Programming

Finally updated to Drupal 6.3, a security update.

Wasn't much to tweak, just had to remember my hacks for taxonomy.module (to sort taxonomy by weight and name) and taxonomy.pages.inc (depth = 'all' instead of depth = 0). Oh, and the latest Views release candidate introduced some small changes that had me go into the announce_block view to fix how it displayed the date field. (It was putting a label I didn't want.)

More or less it was a painless update (as it often is) so woo! I could either do more tag cleaning, or just sit here and space out at the screen. :P

*stares*

...or I could try to update Marinelli theme. I'm a version behind, but I rewrote enough code from the original that it'll be a bit of a pain, considering the fact I am all lazy about learning to use a revision control system. I really should get into that habit sometime soon. :/

...well, to be honest it's something I've wanted to actually redo for a while. The Caduceus site, I mean.

Here's the main page that I've already shown before, and the actual journal part. The purpose of the journal will be for Jon and I to write in-character things about Ryshy and Alexsei, to help us flesh out how we'll separate them from Exalted's Creation and into Eskarne (my original setting for the Anthegenia Cycle, and yes, also the name I gave the Great Bird in Reborn Again. It means "Mercy".)

For the user profiles, I ended up using a nifty Nucleus plugin for customizable profiles. Even if there'll only ever be two users for the Caduceus, I just had to get it done *right*. ^^;

I went through a few different and interesting blog software and CMSs before settling back with Nucleus, one of my staple favorites:

Just did a few changes to the node layouts. So exciting, huh? :P

I decided (after editing Talliska's journal to do the same) that I'd only display categories on the teaser, and put the tag list at the very end of the full node view. Makes things look less cluttered, though it doesn't actually reduce db queries, since I have to traverse the terms *anyway* to pull out the categories separate from the tags. But that's to be expected.

Also I tweaked the code so the author/date/categories will only display for blog entries. (Pages are static, and events have their own dates on them anyways.) And I went into contemplate and edited the node template for events so it wouldn't use <h3> any more.

Now I really want to play Talliska in DR, but I keep futzing around with the journal instead! =_= And making things like this (a placeholder page, helped me practice basic CSS) and this (made with Nucleus - I'll stick a PSU screenshot in the layout later to make it look more interesting.)

(Also, this post ended up LONG!)

But I've mostly gotten things set up the way I wanted them, now. Here's some of the annoying things I had to contend with:

1) The user login box had odd formatting for the list bullets. I was actually ranting to Kalli about this for a while. I finally fixed it, by taking out the line-width argument the creator of my base theme (it's called marinelli, by the way) stuck in the loginblock CSS.

2) I made the BAD mistake of trying to activate the theme developer module packaged with devel. I don't know WHAT was wrong with it, but it started eating my PHP memory like crazy whenever I loaded the modules page. Geez... I had bumped up the max allocation in php.ini to 40M and it was still trying to allocate more! And it started spitting bunches of raw code at me, too.

Bleargh... I hate CSS. I really, really hate CSS!

On the other hand, though, I have Drupal 6.2 running now, after a day of slaving over database backups (I had to do a restore at one point, it was painfully slow and nervewracking), manually updating modules, having to redo my URL aliases at least twice, and *re*-learning Views because Views 2.0 has an entirely different layout to it. (I managed to get all my views working again, though, woo.)

I'm still poking at various little niggling details of things. Having such a beautiful monitor is a blessing and a curse... I *love* the way my site looks on my screen, but some of the colors just look horrific on Jon's. Argh. I grew out of sticking to web-safe colors a long time ago, so I guess that's to be expected, but it's annoying looking over his shoulder and thinking to myself "Bleah, that looks SO much uglier than I thought it did!"

Oh, I managed to find a non-database query intensive way to print categories and tags per entry. But I still have to tweak the full views... now they print tags twice. WTF! Ahhhh, going to be a long night still, I can tell.

Well, I'm gonna be away for the night, staying at a hotel room with Jon. Which is rather romantic except that 1) my period started and I BET you guys wanted to know! and 2) the hotel room idea is at least partially because the hot water problem NEVER got fixed today. Yeah, great. n.n The first thing I'm doing when I actually get the room is *showering*.

It put me in a little of a bad mood today... well, okay, a lot. I was pretty miserable and I still feel pretty bad, but I'm going to try to enjoy the rest of the night at least.

Just finished talking to people before I go, sending off messages, etc. Thanks to everyone who gave me birthday wishes. Also, Kraken wins, he sent me a book on Ruby programming just like I'd hoped~ I'm pleased with it, it's an O'Reilly book and I can't wait to have time to sit down, crack it open and make use of it.

P.S. I'm playing DR again. Halcier, awesome guy that he is, gave me a link to a reviving Order that I may actually involve Talliska in. Sent my application, anyway, though I could end up being refused, or the interview could discourage me, etc. *shrug* But I made Talliska an IC journal with the new Wordpress 2.5 -- who knows, may actually use it regularly. n.n

I was going to spend tonight working on Rosalia's sheet, but once again, I was thwarted. :/ Deadlines and weariness aside, friends > RP and I really wanted to be there to talk.

I've seen with my own eyes, and lived with my own experience, how much damage depression can do to a person's life -- and sometimes, the lives of others, too. I understand all too well the self-destructive urge, but I have the wisdom of many years of self-analysis and a husband who just never quit when it comes to making me face the *truth* of my condition. I honestly consider myself lucky that I've had these years to think about myself and what's really wrong with me. Many people with my condition never get that far -- they only continue to blame themselves, and believe that everything that goes wrong in their life is their just desserts.

Man, I suck at being social. I think I actually miss my online and RP life. What a geek I am. :/

My sis leaves in something like 10 hours, but I'm not coming along so I don't have to sleep early if I don't want. And I don't. :D I'm going to be lazy.

I'm poking at installing Ruby on darksiren.net right now. Finally! I have Ruby itself installed but still have to install RubyGems and Rails. Stupid me, I never even knew the 'wget' command existed until I looked at a Ruby installation tutorial for installing on CentOS 4.6 (which is what the ol' webserver runs right now). Well, at least I know now, and it'll help. :D

Can't wait till I have some money to buy some hardware to run my own personal server, separate from darksiren.net. Then I can finally experiment with Linux stuff without worrying I'll screw up my data!

Yeah so... I was going to spend today working on Rosalia's sheet, and then I encountered some sort of maddeningly frustrating bug with the media manager submit button. (The media manager is that window that pops up when you add an image to a Dokuwiki page.)

The bug was unique to the ACH layout I've been using for mine and Kalli's wiki, and only occurred in Opera. Actually, I wouldn't have noticed it at all if Jon wasn't using Opera at the time -- I gave him an account on the DSWiki, so he could put up his first Ex2 char there, too. He went to upload his char's picture and the upload button just wouldn't work. Clicking it did nothing, mouse-overs didn't change the cursor as expected from the CSS... it was just a dud button.

I tried it on every other browser I have (Firefox, IE... god damn, even Safari) and the button worked fine. So I sat here for something like 6 hours just to hunt down what it was that Opera had a problem with.

I'm not doing much lately, just gradually building up the subcategories for characters in Emberdays and writing an odd NPC profile here and there. The site is still not organized to my liking, and there's still a lot to add, so there are bits and pieces that will change places and maybe even be reworded.

For ease of writing the profiles, I'll have to make some wiki pages for each of the PCs, too... more like placeholders, though. But it's easier than me referring to one of the PCs in the wiki and having to remember the URL of their character sheet to post as a reference. [Edit/Note: ED wiki is gonna remain locked for me to edit, I think. So it's more something for others to read, not add to.]