The Big Test: Changing Webhosts…
As youse will by now be aware, we have been going through a process of adding functionality (and prettiness – of which more later) over the last little while. The innards of the site are now working reasonably well, except that the webhost has a nasty habit of dropping the whole of RantSpace off the innerchoobs entirely.
This sitch has gone on for too long, and your Beloved GT – who, as you know, is a delightful and tolerant man in addition to being handsome – has had about enough.
So today I've decreed that RantSpace will warp over to another host this week. I will try to clarify exactly what day that will be: at this stage it seems likey that it will be Wednesday. The actual site innards have already been sticky-taped into a holding cell, ready for migration, but I'm doing another backup today just to ensure minimal disruption.
There is some small risk that the site will be offline as the migration to the new webhost takes place; it might also be the case that your ISPs DNS routing table is 'slow on the uptake'… but you can take it as read that the RantSpace that you know and love will burst forth again like that little alien thingy out of the guy's guts in the original 'Alien'.
Now as to the new prettier face of the site: I got that theme I mentioned, but there is some small twiddling that has to be done in order to set it up all nice-like. There was a ten-minute period on Friday where the new theme was activated as a test run… you might have seen that, but likely not. If there is downtime in the transition period, I will take the opportunity to change themes as well – so if we wink out of existence, you might not recognise the sexy new-look MarketMentat when it re-appears, but it will be us, again.
Bringin’ the Pretty…
I mentioned in yesterday's OzRant that I was going to have a go at improving the screen presentation of our globs of congealed Rant-iness. Specifically, it was beginning to irk me that if one had a screen resolution of 1920-by-whatever, reading the pages caused so much eye travel that it was like watching a tennis match.
Anyhow… so off I went and buggerised around trying to fluidify the layout; as usual, IE (specifically ,anything less than IE7) got in the road, because it fails to support min-width and max-width properties. That's because it's a piece of shit.
So – if you've got a non-compliant browser and a decent-sized screen, you're going to have to put up with the eyeball-traverse; for all other folks, it now ought to present a bit more nicer. (It works on my screen in Opera, IE8, Firefox and Chrome).
As I've said numerous times, I have the design flair of a Springbok front-rower – and because I am aware of that, I am also prone to developing growing nagging doubts about the 'look and feel' of anything that I produce; if I adapt a professionally-designed 'theme', over time I get the feeling that my adaptations are a bit, well, shit. And so it is with the current theme ("Magazine" by StudioPress); I've done some very limited tweaking of the theme, but the mental rot has started to set in.
So off I went and had a gander at some other professionally-developed themes – and I think that this one will be given a trial run in the next little while. I'm also going to ditch my self-produced logo and get something decent (since graphic design prices are plummeting).
Dicking around with the presentation layer is a waste of effort if the content is shit – and conversely there are abundant sites that make it clear that if you've got the right content idea, your presentation can be very basic (ZeroHedge, Mish, TickerGuy, 321Gold) or can even be an absolute schemozzle (4chan). I like to think that the RantScape is doing better-than-OK content wise – so it's not just 'lipstick on a pig'.
Also, since there is so little effort required to make things look decent, one ought to at least have a go.
Nothing ‘Sploded… But…
Well, the membership plugin is in place and activated and nothing blew up.
Now it remains for each Page and Category to have the appropriate permissions sticky-taped into place and for the subscription options page to be updated with new, higher prices.
A short note for users of Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer who don't log in: the caching mechanism will ensure that you get fast delivery of the homepage, however it will almost certainly be a stale page. If you are logged in, the page will not be cached at all – the caching mechanism only presents cached pages to non-subscribers.
The 'stale cache' problem is not straightforward, even though it is specific to one part of the site – the front page. The cache appears to use different logic for the front page than it does for other sections. For example, this page wot you is readin' right now… well, it will appear in the following places:
- the front page;
- the RSS/Atom feed;
- the blog page; and
- the appropriate tag and Category pages.
If you're not logged in, the cached versions of everything except the front page will show this post. Therein lies the mystery to be resolved today.
Upgrades, Take ∞
As youse are now all-too-aware, our grand plan to dominate the cyber-battlespace involves some additional doohickeys, doodads and thingyummy-bobs being sticky-taped into place.
I generally try to give some advance warning of when I'm about to do something that will result in the site blowing up for a bit.
Today is likely to be one of those times. In fact, it is highly likely to be one of those times.
That's not to say that I'm likely to blow up bits of the site today, but that I am likely to do a thing that might blow up the site. I've decided that the membership system has to be installed, and that it has to be installed today. So it might be that by the time you click on the site this arvo, it's busted beyond recognition.
