  Blame Microsoft.

Okay, recall earlier today when I posted about the reasons that people blog?  Well, I missed a fundamentally important thing that makes blogging fun: checking your stats.  For the record, my website gets about 3,500-4,000 unique visitors a month and serves about 2.5-3GB of data.  A full 13.5% of my website’s hits come from people using Ubuntu, either a sign that this upstart Linux distribution is much more popular than people think, or that I visit my own site WAY too often.

But just the record of visitors isn’t what makes it great, the best part is how people came across your site, the search terms are often very funny and other times very frightening.  For example, it comes as somewhat of a shock to me that the #1 search term that people used to find my site is “Kansas City”.  Obviously, I should follow the wishes of my readers and blog more about the joys of Kansas City.  But aside from the truly creepy items, it’s kind of a neat overview of the various things that I’ve ever written about.  I get political things, like “the white house” or “rumsfeld cannot see the war lasting”.  I get places I’ve been to, such as “nagasaki peace gardens pics” or “pont du gare” or “ensanada mexico”.  Then there are the techie things I write about like “turtle beach audio advantage micro vancouver” and “.html my personal website”.  And I’m pleased to report that the #3 item on the list is “penis”.

It’s a bit of a stereotype that n00b bloggers love to post crap like this, and long time writers like myself (this is ryanthiessen.com’s 10th year on the internets) are supposed to be too cool to write about this kind of crap.  But we’re not fooling anyone, and I’m pretty sure most if not all bloggers check these kind of stats if they are able to.  In fact, one of the ways I know that my server has crashed is that one of my customers checks his stats so frequently that it’s effectively a first alert system for when something has gone wrong!

The point of all this?  Make a blogger happy.  Plug in a random search term into google, the more bizarre the better, and follow the link to a weblog  somewhere.  Whether they are too cool to acknowledge it or not, you’ll probably make someone’s day.  And in case you want to see the full list for May, click here for fun and profit.

I remarked to joh3n yesterday as he was in the process of setting up his blog again, that perhaps the most fun part of the whole blogging experience is not writing what you want, sharing with your friends and family, or even getting comments from people. No, it’s just really fun to tweak at the theme all day, getting things exactly as you want it and even sometimes (ok, usually) just for the heck of it.

So it’s in that spirit that today I reworked the photo section of my website, replacing the hackish and not really well working site with a very basic directory but a nifty but simple AJAX powered gallery program for each of the albums. I also added my wedding photos (about time eh?) and also some pictures of me in elementary school.

Woo.

Several meta items on the agenda today.

1) Obviously my posting volume is going to decrease somewhat, since I am busy as a beaver with the new job and the moving.   I will do my best though to come up with AWESOME things during the day to post when I get home though, in between packing.
2) Aside from very general terms, I’m not going to blog about my job — except for the fact that I do in fact have one.  I’m not going to be one of those people who gets fired for blogging about their work, that’s for darn sure.  So I won’t mention the name of my employer or what they do, nor any details that might identify what it is I’m doing beyond vague generalities.

3) I am still not a fish.  If you have any questions, that’s your problem.

4) Instead of the How AWESOME is this ranking from 1 to 5 stars, I have undergone a lot of work and replaced that with a simpler (and more AWESOME) yes/no rating system.  Because of past ratings, some things will be ranked at over 100% awesome… but if you have a problem with this, just consider that it would be even more appropriate for ALL entries to be over 100% AWESOME so stop your complaining already.
5) I now control the #1 hit to “worse than hitler” on google.  Suck it, Chavez!

I have worked dilligently to ensure that Worse Than Hitler is now Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Finally now I hope the endless complaints about the invalid syntax of that page will cease — I hope!

In other meta-news, I once again edited the commenting system to make it easier for people to comment without their comments being lost due to the spam trap.  Now, if you forget to write it, it tells you what you just wrote so you can copy/paste it again.  And also it reminds you twice that you need to include that field instead of just once.   Also I spent about 45 minutes getting the “How AWESOME is this post” rating system to correctly switch between “vote” and “votes“.

I hope you all appreciate it.

If you hit this site or RSS feed today at the wrong time, you may have gotten strange or broken results… this is because of some little stupid thing that I was working on today.  I wanted to have my random face image that you see in the upper right show up in the RSS too because that is how many people read the site.  So I got a rss feed plugin “better feeds” that allows you to customize the way the RSS feeds work, and then I hacked it up to include my random face image.  After a couple of aborted attempts, I finally got it working, but for some reason some of the Wordpress administration tools completely stopped working.

