While I rarely bother to actually sign in to or otherwise use Facebook, I do my best to create the illusion that I log in regularly: some clever software reposts my Twitter posts as Facebook status updates, and my blog posts as Facebook notes. But I just want to remind anyone who follows me on Facebook that, to read the entire blog post that corresponds to one of my Facebook notes, you have to click the small "View Original Post" link under the note on Facebook.

In an ideal world, the link would be inline with the entry excerpt. I've just not bothered to make the small change to the relevant template to make that happen. Perhaps I'll find time this weekend.

Even though it was but months ago that I gave my website a facelift, something about the last iteration of the design didn't jibe with my aesthetic sensibilities. So I'm working on yet another look. Hopefully this one will stick.

While I have the occasional dry spell in terms of posing — whether due to final exams or some monstrous French literature essay to write — the gap I'm ending now has been especially long. I'd like to take this opportunity to explain why.

For the last three years, I've hosted my website with the fine folks over at VizaWeb. Unfortunately, at some point late last year, VizaWeb decided to switch its focus to big customers, away from smaller customers. While they were gracious enough to grandfather me in under their new regime, the transition had some problems. Most recently, some wacky Perl misconfiguration made my Movable Type installation spew gigantic log files that ate up my rather pitiful one gigabyte storage limit.

That and some MySQL issues compelled me to switch hosting providers. And on Tuesday I did just that. My website is now hosted by the wonderful folks over at DreamHost. Hence, the rather off-kilter website.

Much to my displeasure, I have an incredibly full schedule until early next week, thus I doubt the site will be back to normal until next Tuesday at the earliest.

While I sometimes feel like my Google Analytics account gives me a little too much information about my visitors, seeing the data really makes me appreciate this whole World Wide Web concept. Here are a few crazy stats for the months of June and July:

• 13.4% of visitors to Kibeland live outside the United States
• People from 26 countries visited Kibeland, including: Malaysia, Egypt, France, Russia and Venezuela
• Only 73.41% of visitors used a browser other than Internet Explorer (higher than the global average, but still disappointingly low)
• "hermes octopus tie" led the 4th greatest number of people to Kibeland from search engines
• 11.96% of searchers found Kibeland with the search string "kibeland" (apparently the four extra characters in ".com" proved too much for some)
• June-July's most popular entry was "Pocket Computing," which accounted for 2.4% of all page views (most people read the RSS feed or the main blog page)

The world feels very small indeed.

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.

I recently purchased a Blue Microphones "Snowball" microphone for recording this that and the other. As the box says, "Perfect for Podcasting," I figured I would try it out by posting the first of what may become many podcast episodes. This particular episode spans a whole minute and twenty-six seconds.

Please excuse the somewhat unpolished audio; I know next to nothing about recording and the like, so it sounds amateurish. With any luck, the production quality will improve if I decide to produce more of these programs. Though, I did manage to have a great deal of fun with the accompanying music.

Enjoy.

Episode 01.m4a (708 KB; MPEG-4 Audio)

As I mentioned previously, I had some problems with the TypeKey comment-authenticaion service, which failed to post comments as the logged-in user, despite that user being logged in. It made no sense. At any rate, I have now (mostly) fixed the problem by completely rewriting the comment submission template on my individual archive page. I still have no idea what I broke before, however, that's quite immaterial: it works now.

But, unfortunately, if you preview a comment and try to post it as a TypeKey commenter, that will still fail to post into the system as an authenticated comment. I could fix that too, by rewriting (most) of that template, but as the clock says I am now working on Saturday instead of Friday, I think I need to stop.

Working into the small hours of the morning, I managed to make the MultiBlog aggregation system work. Visitors to the new homepage will now see the beginnings of a multi-blog aggression system that pulls entries together from my two current blogs, and will also pull content from two more content areas I plan to launch relatively soon.

But while I did manage to put the content aggregation system in place, I broke comment authentication on the entire site. I really have no idea what I did. It's still possible to log-in, and the system clearly recognizes that the user has signed in using TypeKey. Nonetheless, when the same user tries to post a comment, it does not receive instant "Published" status on the administration page, nor does it show the user as authenticated.

The number of visitors to my blog has also grown considerably in December. Only two-thirds of the way through the month I have received nearly three times the number of visitors who came in November. Though, to my continued bemusement, I still only have about forty comments on my hundred or so entries, which makes absolutely no sense considering the number of visitors I have each month. But then, a small contingent of Dutch and Swiss visitors seem to visit the site every month. Perhaps the visitors just cannot write very well in English. But for the Swiss visitors, I do speak French.

Since rehabilitating Kibeland in August, I have wanted to create a dedicated "Home" page where I could pick and choose from amongst the various content on different blogs to display prominently. But, until today, I had no way to do so, save creating a very elaborate system of conditional templates and categories. Today I discovered a great plugin, called MultiBlog, which allows me to aggregate multiple blogs onto a single page.