Unlikely, though – everything has been proceeding nicely, from upgrades to the commenting mechanism (behind the scenes) through to sticking in the new Sharing doodad (I just prefer its design).
Another Thing to Mirror… Insurance.
Things are hotting up; the US Death Machine is genuinely aggrieved that its child-killing sprees in Afghanistan and Iraq are being shown for the pus-filled garmonbozia-fests that they actually are. They're also not best pleased that the Magic Mulatto, far from being some sort of urbane Sidney Poitier "Mr Chips", is being revealed as just another house nigger (like Colon Powell – the house nigger who "done pleased Massah" by presenting those silly cartoons to the UN).
So anyway… in the best traditions of those who are forced to interact with governments and other organised criminals, Wikileaks has taken out pre-emptive insurance. WL released an insurance file (it's large-ish: 1.4Gb).
Let's just say that if anything was ever to happen to Julian Assange or any other Wikileaks contributor, the US would no longer have secure sources anywhere in the world. If you're a CIA, DIA, FBI, INR or other 'law enforcement' humint resource, start sweating NOW.
And for those whose heads are too thick to get it… give up now, and get a real job, you dumbass white-bread no-thinking motherfuckers: there is only one end game - the good guys WIN.
Here's the link. Download it, mirror it, keep it safe: make a copy on a hidden partition, save it to a removable drive.
The key will be distributed the second any Wikileaks contributor or source experiences an 'adverse life event'.
Required coda for those who think the word 'nigger' has anything to do with race: it doesn't… it conveys craven acceptance of station (in the same sense as saying 'as craven as a kaffir dog' does). I'm part spear-chucker myself, so don't play the brown card with me. Anybody who helps further the aims of the state is the state's nigger, regardless of their skin colour.
Download This. Mirror It. Keep It Safe.
As youse may or may not be aware, your Beloved WIkileaks just released a bunch of sit-reps originating from the US death-machine as it rapes Afghanistan.
And now we find it very hard to see Wikileaks' main site. (Go here for the mirror list but expect each of those sites in turn to develop 'issues').
The material is already pretty safely distributed – on freenet of course, but also in a bunch of other locations: if nothing else, your Beloved Wikileaks makes sure that material has a permanent untraceable home before the primary release to the public through the site.
A bunch of other stuff is coming that is yet more revealing about the crapulence of those who would continue to enslave us (and their mindless thug-drones), but I really do recommend that those of youse who understand how to use a Google Earth KML file, take the time to view this one.
I'm uploading the entire archive onto the RantSpace so that like-minded chums can download it from there… if you download it, make an encrypted copy and store that on a removable device.
The links are as follows (these files are unencrypted: 7Zip is a freeware archive manager):
Never EVER Buy a Compaq (or an HP)…
Some of youse will be aware that your Beloved GT has had a dim view of Compaq ever since the days when Carly "You Will Get Our IB Work If You Rate Us Buy or Better" Fiorina got caught putting pressure on sell-side analysts (Can it really be nine years ago that this happened? Can it really be that Fiorina never went to fucking JAIL for that?).
Anyhow – be that as it may, I was gulled into buying a Compaq last year as a result of a $100 cash-back; with the give-back of the GST and the $100 cash back, the all up cost of a seemingly decent machine was $340 or thereabouts.
Well, not so fast, Brainiac…
First, the machine gave all the warnings signs straight out of the box: about half the keys on the keyboard didn't work.
Contacting Compaq's online tech support was a waste of time – oddly for a tech company they seem to ignore their Inbox. EIGHT MONTHS (and FIVE submitted online requests) later, I spent almost half a day on the phone to them (at my expense, obviously) and they eventually managed to fix it.
When I got the unit back from the warranty repairer, one of the USB ports no longer worked (but I didn't find that out until later) and nor did the DVD drive. I found that out just after the warranty expired. The HP Total Care bloatware that came pre-installed, never reported any problem with any device (including the never-functioning keyboard).
Compaq never gave me the $100 cash back: they sent me to a page that recorded all manner of details and purported to have sent me confirmation and some number that I had to quote. Never got a thing, and when I complained I got told I had to quote that number.
And now the display (the screen) is flickering in such a way as to make the unit unusable without an external screen. In trawling through the internets to see if there was some BIOS- or driver-based solution to this, I find that on HP's own website is a year's worth of forum posts that deal with precisely the same issue. There are other places on the internets tubes that outline the same problem – always with the CQ40s.
In other words, it is a known defect.
