Since I occasionally blog about something useful, I’ve added a list of useful links to the sidebar (currently to the right of the content). Dina suggested that I ask ‘my readers’ what posts they found especially useful or amusing, or were otherwise favourites. I’ll add some of your suggestions to the sidebar too.
Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category
Comment Spam
2007-03-30 18:09I’m now getting about 200 pieces of comment spam every day. If you comment and you don’t see it go through immediately, send me an email and I’ll push it through. Really. Hating. Spam. These. Days.
Posted in Meta | 1 Comment »
My Blog In IE
2007-02-04 13:31Wow this thing looks horrible in IE7… maybe I should go back to the default theme for now…
15:39 Tweaked things. It now looks OK under IE7 again. No clue what I did.
Posted in Meta | 1 Comment »
Topical Comment Spam
2006-06-02 07:24I’m impressed. In response to my Water post, some company left topical comment spam… so topical in fact, that I’m wondering whether it should actually be defined as spam or not.
Posted in Meta, Personal | No Comments »
Domain Migration Issues
2006-02-24 00:12
My webhost has merged (again).
varacalli.com is migrating to a different server.
Email, web pages, blog, etc. will take a couple of days to get back to normal while the DNS changes propagate.
Email should eventually get to me… apologies in advance for the delays.
Feel free to cc deleted@gmail.com.
Posted in Meta, Personal | No Comments »
Blog Tweaks
2006-01-01 10:43- Upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Not sure if there are any user-visible changes.
- Added a comment spam filter. 3 spam a day is annoying.
- Fixed auto-formatting of comments. Line breaks are now respected. Holler if it doesn’t work, there’s anything else that I need to do, or there was collateral damage.
Posted in Meta | No Comments »
Yo Readers: Please Comment!
2005-10-13 10:45I guess this post flushed at least a couple of old-time friends that I was glad to hear from out of the woodwork…
This obviously makes me wonder who else reads this blog that I don’t know about… either current friends, or people from the past. That said, if you’re reading this, please leave a comment (on my blog, not using the LJ comment system please). Feel free to make it a guessing game if you want, though, if you don’t leave me an email address, you’ll have to re-read the comments.
On a semi-related note, it seems like LJ syndication isn’t picking up all my posts. Looking at my feed, I think it’s on LJ’s side, not mine. I think it occurs either when I edit a post, or I post more than one entry between the times that LJ actually reads my feed.
Posted in Meta, Personal | 7 Comments »
Guessing At Commenter’s Identities
2005-10-08 19:53Hey folks… some of you have been commenting without leaving an email address… which means I can’t easily reply back to you unless you’re actually following the comment feeds somehow… anonymous throwaway email accounts are cheap…
Ceeder… Paul H. is that you?
Posted in Meta, Personal | 6 Comments »
Password Protected Entries
2005-09-06 17:00
class="alignright"
style="width : 150px; height : 99px;"
alt="Photograph: Building Reflections, Tokyo, Japan, March-April 2005, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Building Reflections, Tokyo, Japan, March-April 2005, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
I’m starting to password protect some entries. Email me (using either the links on my site, my blog, or the one in your address book) to get the password for a particular entry. I know, I know, it sucks compared to the LiveJournal model. Sorry. I’m working on things like TypeKey support and other features to make it better.
Why am I password protecting entries?
- There are things I don’t want anyone to read, but I want to blog about anyway. I find that re-reading my blog years later is a very useful thing. I can be cryptic, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it. Either I forget what I was being cryptic about, or something is too obvious, and no amount of obfuscation will help.
- There are things that I don’t want certain people to read. One notable example of this is people I work with. Juggling my blog and NerveWire, Merrill Lynch, and VistaPrint, though interesting, was not fun. There are also times when I’d like to be able to vent about something without actually impacting what I’m venting about. Social and group dynamics may fall into this category.
- There are things that I don’t mind sharing with my friends, but I don’t want to be on the internet / googlable.
- Because…
Posted in Meta | 1 Comment »
Testing Syndication Feature
2005-08-23 14:17As an exercise in my continued attempt to learn PHP and in order to make my feed friendlier, notably to my readers over at LiveJournal, I’ve attempted to add a footer to my post that directs people back to this site for comments and permalinks.
Feedback on the implementation and look & feel are welcome.
Posted in Development, Meta | 5 Comments »
Blogging To The Next Level
2005-08-11 00:43The homebrew system I was using just wasn’t cutting it, and I want to dump the dual posting to LJ. Time to use some better software.
I’ve also registered another domain. I have some ideas for what to do with it… haven’t decided which to do yet… I also haven’t decided whether to use a Linux or Windows host.
