Comments are hereby immediately suspended.

If I said something tragically stupid and you want to correct me (or something amazingly witty and you want to congratulate me, or somewhere in between those two extremes), tell me at l u o m a t @ (Google’s mail domain) dot com.

Then I moved to MovableType, because it was free (mostly) and popular.

MovableType then went to not free, then a little free, and (if I remember the latest) is free again, at least for some people in some situations.

In the meantime, WordPress has become more popular, and it is also easier to update because Dreamhost has it as one of their one-click installations. Not only will it install it in one click, but it will also update it.

For awhile I was running the main TnTLuoma site, a separate blog for the Opera Lover series. Then I did the same thing here, with http://tj.tntluoma.com and http://dmin.tntluoma.com.

Tonight I have merged the posts from the old TnTLuoma site, the Opera Lover series, and the D.Min. blog.

I have no idea what this will do to things like the RSS feed, which might see these as “new posts” (I hope not) but it will hopefully make my life easier in the long run.

If I had unlimited time I’d do it all the right way, setup htaccess redirects and all that, not to mention getting the older Opera Lover series in here. Unfortunately the original Opera Lover series and revision was not written in any kind of weblog software, I wrote all the HTML myself (sadist that I was).

I suspect that the Opera Lover series is now largely useless anyway. Sad, but true.

I also added my 3 most recent Twitter postings over on the side there. WordPress Plugins rock! I would have added more, but about 5 down right now is an expletive posted after the Red Sox/Yankees game tonight, and I didn’t want that showing up on the site.

The WordPress theme I am using is the one I had chosen for the D.Min. site I rather like the image at the top. Is he walking or standing still? Why is he alone? Why is his back towards us? Is he a student (I assume so from the backpack)? It’s a picture I would have liked to have taken. Maybe someday I’ll have a better one of my own to put up, but for now, I’ll stick with it.

People like full text.

Well, I’m all for giving people what they want. Just a few quick notes.

If you want full text of all the posts, be sure to subscribe to the Atom feeds. The full text is always included in them.

The RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 may not show the full-text, because they do not show the “extended” part of the post (i.e. any post that says “Continue reading…”)

Unfortunately RSS 1 and 2 don’t indicate if there is more text than what is included in the feed. So either a) I have to give some indication in the first part of the post that there is more, or b) you have to deduce it.

I might see if I can fix this for RSS 1 and 2, but since there is a solution available (use Atom) I probably won’t even look at it until I’ve solved the other existing issues.

If so, drop me an email at tim @ [this domain name ] or use the http://tntluoma.com/contact/ form.

I just realized that MT3 puts full text of posts in the feeds. This has plusses and minuses, and I’d like to know how folks feel about it.

Previously I was just posting excerpts. The “full text feeds” often lack links to URLs and other stuff that might be useful (i.e. like being able to tell when something is in a BLOCKQUOTE rather than being my own words).

But if people like the full text feeds, I’ll keep them.

You have until the weekend to cast your vote.

By the way, I haven’t figured out a way to be notified when someone posts a comment, so I have to manually look for them and approve them. Don’t be offended if this takes awhile, I probably just forgot to check. If you use TypeKey (www.typekey.com) your comments will be instantly posted and I do get a copy of them (in case any lousy spammers sign up to TypeKey and try to post comments).

By the way, if you have no idea what I’m talking about (Hi mom!) feel free to ignore this entirely :-)

Some of the other pages are not yet styled with the update. For example, if you look at the Daily Dose of Ethan pages, you will see the old layout. What can I say, it takes a lot longer to do this with just a dialup account.

Obviously there is still some work to be done on the formatting, etc. But I wanted to get it out there so I could start seeing it live.

I’m upgrading to MovableType 3. I intend to use a strict comment policy. If you don’t have a TypeKey account already, you ought to get one.

And I really hope that every last spammer out there finds themselves a respectable job so they can stop bothering people and wasting our time.

Is anyone reading this?

I mean, I know the Crazy Insane Cat People are reading this, because every few months I’ll get some obsenity-laden email telling me what they think of me for posting that dogs are better than cats.

