April 7th, 2004:

After getting just a tad bit annoyed with “bBlog”:http://bblog.com/ (the engine that powers this site, heavily modified), I decided to look, again, for a better solution. After looking for a while, I realized why I picked bBlog in the first place: everything else sucks even more. Then I remembered why it was that I’m writing my own (or trying to anyway). So, yeah. That was fun. Just a giant circle to consume an hour of a perfectly good day.

I’m getting sick of my LiveJournal syndication. You know… how… when I put something on *revjim.net* it automatically shows up on LiveJournal. See, the problem is this, I often update (to make spelling corrections, etc) my posts. However, my bBlog->LJ script doesn’t handle updates. And I don’t feel like altering it to do so. So, the text in LiveJournal is usually wrong. It either doesn’t have all the information in the real post, is full of misspelled words, or has some sort of display error that makes it look funny. And, it’s enough trouble to update one site, let alone two… so I never bother to fix it.

However, LiveJournal has a perfectly good “syndication feature”:http://livejournal.com/syn/. And my site already pumps out an “RSS Feed”:http://revjim.net/rss20/ that it can read. So, the work’s already done, I’m just not using it. The only difference is that LiveJournal only updates every few hours, and my script is instant. But I don’t really care any more. So, I’m considering turning off my bBlog->LJ script. I already force all the comments to be at the site. So, the only thing my LiveJournal readers will have to do differently, is add a new “friend”. Are there any objections to this?

I’ve upgraded my “Photo Gallery”:http://photos.revjim.net/ to “Gallery”:http://gallery.sf.net/ version 1.4.3RC2. And once again I must proclaim, I really don’t like the way gallery works on the back-end.

Despite that, the upgrade went smooth enough (aside from the small manual change I now have to make to each and every album one by one by hand). Let me know if you have any problems.

One good thing about the upgrade, aside from the security holes being fixed, is that I should now get emailed when comments are left. That’s what I’m told anyway. We’ll see how it works out.

They have a “feature” that allows you to modify an album and all of its sub-albums (and I assume its sub-album’s sub-albums). However, they don’t let you modify EVERY album, which is exactly what I need to do, of course. It makes me want to make an album, move all the albums into it, make my modification, and then move them all back out. That’s just silly.

Now if only I could get Textile in bBlog to work properly, my life might be a lot easier.