My Musings

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Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Counting and Moving

Sorry, folks, but this isn’t a “real” entry. Just thought I’d give ya a fair warning.

That said, I’d like to begin with a thanks—a thanks to all you guys who come this blog, because I recently broke 1000 hits! To be sure, many of those hits came from me, but I couldn’t have done it without you. Literally. A person can come to this site from their computer a million times in a row, but the counter won’t budge unless somebody else comes to the blog and “clears” the counter for them. Mandy and I, in what was a perfect case of two people with way too much time on their hands, discovered this fact one evening by getting on the phone and repeatedly hitting the Refresh buttons on our computers, thus raising up about 30 or so hits before figuring out that as soon as one of us stopped doing it, the counter would stop rising.

Are you confused now? I hope so. My point is, I didn’t cheat with the counter. If you don’t believe me, hit the End key on your keyboard, look at the counter, and reload the page. You’ll see that the counter did not go up. So basically, the 1000 hits were racked up by real, actual people sitting behind their computers and spending their preciously limited free time going to my blog. Isn’t that neat?

Sadly, today isn’t all about cheer and praise. Problems are beginning to crop up. For one thing, you may have noticed that every single dang entry I’ve ever posted is right here on the main page. It’s kind of nice, yes, but I imagine that a few months and many entries from now this is going to create severe loading problems. There’s an archiving system, but I can’t get it to work properly. The only thing you get when you click on the “Archives” button near the top of the page is a link to this month’s archive—nothing else. If I set it so that only a limited number of entries appear on the page, the older entries completely disappear. They are not deleted—if I undo the changes the entries reappear—but they’re not on the main page and they’re not in the archives. Where are they, then? Good question.

Another problem is that whenever I post anything, I get a funky error message. A “more info” link appears next to it, but that only leads to a generic troubleshooting site that mysteriously does not have anything whatsoever regarding the specific problem I’m getting. Apparently there’s a “template file” somewhere, and apparently it’s supposed to load, and apparently it’s not doing this. I don’t know how to get it to do load myself, probably because I don’t know what it is. The error message also cheerily informs me that somebody is “working on it” and suggests that I try again “later.” My fellow bloggers, as far as I know, aren’t getting this problem, so it must just be me, and unless I’m supposed to believe that the Blogger people like my blog so much that they are willing to pour all their resources into fixing a mysterious problem plaguing one, nonpaying user of their service, the problem isn’t going to get fixed “later” or ever. The presence of this entry hopefully confirms that I can still post to the site, but there’s another problem that I think is tied to the error message—on some people’s computers, the latest entry won’t show up on the page. While this can be fixed by going to the Archives and clicking on the link to this month’s archive, I don’t see anything stopping this problem from spreading, and for all I know when I go to my blog tomorrow I’ll get nothing but a little message in small black font informing me that a furry green monster hacked into Blogger and ate all my entries along with his guacamole sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice.

What I’ve decided to do is “copy” this blog onto a diary site. For those of you who don’t know what an online diary is, it’s basically like a blog, only not nearly as cool. Near as I can tell, you can’t do anything nifty with a diary like make links or tag boards or counters; I don’t even know if you can put HTML in the entries. If you can’t, then I’m really screwed, because all the italics I’ve been using in my recent entries won’t carry over and I’ll have to change them to caps, which works okay but isn’t quite the same. Another slight but important note is that with a diary (at least the ones I’ve seen) you don’t really get your own website. I mean, my blog is www.boarass.blogspot.com, which is a normal URL, whereas the diary version is the rather lame-o www.my-diary.org/read/?read=66396. One thing that annoys me about the particular diary service I’m using is that you can’t change the font or margins or anything like that, so the entries all appear in small white text on a black background in really narrow columns, which burns the eyes and is rather annoying to read. Alas, I am left without my trusty Comic Sans MS :(

The diary does, however, have its advantages. For one thing, rather than globbing all the entries onto one page, it sorts them into a nice column and you click on the one you want to read. And though it’s not as customizable as a blog, with the smaller range of possibilities also comes a smaller learning curve. I won’t get into the details, but basically a blog is a major pain in the ass to use, as opposed to the very user-friendly diary. There is also—I think this is sweet—a button you can click on that will “subscribe” you to the diary and send you an email whenever it’s updated. No more randomly going to Boris’s blog or constantly peering at his AIM profile to see if he’s updated or not! I realize this will probably significantly decrease my hit count, but hey—I’ve already got 1000 and that’s good enough for me.

Even with all that, the blog is way cooler than the diary, so I’m only going to copy it—not move it. Having a mirror of this site will let me lop off the old (and often rather bad) entries, hopefully giving everybody a faster loading time and a more manageable scrollbar. Once I’ve moved everything into the diary, I plan to add each new entry into it as it comes into the blog, so you can use the nifty email feature of the diary to find out when I’ve put something up in my blog. Gee, I hope after all that hype the subscribe feature actually works. Ah, crap! I just tested it out, and it turns out you have to be registered with the “my-diary” people in order to use the feature. Well, it’s not too hard to register, so you can still use it…anyway, it’s up to you.

Okay, let’s see—the counter, the diary—I think that’s all I wanted to talk about. Once again, I earnestly thank you for coming to this blog and reading my stuff! With any luck, pretty soon you’ll see something along the lines of a “mirror of this blog at My-Diary” link in my links section, which means I’ve finished moving everything and this blog has a little less junk on it. As far as how many entries I should keep on this page, I think the ten most recent ones should suffice. If you have any comments about this—or, for that matter, anything regarding this blog—or, heck, anything regarding anything—scroll up and email me your thoughts!

.: posted by Boris 12:07 AM

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