Regardless: a Merry Christmass and Happy New Year to all!

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/

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.

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.

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.