Category Archives: Meta

Recent Comments

Meta

All the cool kids are doing it, so here it is. If you put a number at the end, like comments/50, you will se the last 50 comments. Neat huh? Want to see something really fancy? After you put the number on the end, add “rss” like this. Hot damn. It’s even valid. Some feedback would be helpful, because I don’t have an aggregator to test it in on this machine. As Mike would say, “Baaaahhhh.”

The real reason I put this up in the first place is that there is some good discussion (and sometimes not) in the comments occasionally that I feel gets lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, the RSS monkeys have no idea which posts have comments already, or to know automatically if new comments have been posted since they last checked the feed, so this will give them something else to subscribe to for the closer-to-full PhotoMatt Experience. šŸ˜‰

A Sad Day Indeed

Meta

The “Syndicate” page has been updated, which you could tell from its emphasized status on the menu bar if you were actually at the site. I’m afraid one day my RSS feed will start getting more hits than my main page, and that will be a very sad day indeed.

Hit Diggity!!!

Meta

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. šŸ˜‰

I am so going to start using this at parties!

While It’s Hot

Meta

Not that I’m advocating anything, but now probably would be a good time to buy some PhotoMatt, especially since the price just drastically dropped and there is a new juicy front page link that hasn’t been picked up by the bot yet. Is this wrong? Maybe, but all’s fair in love and BlogShares.

In other meta-news I stole some buttons from the incredible Eric, but the real reason was I have a strange irrational desire to please this thing.

I better get to sleep though. I’m sitting in a rehearsal at 10, presenting for HPUG at 1, and again at the Web Technology SIG. Stop by HAL-PC if you’re interested.

The Ones That Almost Made It

Photolog

So you’ve seen the ten that were chosen from a pool of over five thousand, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know what photos didn’t quite make the cut? Here’s the story of the six photos that almost made it:

  • 6-1-2002, Rachel — I really like this photo but it’s a tad washed out in the colors, though nothing that couldn’t be tweaked I suppose. In the end it was just pushed out by stronger candidates.
  • 1-19-2003, Sarah C. — This is one of the more interesting ones from the photoshoot with Sarah. Again, I like the shot but the contrast is a too high on her face, and overall it’s blurry due to the lack of light. Gotta love the hair though!
  • 2-20-2003, Duck — A fairly recent photo that has some pretty interesting elements. I especially like the duck behind the main one that’s checking everything out. I also enjoyed these subjects because they didn’t attack me like the geese did.
  • 2-16-2003, Wood — Sarah W. swears she took this photo even though I’m pretty sure I did. The whole day is worth checking out as a lot of the photos came out very well.
  • 2-16-2003, Sauce — A cool picture of something hot.
  • 3-23-2003, Trees — I was extremely close to putting this one in, as personally I really enjoy this photograph. In fact it’s my desktop right now. There’s just something about the contrasting colors and shape of things that tickles my fancy.

Many Updates

Photolog

The photolog has four new albums and about a hundred new pictures, including some of a family trip, an Apple sticker, a peace protest, and two jazz concerts. I had another very nice post lined up but I forgot that Tantek’s site occasionally crashes my browser so it’ll have to wait until I find some more free time.

Menu Revamped

Meta

Okay, per Tantek’s suggestion I’ve made the menu entirely a nested list, and adjusted the CSS accordingly. I had to work out a few kinks with the specificity of the contextual selectors, but after that it was a breeze. However this has brought to my attention how terribly ugly the CSS ridge effect is in Mozilla—really unattractive. It’s a shame because a lot of people seem to like it, but I’m exploring other options. Structure is groovy. Hell is a world without the style attribute.

Search Updated

Meta

I’ve cleaned up the ht://dig search engine quite a bit, though I still have to hack it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant and fit better with the site, but after updating the index I got these interesting stats:

./htstat
htstat: Total documents: 11490
htstat: Total words: 1933258
htstat: Total unique words: 17660

The bulk of those pages are from the photolog, which is currently 5200 photos, but before the index was huge because my URLs weren’t very tidy and sometimes the same thing would have 10 different ways to access it. That’s still true a bit, but I’m working on it. Also I’ve been working very hard on a new project, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet.

Because They’re Watching

Meta

This is just post to let everyone know that you can now browse PhotoMatt securely. The secure site is functionally equivalent except it doesn’t display the Wanderlust code because it will pop an annoying error since it’s loading remotely. It uses a self-signed 1024 bit SSL certificate which will pop up as not being from a trusted authority the first time you visit but if you add it to your trusted certificates (usually just a button click away) it won’t bug you anymore. Why do this? Because I can.

This will appeal to exactly 2 people.

Daylight Works

Photolog

Got some really nice pictures in the country on Sunday. I hadn’t realized it until I was working on the photos, but the bulk of the pictures on the photolog are taken at night. This fits my personality because I’m very much a night person, but these daylight pictures have really nice colors, so perhaps I should try to take more pictures during the day.

Some Visitor Stats

Meta

Added the first of what will be many visitor statistics to the Zeitgeist. Thanks to PowerPhlogger I have very rich data in SQL which is easy to access. Plus it already does so much itself there is no need to reinvent the wheel in many cases. Right now there’s just visual goodies up, mostly because I’m struggling with getting tables to look the way I want using XHTML 1.1. Apparently ease of use was one of the things they depreciated.