As you might be aware. I'm not a big believer in the 'judicial' system – or in any form of State-sponsored legalistic terrorism based on silly mediaeval dressups. I believe in taking highly-asymmetric personal revenge: I go much much farther than 'an eye for an eye'. So as with my desire to see to it that Clayton Utz's reputation is trashed on university campuses in Victoria (that's going well) and in quiet moments in some clubs (also going nicely), I plan to cost Compaq several million dollars in consumer orders-that-never-were.
I will offer Compaq (HP) the chance to make good – to refund me my purchase price plus the price of the screen I had to buy to make the thing usable; otherwise they will have to figure on twenty years of me trying my damnedest to piss into their tent. (Have you seen Clayton Utz's recruiting and revenue figures – relative to competitors – in recent years? There's a reason they have lost 20 partners since my fatwah began)
But there has been a side benefit: the new external screen has a resolution a few orders of magnitude better than the native screen, so I can see the RantSpace resplendent in 1920*some other number. And your Beloved GT looked upon his works, and he saw that it was good.
Still a Bunch on the To Do List…
The decision to spread the updates out over the course of several days has enabled your Beloved GT to evaluate each change in vivo, as it were.
Each new accretion has already been exhaustively run through its paces in a mirror of the site that runs on my localhost, but releasing something into the wild results in nonlinear behaviour: my localhost is set up as closely as possible to the RantServer, but the two configs are not identical. Benchtesting helps reduce the test effort required on the live site, but it doesn't eliminate it completely.
So anyway – you can now embed videos into comments (and of course there have already been folks who have send me porn to moderate… srsly…). You can also re-tweet posts via the TweetMeme button in the top right of each post, and it will automatically use bit.ly to shorten the URL in the retweet.
By the end of today the front page will be more glamorous as I make the 'read more' links a bit sexier (that's just eye-candifying, I realise).
…
On the back-end, there's still some optimising to do. Mostly this is to do with trying to cache the output sensibly. OpCode caching has sped up the site significantly, but content caching is harder.
Some page elements update in real-time – the HeatMap, the intraday chart, the Index quotes – and so they can't be cached. The existence of live links back to the databases seems to confuse the two best cache components, which might point to a configuration error rather than a problem with the components themselves.
…
Lastly – but not least-ly – there's the implementation of the new permission/membership layer. I will leave that until Sunday, because the way it is to be implemented is "default_level=subscriber", which will throw up an Adamantium Curtain across the whole shebang. Then I will go through each section of the site and reduce the required access level for non-subscriber sections. If I can't get it all done Sunday afternoon I will switch it off again and leave it until the following Sunday.
Social Media… ACTIVATE.
All of youse are aware that your Beloved GT thinks that Social Networking is slightly naff – but so is your Beloved GT, so perhaps I ought not be too dismissive of it.
Regardless of my personal view of the epi-phenomenon (or 'meme', as it's called by people who don't know what 'meme' means), my now-overdue mid-life crisis will probably make me yearn for a wider audience.
I'm sure I will have a mid-life crisis at some stage – I'll de-grey my hair or buy coloured contact lenses, or pretend that 'extreme sports' are not a completely-safe weekend hobby for utter wankers.
(One thing I will definitely NOT do is get a tattoo, especially a Chinese-charater tattoo).
Anyway… part of the new Rant plan to dominate the cyber-battlespace and crush our enemies bones to powder, has involved setting up a FaceBook and Twitter account for the site.
Of course since I'm majorly 'Web 2.0' (i.e., I have transcended personal e-communications), I committed FaceBook and Twitter seppuku for my personal accounts ages ago.
So let the songs of praise ring forth – from now on, the Rants and such will be re-tweeted all over the place.
Resistance is Futile (and Facile)…
Well, thus far the staged-upgrade procedure has gone rather well.
On the presentation side, the layout is more to my liking, the embedded piccies work, and I've found out how to embed RSS aggregates into posts instead of sidebar widgets.
And as far as the interstices and the engine are concerned, there are only 3 or four more things to do (later this week) and the RantSpace will be in a position to go forth and dominate the digital age.
Part of this has been motivated by the desire to up-rate the eye-candiness of the RantSpace in advance of the move to syndication that I wrote about ages ago – but for the most part it's just being done in the interests of efficiency: to try to the extent possible to get rid of hand-crafted elements in content-production, presentation, and access layers. By the time I get it right, I will actually know quite a bit about this internet thing that all the kiddies are talking about.
All things considered, it's gone far better than previous upgrades. Hence the piccie of the digital globe that will be assimilated into the RantBorg.