Anyway, the redesign took place in two parts:

Part 1) a color change for readability;

Part 2) the former static masthead picture (a really nice picture of the 3 of us from March 2003’s Ethan Fest taken by Mimi Kahn) was replaced. Although I still like the picture, it was almost a year old (aka “ancient” in both Internet Time and Boy-Isnt-Ethan-Growing-Up-Fast Time)

So I decided to do something I had thought about doing for some time: rotating thumbnails (wow, I just realized that sounds like some torture procedure).

The idea is this: show a selection of pictures from the Daily Dose of Ethan, which is really the primary reason for this site to exist.

There are 7 pictures at the top because that’s how many could fit across the screen at 800x600, which I think is a reasonable compromise.

The first 3 pictures are static: Ethan at birth, at 1 year, and at 2 years.

The last 4 are dynamic and change every day. From left to right they show Ethan one year ago, 6 months ago, 3 months ago, and today.

Each of the pictures links to the corresponding page from the DDOE.

Note: the rest of the post is rather geeky.

The disappointing thing (to me) is that the pictures had to be in a table (1 cell down and 7 across) because there was no way that I could find to line up 7 images next to one another using pure CSS.

My original thought was to write a PHP function to pull up the images. Then I realized that was a total waste of processor time. Every time a page was accessed, it would have to run the PHP code, and no matter how efficiently I wrote the code, there was going to be a lot of waste. Why should it recalculate it for every page when the information will only change once every 24 hours? Like I always say, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

So instead I wrote a simple /bin/sh script which calculates the correct dates. The good news is that GNU Date makes this fairly easy to calculate 90 days, 180 days, and 365 days ago using the —date flag. However, there was one catch: there is no DDOE picture on Saturday or Sunday. Therefore, if 90/180/365 days ago = Saturday, I added 1 to the date to make it Friday. If it was a Sunday, I subtracted 1 to make it a Monday.

The /bin/sh script then creates a static HTML document which is called by PHP.

Since the site is mainly controlled by MovableType, it was a simple matter of editing my template. Those pages which were not controlled by MovableType are controlled by PHP, and I already had a global header variable declared, so by changing that, I was able to change all the files.

All in all, only about 5-6 pages needed to be changed in order for the entire site (or at least about 95% of it) to be updated.

One of these days I need to update to MovableType 3, which I’m using on some other sites and is a huge improvement over MT2.

This came about for a few reasons, including:

1. I was switching webhosts, so it made sense to do it now
2. I have wanted to combine my various weblogs into one
3. The old design was such a mis-mash that it had numerous flaws

What this means to you is that if you used to just read one weblog, now that they are combined, you are pretty much stuck reading all of the posts. Sorry. Maintaining several different weblogs was just a royal pain. It probably would not have been so bad if I knew more about Movabletype (which seems infinitely powerful).

Also, the name will no doubt cause some confusion. Originally I had a weblog named Beyond30 which was supposed to look at Opera tips and tricks after the completion of my series 30 Days to Becoming an Opera Lover.

However, I found that I was writing about a whole bunch of different things, some personal, some technological, some about the web, some about other browsers, and so on. The name never really meant what it was supposed to mean.

When I decided to combine all my various weblogs into one, I tried to think of a name for them, something catchy and unique. While I liked my initial choice a lot, for various reasons I decided not to use it, nor even reveal it. Someday someone else will use it and I will have to say, “Well that was my idea first, but they actually did something with it.”

After that I thought about using “Beyond 30” not as it was originally intended, but as an indicator of this time in my life when I am now “Beyond 30” myself. Of course if this were to continue for another 10 years it would be more aptly named “Beyond 40” but since 40 is still “beyond 30” it will still be applicable. Perhaps I will rename it “Further Beyond 30” for my 40s and “Even Further Beyond 30” for my 50s…

Anyway, if you find something missing, please let me know right away.

A lot of stuff is broken / doesn’t look right. My apologies. I’ve been working on it, but it’s time to sleep now.