Baffled, I reverted themes but found the same error present, and I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what the heck was going on.  Eventually after ruling out lots of other things, I disabled the plugins and found out that the problem was caused my inclusion of the “better feeds” plugin — but I still didn’t know why that should have anything to do with the problem.  So i did a bit of reseach, and I found out that the PHP include function which I was using to share code between the RSS feed and the sidebar, brings all of the variables from the included file into the current scope.  That is to say, all of the variable are completely global.

So one of the variables I used in my face rotation script conflicted with a variable name that the wordpress administration system uses, so when they overlapped it would prevent the administration from working problem.   When I finally moved all of the variable names to be specific to my little script, the administration interface instantly starting working again.  What I find most amazing is that not only is this behaviour not considered a bug, it’s seems to be an intentional feature of the wordpress, and indeed is the foundation of how the plugin system works.

This strikes me as a very terrible solution — to rely and use globals all over the place is just asking for trouble, trouble of the sort that I accidentally ran into.  I’ve seen plugin solutions implemented elsewhere and I suppose I just assumed that having hooks in important places and making that available to plugin authors was the way everyone did plugins.  But I’m not really impressed by the utter lack of controls wordpress seems to implement.  Oh well, it still works well as a blogging system…

In other meta news, I added a “how awesome is this post?” rating system to each entry, so please (ab)use this as you see fit.

A while ago I changed the image in my blog header from Battery Park to the current one, the rain on my wedding day.  But I found that my name in the header didn’t show up very well against the new background, so I decided to replace the plain text with an image with the text in drop-shadow making it a bit easier to read.

The only way to overlay an image like that properly is to have a transparent background, but this leads to a problem.  The two ways of having a transparent image is to use a GIF or a PNG.  The GIF solution sucks because it doesn’t do true transparency (doesn’t have an alpha channel), it just fakes it by allowing for transparent pixels.  If you don’t know what that means, it’s that you can’t have a partially transparent image, every single pixel has to be either opaque or transparent, which severely limits the quality and range of what you can do with transparency.

The second solution is to use a PNG image, except that this has its own problem: transparent PNG isn’t supported by Internet Explorer, tragically the most popular web browser out there.  However, there is a complicated workaround for that problem, which involves having DirectX render the png as a texture (thx fluffy for explaining to me how this works) — and then magically the transparent PNG works just like it does on every other browser!  So I did this the other day, set it all up and tried it out for myself, but it didn’t work.  Hrmph.  It turns out that because the hack involves using a DirectX filter, it doesn’t work under my IE6/wine/linux implementation so I can’t test to see if it’s actually working on that browser.  HRUMPH!!!!!

So I decided, screw it. If you’re using IE, you get the plain white text.  If you don’t like it, get a better browser already.

I updated the root page of my website today to replace the bulleted list with an image map created from a screen shot of the game FreeCiv. I realize that having an image map for navigation is considered a really horrible thing to do, but hell at least it’s not flash. It still works in the text mode browsers Links and Lynx so there really can be no honest complaints. And now on a whim I can add easter eggs all over the place, yay!

I am rather proud of this.

Today in a fit of inspiration of the strangely productive sort, I brought back an old favourite of long-time readers of my old blog, poker!

On the upper right you’ll see a random image appear each time you load the page… but if you click on it you get to the poker page where it loads five different rt heads at once.  And here’s the inspired part.. I wrote a simple script to count your poker score and then print that out underneath!

Fun for the whole family.

I write a lot of stuff that manages to get itself posted all over the internet… so I figured why not actually get a blog like everyone else in the world?  Ok, to be fair… I’ve had several blogs in my lifetime and I haven’t ever kept them up for various reasons.  In fact I’ve had a blog on this very site for a couple of years now but I never actually update it, partly because I’m lazy but mostly because the posting mechanism was annoying and slow.  So I’m hoping that with the new weblog software I installed (Wordpress) I’ll keep up my efforts a bit more and maybe have a site that is worth reading.  So I’ll give it another shot!  I’ll slowly bring across content that I’ve already written elsewhere and write new info, so if you know me perhaps you’ll have read it before and if so I apologize for boring you.