Author: admin

It should now be safe to post. Please let me know if you experience any problems with the site. For more details about recent changes, follow the “more” link below.

Continue reading “UPDATE IMPORTANT“

I’ve gone and done it again, exercising my authority over this little corner of the webiverse. I upgraded the WordPress software to fix a few annoying bugs (like its former refusal to alphabetize the post categories) and plug some security leaks. Please let me know if I’ve broken anything in the process. And, as always, I take requests.

You may need to hold down the ‘Ctrl’ button while reloading the post page and/or the main MoW page to see any changes (holding ‘Ctrl’ down tells your browser to pull a full new copy, rather than pulling it from its cache). Otherwise, enjoy the new-and-improved Mind of Winter.

First, I should apologize if anyone has experienced difficulty with the site recently. I had a small communication error with the webhost and some configuration files were deleted. Everything’s been recovered, but there was a day or two of garbage loading… Anyway, in straightening that stuff out, I made a few minor changes to the layout:
Continue reading “Miscellany”

I’ve updated the Guts of Winter to something the cool kids call an unstable nightly, a term that here means that things might all go to Hell in a very fast handbasket. Not much has changed yet, but with new guts I can start installing anti-spam stuff. And the posting interface has changed a bit. I have just spent a redonculous amount of time, though, trying to get everything on the main website to look like nothing changed at all. I’m tired now. So I’ll just leave it at this: I think it should be safe to post away, but something might break. Let me know if something does.

Also, as a general rule, I’m always willing to entertain design ideas. This site is remarkably customizable, so if you want to try something out, just let me know…

I’m a-gon’ attempt an upgrade to the infrastructure here. The blogware needs a new pair of shoes. I haven’t had a chance to test everything locally, so I have a feeling things may be buggy for a little while, but I’m about to lose my free time (right about… NOW), so it’s now or never, and never might be fatal. The upgrade will help with the comment spam, meaning we can turn on comments again, and it will make the interface a little nicer, a little smoother. Also, the password encryption is stronger in the new version, so no strange unwanted unfriendlies will be able to break in (btw, if you’ve forgotten your password, I can’t retrieve it, but I can reset it for you—just shoot me an email: Administrator 4t joke of all trades d0t com). I apologize in advance if I break things. I’ve been known to break things before. But I’ll do my best.

I mention this because as of this posting, I can’t guarantee that anything will work right until I finish the upgrade (and I can’t really guarantee anything then, either!). It’s best if nobody posts until I’m done. Thanks.

I realize this has absolutely no impact on anyone’s behaviour here, since very few comments have ever been posted, but due to a massive wave of comment spam I had to turn the comment feature off. Don’t be surprised if nobody comments on your posts—they can’t. I’m really very sorry; I just don’t have time to update WordPress and learn how to innoculate the site against all the people in the world who want to ruin the internet. So, until certain other countries start passing and enforcing laws to keep such idiots off the ’net (I’m a-lookin’ at you Malaysia, and you too, Bulgaria, and don’t even think I didn’t notice you, China), comments here will be turned off.

I’ve started upgrading the WordPress system to a new version (it’s supposed to fix a bunch of problems with the database and make it more “user-friendly”), and it seems that the internal structure has changed quite a bit, so all my original tweaking has to be readjusted. It’s going to take me some time to get everything back to normal.

Continue reading “System upgrade in process”

I just installed this ‘Content Management System’ on Sunday, so I haven’t really had time to work out all (any) of the bugs, quirks, annoyances or other features that might be less than desirable. Any suggestions are welcome. If you don’t like the interface, we have options.

Also, I know it looks pretty ugly right now. I was trying to find colors I liked—not necessarily together—and I didn’t switch anything back to normal. I am not a designer and I am artistically impoverished, but I can code well enough, so if you have layout/design ideas, let me know.

Finally, I know the site breaks in Netscape 4 (but it breaks gracefully!). Netscape 4 sucks. N4 doesn’t handle CSS styling very well, so I just hid the stylesheet from N4 altogether (actually, I used a perfectly valid method for declaring a stylesheet, but N4 got that wrong, too). If you’re stuck using an old version of Netscape, I’ll try to come up with something more palatable when I get a chance, but I don’t know how soon that might be.