Posted in Meta | No Comments »
Spin Control
2004-10-13 18:00
For the next little while, my blog will be in a different location on varacalli.com
or will be friend-protected on LJ.
If I provide you the location or you are an LJ-friend, please do not share the contents of my blog for the time being.
Update: 2004-11-06: I’ve switching jobs, so I can un-hide this.
Posted in Meta | No Comments »
Visualization
2004-09-08 18:14
class="alignright"
style="width : 100px; height : 150px;"
alt="Photograph: Red Brick Church, Cambridge, MA, 2004-07, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Red Brick Church, Cambridge, MA, 2004-07, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
Meta-Aside: Added search to the footer on every page. Cool.
Just had five rolls of film developed, one from my cousin David’s wedding, and 4 from my step-sister Sandra’s wedding. I’m quite proud of myself. A lot of the pictures are good. Two areas where I’ve traditionally been weak, people and light, came out quite well. Lotsa room for improvement, but a glimmer of hope along two otherwise dull axes. My goal is to use time when I’m watching football to get picture related stuff done.
At squares last night, I purposely danced a square with seven phantoms.
Though I picked the strongest possible dancer as my shadow, I rarely relied on him to figure out my location.
Most of the time my eyes were closed anyway. I only messed up once.
The important part though, is that I was able to fully visualize the formation around me for most of the tip.
In my opinion, my visualization skills, or lack thereof, has been the main impediment to my learning of squares.
I’d be able to learn quicker, and be a stronger dancer at all levels were my visualization skills on par with the other ones that I use in squares.
It’s cool that I’m making progress, and improving a skill I’ve known I’ve had issues with since I was about 8.
I’m chuffed. Two visual things coming together.
Posted in Meta, Personal, Squares | No Comments »
Misc
2004-09-07 18:18
class="alignleft"
style="width : 150px; height : 97px;"
alt="Photograph: Yellow Flowers, Detail, Cambridge, MA, 2004-07, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Yellow Flowers, Detail, Cambridge, MA, 2004-07, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
On a social note, I’m starting to feel minorly paranoid about various things.
I thought I’d gotten rid of that problem a while back.
Apparently not completely.
First, I need to stop fretting about it openly and externalizing it.
Then I need to take a deep breath and let go of the useless paranoia altogether.
Just took a look at my August web logs.
Holy crap. Google Image Search
apparently loves proper semantic markup.
Simply adding a good
title=”",
alt=”", and good descriptions around the image means that
all together, the various flavours of Google Image Search contributed about 7,000 hits to my site last
month. Not bad at all for something that I don’t advertise and isn’t widely linked to.
I’m wondering what would happen if I made some of the image descriptions into
<h2 style=”display : inline;“> … </h2>.
Posted in Meta, Personal | No Comments »
IE Sucks
2004-06-20 18:33
class="alignright"
style="width : 101px; height : 150px;"
alt="Photograph: Shad Thames, London, England, 2004-03, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Shad Thames, London, England, 2004-03, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
I finally figured out how to add a table of contents to my blog (on my website, not on LJ).
That’s why the logo is now on the right. The left is left free for navigation.
Getting it to work the way I wanted in IE was impossible. So I punted.
I actually have browser detection code that disables the thing if you’re using IE.
Getting it to work in FireFox was quite fun though.
Learned a fair bit about both CSS and JavaScript.
Browser layout engines are pretty sweet.
Click on the Contents link in the top left corner of the window.
It may take a bit of time to appear, it has to crawl the DOM for a pretty large document.
If you’re using another browser, please send feedback on how it works for you.
While I was at it, I added a page to help me with square dance calling. Update: 2004-08-15: Page removed.
Posted in Development, Meta, Personal | No Comments »
Grrr
2004-05-05 18:40
class="alignleft"
style="width : 150px; height : 95px;"
alt="Photograph: Yellow Dark Purple Flowers, Cambridge, MA, 2004-04, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Yellow Dark Purple Flowers, Cambridge, MA, 2004-04, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
This entry started out as a LiveJournal only entry.
It actually got enough comments to make me seriously consider keeping my blog completely on LJ.
Either that, or I have to get off my ass and get comments and an RSS feed working off this site.
One of the things I like about LiveJournal is that it’s just that much
more spontaneous than my own web site blog which it normally mirrors…
no compiling, no source control…
So… first, my Treo broke…
just the flip top… it’s epoxied back together…
for now… we’ll see how long that lasts…
Second, I’m in a really
foul mood this evening… have turned down two social engagements
because of it… really feel like… dunno… being destructive…
whether self or something else is neither here nor there… mind you…
having drunk 4 martinis now… it’s much more likely that I’m going to
go to sleep instead… life fucking sucks…
Aren’t y’all tired of the self-centered angst yet?
