Assorted Afflatuses

Like a home improvement project gone awry, my website redesign took a little longer than I had anticipated. Now, however, I can finally say — save the design glitches I will doubtlessly find and quash in the coming weeks — the revamp is complete.

I spent more time than I care to admit vacillating between one color or another, or one width of a box or another. Still, I like what I managed to cook up.

Though I'm beginning to think the pink is a little overpowering.

When my upgrade to Movable Type 4.1 broke every piece of my custom tempting scheme, I figured it would be more exciting to just start over and come up with a new, if similar, design.

The process is coming along well, especially now I ostensibly have nothing to do (it's not as fun as most people imagine), though, as is apparent, the look is still rough around the edges. Still, this, unlike the mangled mess Movable Type generated after the upgrade, can at least be read without too much eyestrain.

For most of my life, I have either used a plain vanilla text editor or Macromedia's Dreamweaver to cook up my HTML. But, as much as I have come to know and love those two tools, they have their shortcomings.

Creating markup with a text editor can be unbearably tedious. It's nice to have software that does syntax highlighting, magically indents in the right places and completes certain strings. Without a doubt, Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editing environment is easy and quick. The markup it spews out, however, often fails to pass muster in multiple browsers, and the software limps slowly along like an overweight tortoise.

Then I discovered Coda. While I will admit the folks at Panic have a few wrinkles to iron out, the software still manages to best every other piece of web development software I have used.

The text editing component has everything I want and then some. Syntax highlighting makes deciphering gigantic amorphous blobs of HTML a snap and the built-in syntax-aware autocompletion feature saves my poor fingers from typing more than they must. It also saves me from those pesky problems that result from missing a letter or forgetting the closing tag, since Coda just drops the text in place.

Coda replaces Dreamweaver's cumbersome preview system, which involves switching to an entirely different application, with instant, beautifully rendered WebKit previews, thanks to Apple's WebKit framework. It just works. And it works well.

The clips heads-up-display (or "HUD"), while not a headline-grabbing, awe-inspiring feature, has also proved surprisingly useful. On the surface, it's really nothing more than a glorified copy and paste system, but it still manages to save me a great deal of time. I just drop a blob of code into the HUD, name it and I can quickly add it to any other page.

Even the FTP system has blown me away. I have never used Panic's acclaimed Transmit, but, if it uses the same underlying technology and has the same beautiful interface, its fans have good reason to love it. Unlike, say, the FTP component haphazardly attached to Dreamweaver, Coda's remote site access is fast, effortless and unobtrusive. I can continue to code away while I wait for an image to upload without the constant annoyance of Dreamweaver's petulant FTP status window.

Just in case someone from Panic actually reads this, I will air a few grievances. With large files, the syntax highlighting tends to slow down, to the point I crashed Coda opening an enormous JavaScript file. On a similar note, the ability to collapse code would be wonderful when working on long CSS or JavaScript files. It might also be nice if I could have some way to make Coda automatically complete Movable Type template tags.

Still, Coda is, far and away, the best web development tool on the market. It offers just the right combination of tools in a beautiful, simple package. And, at $80 — less than a quarter of Dreamweaver's astronomical price tag — it's a bargain too.

After posting my last entry, I realized that my website looks a little off. I apologize! It seems my upgrade from Movable Type 4.01 to 4.1 changed a thing or two. I may have some time this weekend to address the problem.

Unfortunately, the strange absence of posts over the last week (or week and a half) stems from a server problem, not a sudden burst of business to fill my obnoxiously empty schedule.

Despite my best efforts to secure everything, someone or something managed to upload a slew of extraordinarily large files into obscure folders. In fact, the mysterious files form nowhere occupied so much space that I was temporarily barred from accessing my own server via Safari. Then, of course, I realized I had forgotten the extraordinarily cryptic password to my server's FTP login. Apparently the Keychain item was deleted in my migration to Apple's new Leopard operating system.

Fortunately, however, I remembered that I still had an image of my hard disk stored from the upgrade. After a great deal of digging I managed to find the password, which brought me to this point. The entries should return soon.

After many painstaking hours, everything not only works properly, it looks good too. With time the home page and my other still-in-the-planning-stages page will go online, but, to be frank, I have spent more time writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript to last me at least a few decades, if not a lifetime.

But, as is so often said during informercials, that's not all. By fixing some weird template issues I have now brought back the coveted anonymous comment feature, albeit with a weird captcha box to (hopefully) stem the torrent of comment spam I was experience before. And, as if that were not enough, it's now possible to sign up for your very own Kibeland-specific user id and password, or to comment using OpenID, LiveJournal and Vox.

As the strange lack of other pages and the generally unfinished look probably indicate, there are some changes going on. The numerous Movable Type upgrades that I have inflicted upon my poor website took their toll, which gummed up the database that stored all of my lovely writing. While you, the end user, may not have noticed anything, I had to deal with painfully slow and somewhat wonky performance, which, among other things, hurt my ability to write.

So, I took action. I gutted all of my databases and installed a brand-new pristine copy of Movable Type. But, of course, something went a little awry. I won't go into the gory details, but it took me all day to put the website in its current state.

Hopefully by sometime tomorrow or Friday everything will be better, with a few visual tweaks (foreshadowed in this wreck) and a new addition. Pardon the hideousness.

Through some clever scheming I managed to fix the commenting system. Everything probably will not be back in order until the final version of Movable Type 4 is released late this month, as I will need to make some changes to the backend of the website once I know the final specs.

You still have to use some kind of authentication to comment, though. But thankfully the new version of Movable Type I installed allows you to register specifically with this site and create your own profile complete with (eventually) a picture and all that jazz. You can also authenticate to comment using TypeKey or OpenID, or you can log in using your Livejournal or Vox account. I cannot say that I have tried the Livejournal, but I know the TypeKey and the Vox systems both work.

It now appears that the Beta of Movable Type 4 is not as stable as I thought it would be. As is probably obvious, many features of the site are now broken or do not display properly. I would explain the technical details, but I don't want to bore anyone too much.

At this point I am waiting patiently for the next build of the beta to be released, which should include bug fixes for a number of internal issues that will, hopefully, allow me to rehabilitate the broken features. Until then, comments will not work properly, the left-hand navigation sidebars are gone and the individual entry pages will not render with the same graphic richness that they ought to.

Once again, apologies for the inconvenience.

It appears that the beta upgrade software really mucked up some of the internal workings of my website, so things may be a little weird for the next 24-48 hours while I try to put everything back in working order. Sorry about the pain!

Fear not, entries are in the pipeline. I just have not had the opportunity to polish them off for publication for the entire world to read. At any rate, I have been busy working on some backend features of the site that will manifest themselves shortly. I also spent part of my morning upgrading my server to Movable Type 4 Beta 1.

This new version of Movable Type should allow me to publish more easily, though it may cause a few headaches initially, especially since the folks at Six Apart have not taken it out of beta status. In the brief period that I have used the system I have already found a few bugs that need ironing out.

The only noticeable change on the user's side of the new system is the lack of anonymous commenting. I spend hours every week deleting unwanted spam comments for products and services I neither need nor want. So, from this day forward, all those wishing to comment must use some kind of authentication. The good news, however, is that Movable Type 4 allows authentication with not just TypeKey, but also with OpenID, Vox, Livejournal and Movable Type's new native authentication system.