rudis dot net

Just wanted to drop a note to everyone that I am, in fact, not dead. I do feel dead, mostly due to this illness that's been hanging on for a while. Doc says it's viral, so rest and symptom relief. Between work, being sick, Twitter, infrequent TAB posts & the fam, it's been waaaay to hectic to personal blog, plus I'm trying to start a non-personal blog as well.

Doc sez I should start feeling better by the end of the weekend. Joy. Expect massive posting thereafter :-)

If you've sent e-mail, I should be able to get to it within the next couple of days. Been too unfocused to even skim through GMail...

If you're one of the few, cool folks who comment here @ RDN or have just been lurking, waiting for that perfect post to arise that was worthy of your €0.013, I wanted to make you aware that I installed the spam-filtering akismet module today.

Drop me mail (bob at my self-named hosted mail net address) if you get rejected so I know I need to turn it off or tweak it a bit.

Some noteworthy items do not warrant a full-on blog post...at least that's [part of] the premise of tumblr. I - mostly - tend to agree, and fearless readers should now see my tumblr feed as a right-hand block.

You can also bookmark the gathered post directly or just subscribe to that RSS feed for updates.

I'm thinking of a weekly "best of my tumbler quick hits" post, but we'll see how that manages to manifest itself.

For some reason, iTheme was bugging me. It may have been the excessive rounded corners. Perhaps it was the typographic idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies. Kubrick has always "felt" right and it seems to play nice with Safari now, so it's up until I can come up with something better on my own.

I just need to get an iPhone CSS file customized for it.

Let me know if you have any theme suggestions.

Hey true believers,

Mary is blogging.

Quick link in the tabs on the top of RDN for it as well.

It appears that changing the blog id from whatever the initial setup gave you to story allows you to post entries to story nodes rather than blog ones.

Howdy, true believers. Picking a house tonight, but am testing MarsEdit 2.0.1 with Drupal 5.2 at the moment while I wait for the latest caffeine injection to kick-in.

Always seeing if there's a better way to blog.

Wow. The Live Preview feature *really* slows down typing (very CPU intensive).

UPDATE: So, looking at the post, then edited post (with categories) it seems like the interface between the two is good. It would be great if it would let me post to the story area rather than the blog area, but that may be configurable (I'll check the forums). Line breaks work fine and the posting is fast. Flickr integration is also a nice feature as well.

Found some time to optimize rudis dot net for the iPhone. I created a custom iPhone.css for Drupal's itheme that gets rid of everything but the content div (no search, navigation, background image[s] or sidebar). I'd prefer it if those bytes were never sent to the client, but hiding them works well. (I may re-add search once I can figure out a pleasant way to display the box)

The actual "code" is after the jump. It requires two additional lines in the itheme page.tpl.php:

<meta name="viewport" content="width = 545" />
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
      href="/themes/itheme/iPhone.css"
      type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />

Trackbacks are officially disabled. Props to those Drupal site admins who have diligently moderated trackback spam into oblivion, only to do it again...and again...and again...and again.

It's a bit of hubris to expect to get a trackback to begin with - it's just a podunk personal blog. The experiment of enabling them (about a month ago) was educational, however. There definitely are a gazillion zombie PCs out there, just watching the meta-aggregators, waiting for an opportunity to post trackback and comment spam.

If anyone running Drupal does read this, have you done the trackback enable/disable tango, or do you find it not a problem (if you have them enabled)?

Well, I really liked GlossyBlue, but have no time to debug it. So, give a shout out to Garamond. Sigh.

So, I should test things on other browsers before declaring victory.

Back to using BlueMarine until I get things squared away. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Props to Dries & crew. The upgrade from 4.7 to 5.1 went way too smoothly.

I encourage anyone on 4.7 migrate. I had looked at the new features before and was impressed, but the plethora of updated and new modules is just amazing. Site administration is a breeze the whole thing just clicks really nicely.

If you do the whole twitter thing, you can add "rdn" as a friend or just follow it. All new posts will give a "tweet" when published.

I started off this post in Microsoft Word 2007, but am finishing it up right in Drupal.

The new Microsoft Office supports posting to online blogs and it even supports the MetaWeblog API that Drupal offers as one of it's API choices.

Formatting works (not heavily tested) along with setting the post title. Categories do not work (after a cursory test) and images are going to be challenging without using WebDAV.

The resulting HTML that it throws into the post is very reasonable. It even handles editing and re-posting older entries.

Not a bad feature if you're using Office already and just need to post something very quickly.

I added a direct link (under the I-78 traffic feed block) to the new interactive Google traffic maps for the drive to/from NJ on the I-78 corridor.

Direct link: for the commute.

Anyone who previously used the I-78 RSS traffic feed can now go forth and use them again. I fixed the error that was causing them not to update.

If you don't know about the feed and drive the I-78 corridor between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, you might want to consider subscribing to it: http://www.rudis.net/traffic.xml. Lots of advanced warning on issues impacting your commute.