Posted in Meta, Personal | No Comments »
Site Feature
2004-03-27 19:02
class="alignleft"
style="width : 150px; height : 97px;"
alt="Photograph: St.-Mary Le Strand Stained Glass, London, England, 2003-04, © Nick Varacalli."
title="St.-Mary Le Strand Stained Glass, London, England, 2003-04, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
In a continuing effort to brush up my JavaScript skills,
and because it looks pretty, images now display in a page.
The downside is now the site requires JavaScript for some things.
“That, Mr. Anderson, is the sound of inevitability.”
Posted in Meta | No Comments »
Self Indulgent Stats
2004-02-18 19:15
I finally got around to registering the site with search engines a while back.
Due to efforts at work to make their site more crawlable, I decided to look at my logs.
Interesting stuff. Some tidbits for January:
Visitors from: Canada, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Japan, United States (.us), Finland, Luxembourg
Australia, India, Brazil, USA Military (.mil), Italy, France, Sweden, International (.int), Israel,
Turkey, Latvia, Greece
OS: 6% Mac, 2% Linux, 7 visits from Web TV.
Browsers: 3% Netscape, mostly v6 and above, although there’s a big bunch of v4.05…
my site sucks under Netscapes that old. 6% Firebird, a lot of that is probably me,
4% Mozilla, 3% Safari, Some Opera, WebCollage (PDA/Phone Browser), WebTV again, and LibWWW?
Maybe that was me verifying HTML or something.
34% direct type-ins. 41% from search engines, mostly Google. A smattering of hits from weird search engines too.
Also links from weird places like this gifts page
and someone who actually found something useful.
Top search phrase was “water st st johns nfld” and top search word was “pictures”.
Lotsa hits on searching about VB, .Net, pictures, Canadians, CV, etc.
Not all of them currently hit on Google, and they may actually come from other engines.
- burst blood vessel in eye (#6)
- can you touch your elbows behind your back? (#3)
- dina hot Not Safe For Work
- dina porn Not Safe For Work
- dots or feathers (#2)
- las vegas pool bikinis
- bikini zoom lens (#1)
- pictures blue mohawk (#4)
- cute girly quotes
- quotes on being hungover (#13)
- sexy ladies in st johns new found land burin canada
- suicide quechee gorge jump
- poker chip flourishes
- beautiful alma novel
- rene zellweger shape changing pics
- ages 12-18 in bikinis
- birth control glasses (#19)
- caricature builder (#3)
- banana in bed photograph (#6)
- sex in the office discussion
- pictures of girls tied up to a chair in there bikinis
- soulwise wireless
- pictures purple banana (#5)
Posted in Meta, Personal | No Comments »
Meta
2003-12-01 19:47
class="alignright"
style="width : 150px; height : 98px;"
alt="Photograph: Hot Air Ballooning, Red and Green, New Hampshire, 2003-07-26, © Nick Varacalli."
title="Hot Air Ballooning, Red and Green, New Hampshire, 2003-07-26, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
I’m going to start maintaining duplicate entries at
LiveJournal
and at varacalli.com.
I’ll see which system I like best.
Currently, I have a feeling that it will be varacalli.com, since I’m enough of a control freak.
OTOH, LiveJournal is available anywhere.
Posted in Meta | No Comments »
Site Updates
2003-08-30 08:57
class="alignright"
style="width : 150px; height : 99px;"
alt="Photograph: White Water Rafting, Charlemont, Massachusetts, 2003-07-20, © Nick Varacalli."
title="White Water Rafting, Charlemont, Massachusetts, 2003-07-20, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
class="alignleft"
style="width : 150px; height : 113px;"
alt="Photograph: White Water Rafting, Charlemont, Massachusetts, 2003-07-20, © Nick Varacalli."
title="White Water Rafting, Charlemont, Massachusetts, 2003-07-20, © Nick Varacalli."
/>
Uploaded the white water rafting pictures.
Split out the Maritime road trip pictures into a separate page.
Nifty new rollover effect for pictures.
Not that great, but I get to roll-my-own utilities to do the work, so I’m happy.
Also cleaned up a bunch of the picture HTML, automated some uploading, and fixed some internal naming.
Learned that the proper way to center a tablePictures pages, for layout. or a
divRésumé page of paper effect is to use:
.CenteredBlockElement
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
Posted in Development, Meta, Personal | No Comments »