Posts Filed Under Miscellanea

There’s snow on the ground. It was there when I got up this morning, and it’ll probably be there for the next three to four months. Which is great, ’cause I love winter and snow.

Don’t delete a critical file while working on a complex web application before making a backup.

Why, it’s at it’s new home, of course.

I was finally convinced that having a web comic as part of my blog wasn’t doing anyone any good. The blog has often been neglected while I work on the web comic, and the web comic ended up burried in my blog. So now Fractured Mentality has earned it’s own subdomain. Apologies to anyone that’s sick of the comic constantly jumping around; all I can say is that it won’t be moving again for a very, very long time. Or until I feel like it. Who knows?

Anyways, direct all future interest in the web comic towards http://fm.maikeruon.com/

I can tell from my referrers that I’ve had at least a slight increase in traffic since Liliy graciously linked to me. Thanks Liliy. And welcome new comers. Hopefully you like what you see and keep coming back. ^_^

One year ago today Maikeru On launched. In honor of this anniversary—and because I felt like it—I’ve updated the design. Hope you like. It’s about… 2:30AM at the moment, and I”m dead tired. I’ll be updating this post sometime tomorrow after I wake up with all the information about this redesign. A lot of things have changed… so many, in fact, that I couldn’t finish everything even though I’ve spent the last nine hours working on nothing else.

One new feature I’ll mention now, before collapsing: I’ve opened comments up to non-registered users. This is a test run; if I start seeing a bunch of spam comments I’ll lock things up pretty fast. In the meantime, do comment. Registered users still have some perks… which I’ll go into tomorrow. *collapses*

Update: You’d think I would’ve slept until noon or something, but I woke up at eight and have been working on stuff ever since. Most everything is in place now, so here’s a rundown.

• Access Panel: Non-registered or logged out users should notice a new link at the very top of the site, “access”. This activates the access panel, which lets you login, retrieve a lost password or register. I haven’t worked all of the kinks out of this yet, but it’s still using the WordPress backend so nothing is completely broken; it just doesn’t quite work the way I’d like. I’ll be trying to clean this up at some point but it’s functional enough for the moment.
• Customization Panel: Once logged in, registered users will notice the “access” link replaced with the “welcome user” message. Clicking this will activate the customization panel. This one is a little trickier… none of the account settings work just yet, and my brain is too fried to try and get it working right now. Site themes work perfectly fine, however, so have fun playing with those. Logging out removes the cookie that saves your theme option at the moment; I might try to make it a more permanent setting in the future.
• Open Comments: As I mentioned last night, commenting is now open to the general public. You still have to provide a name and a valid e-mail address (which will never be shared), but I hope this will get more people—perhaps those that didn’t like the idea of registering—to comment.
• The FM Archives: Coming soon. The Wayback Machine actually caught nearly every post I ever made on my old site, Fractured Mentality. I’ll be working on getting these posted back to Michael Online in the near future.

There are still tweaks and minor modifications to be made here and there, but for the most part I’m extremely happy with things now. Let me know what you think.

Pardon the mess… I just upgraded WordPress and now a few things on the site aren’t displaying correctly. Everything should still be perfectly funcitonal, they’ll just look a little funky for awhile.

Update: The problem with upgrading is that various aspects of the site require alterations to core WordPress functions. I just spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out how to make what changes I need via plugins and I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.

Part of the problem (I think) is that the changes I’m making require altering functions that the WordPress API currently has no hooks for, meaning that the only way to alter htem is to do so directly. Which is bad, ’cause that means everytime I upgrade WordPress I have to go back and make the same changes all over again.

Prior to WordPress 2.6 I was doing the hacks directly in the core files, but now that I’ve upgraded I’ve taken the marginally better step of placing all of the hacks in the functions.php file that accompanies the site theme. It’s not perfect; I still have to modify the core files, but now I’m simply commenting out the functions I need to modify, copying them into functions.php, and making the necessary changes there.

If anyone reading this knows a lot about WordPress: is there some easier way to modify the way WordPress outputs category, page, and link lists? The functions that handle the building of these lists seem to be pretty low-level and inaccessible via API hook. I’m probably (hopefully) missing something, but I haven’t seen anything in the documentation that shows how I would get to these functions.

From yours truly, that is. I use two seperate stat trackers for this site, the WordPress.com stat tracker and Google Analytics. Both show a recent increase in site traffic, which is almost certainly thanks to Liliy. Hopefully these new visitors are enjoy Fractured Mentality, as the blog here has been sorely neglected as of late.

Various things have kept me busy, including my summer job, my ongoing job hunt (if you have a job you’d like to offer me let me know, by the way), and a personal project which will be going live very soon. I’ll have to ask all of my visitors–new and old–to stay patient while I finish up this super secret project.

And no, it’s not the dedicated role-playing forum. As Liliy kindly pointed out, I don’t have anywhere near the userbase to actually support such a thing. It’s in development though. Honestly. If registration ever picks up I’ll put more of an effort into getting it to a usable state.

Also, about registration… I should mention that user accounts are purged on occasion. I don’t have any specific guidelines for this, but if I see someone that has registered and never posted a comment (the only reason to register at this point) then it’s pretty likely it’ll get deleted. Likewise, users that very rarely comment might also get purged. Everything on the site is available to non-registered users, so if you do register (and I hope you do ) I’d like it if you actually commented.

Want to see something really scary?

Even before Fractured Mentality, I had another site (my first real site) hosted on a friends web server. It was part of iolis.net, a small collection of sites (mostly blogs). I’d point out which one is mine, but I think you’ll find it.

Even though it’s not a complete archive—and if I had any sense I would be horribly embarassed by this—I’m really glad the Wayback Machine exists and that it archived (some) of my old work. I honestly thought this stuff was gone for good. Not the kind of thought that keeps me up at night, but a sad thought anyways. It’s great to see that some of it is still out there, inflicting the net with my presence. Mwahahahaha!

Did you know that Fractured Mentality is not only the name of your favorite web comic but also the name of my long lost site? Way back in the 2004, my first official site launched as Fractured Mentality (FM for short). FM never really developed into anything more than a personal blog, and after one year came down for good. I didn’t have a job at the time and had to choose between a continued college education or a weblog with a handful of visitors and absolutely no cash flow. It was actually reasonably popular (10,000 hits a month near the end, if the stat tracker I used back then is to be believed), but it faded quickly into oblivion.

Or not. It seems the Wayback Machine got a hold of it. I haven’t fully explored what all it got, but it seems to have snatched up at least some of my old posts. I’m actually really glad to see FM on there; I never backed up any of my posts, so I figured they were all gone for good once the site went under. If I ever get really ambitious I’ll copy the old FM posts here to Maikeru On for all to see. In the meantime, have fun perusing the long lost corridors of my Fractured Mentality.

I was just handed a floppy disk. A floppy disk. You know, floppy disks? Those nearly-square pieces of plastic that could store a couple of text files? I think they were used decades ago as both storage devices and coasters. Even more shocking: I just realized that this computer (my work computer) actually has a floppy drive. Those things that read floppy disks. How quaint; I didn’t know they still made those.

I also didn’t get quite as much sleep as I’d hoped to yesterday, but I’ll do my best to get the comic up tonight.