This new system, however, is still not the most intuitive I have ever used, so some features of Kibeland may not work correctly until I have finished setting up the system. Please, pardon the mess.

When I took a peek at my website statistics a few minutes ago, I noticed a number of queries for "MUN" on this blog, which would lead to nowhere. For your reference, the MUN Blog is located at www.kibeland.com/mun and cannot be accessed directly from the rest of my website.

The visually unpleasant nature of my website, which persisted until today, bothered me so much that I decided to take it upon myself to improve the aesthetics of my website at whatever cost. So, after struggling with my poor computer, I managed to crank out the rather lovely piece of work now on display. Hopefully, it looks better than the rather drab default template.

This new design is still in its infancy, so many more changes will doubtlessly take place in the coming days as I continue to tweak the design. However, due to the decaying nature of my computer, most of the other pages, in addition to the other portions of Kibeland, will have to wait until I swap hardware.

My upgrade to MovableType 3.3 has also allowed me to add tagging (as popularized by flickr) to my humble blog. Armed with this nifty new nugget and some clever logic on my part, the tagging system not only allows for a listing of the most popular subjects on my blog, but also provides a visual representation of the subjects' popularity. At the moment, the tags box (on the right of every page) is sparsely populated, and does not provide a terribly accurate visual representation of subjects' popularity. However, as I continue to both write and tag, this should become much more accurate and prove a useful tool.

After a long hard month of waiting, my website finally functions again! Unfortunately, this fresh installation of MovableType has left me with a rather bland looking default template, which I hope to have replaced in a few days time. In the mean time, feel free to peruse the vast library of archived blog entries which I have restored.

Oh, and do not forget to examine my flickr photostream at flickr.com/photos/jkibe/.

With school over and free time abound, I figured I would make some long overdue changes to my website. The look needed a little freshening and I wanted to expand my use of the MovableType content management system so that I could have more dynamic, interesing pages. However, in my frantic bout of deletion to make way for the new files, I deleted the MySQL database user I used to access MySQL databases. I had intended to clear everything out to make way for the new files, and after all, creating a new user requires one to click on a button. Not something terribly difficult. But I did not reckon with the somewhat archaic nature of MovableType.

Apparently, the MySQL database system changed the way it handled passwords in version 4.1.1. This alteration to MySQL entailed changes to any software wishing to work with MySQL. Unfortunately, MovableType still has not received the requisite upgrade. So, when I tried to set MovableType up on my new database - created with MySQL 4.1.1 - errors sprouted up everywhere; MovableType could not access its MySQL database.

Thus, my website is confined to this rather feeble WordPress-powered, one-entry blog, until my web host can change the MySQL password system back to the way it operated in version 4.1.

After five years it was inevitable. My blog has been spammed ! Granted, if you haven't visited my website in the last few days you probably won't have noticed it. I cleaned it up very quickly. However, in order to curb the incredible amount of spam I had been receiving, I have turned on comment authentication. This means anyone who wishes to comment will need to register for a TypeKey account from Six Apart (who does the Movable Type software I use for this blog). This should only be a temporary precaution until I can find time to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 and find some less annoying methods to stop spamming.

As I continue to get Kibeland working again I figured I may as well make some minor changes. At any rate, I have decided I want a section where I create lists. There might be a list of favorite words, a list of fantastic places to buy sticky notes, and other similar lists. However, the one snag I have hit is really quite a simple one. What do I name the section of the website ? A section called "LIsts" does not have the ring and wit I would like to have for a section of my website. It also does not seem descriptive enough in certain senses.

I've made yet another incredibly stupid mistake. I hadn't backed up all 150 plus blog entries that I had written before my website unexpectedly went down. I may still be able to rectify the situation, but it looks grim. I'll just have to start over again.

At least the website's back up.

A couple of minutes ago I went to log in to my Movable Type system to post an entry about a website I had read about in the New York Times. It was related to that woeful font, Comic Sans MS. But then I hit a snag. For some reason my Movable Type login screen wouldn't load. So I tried to just plain look at my blog. That didn't work either. So then, in desperation, I typed in www.kibeland.com into my web browser. Guess what came up. One of those pages you see that says, "This page is coming soon!" At first I thought I had typed the URL wrong. However, as subsequent attempts revealed, I had not. Then the truth sank in. My domain name had expired and the hosting company had not had the tact to send me a notice.

So then I thought, "Well, I guess you could just renew it - it's only $10," however, this too would prove troublesome. A quick visit to Network Solutions revealed this. Some stupid company that crawls the web to snap up your domain name the second it expires had done it to me. I didn't even want to look at how much they were going to charge me to have the domain. Probably something nutty in the $200 range. Only something such as news.com would be worth $200.

Now the harsh truth has come upon me. I need to find a new domain name and a new hosting company. Additionally, I have to use this as my temporary home on the web. This is the second time this had happened to me, and it's not going to happen again.