Adam R Brown

I’ve made some adjustments to my site’s appearance. The change are subtle, but I think they make the site look much better.

The trouble with working on a site with hundreds (if not thousands) of content pages is that something invariably gets screwed up one some of the pages when I make changes. With so much stuff on this site, it might be a long time before I discover any mistakes. If you see anything that looks funny, please let me know about it so I can fix it right away.

My blogs get lots of spam comments. I wrote a spam filter to catch it and shoot it on site. Now I’m watching closely to see how it performs. Every time it catches something, the counter in the sidebar goes up.

So why did all the spammers stop attacking my site the minute I deployed this new defense? C’mon, I want to see the counter go up! Just for a couple days, dish it out. Then you can stop again. (Please do stop, actually, since even though my filter will catch your filth, I’d rather not waste server resources doing so.)

I realized that my entire site has been loading way too slowly for the past few weeks. I finally traced it to a single typo in the php script that produces those five little pictures in my site header. As a result of the typo, those five pictures were being freshly loaded from picasaweb every time rather than loaded from cache, which dragged my site to a screeching halt.

It’s fixed. My site is much, much faster now. If you’re curious, I had to change this…

refreshAlbumCache($userName,$album,$thumbsize,$imageSize);

to this…

refreshAlbumCache($userName,$album,$thumbsize,$imagesize);

If you think the typo is hard to find in just that line, imagine trying to find that hidden in several hundred lines of code. (I had at least figured out that it was the images script causing the problem, so that saved me some trouble, but it is over 300 lines long.)

grrrrr.

You may have noticed a new feature on my site. At the very top, off to the right, you’ll see five little colored squares. Each one is a closely cropped image from my PicasaWeb photos. If you mouse over the little photos, you’ll see the full size photograph appear, along with its caption and the name of the album it’s in.

I use PHP to grab the images from my PicasaWeb account and to randomly select five of them. Then I use JavaScript to place the images on my site and make the mouseover effect.

Maybe if there’s demand I’ll post a walkthrough sometime. If you’re determined, you can figure out the JavaScript by looking at my HTML source. But the PHP is trickier to figure out–especially the bit that randomly selects an image.

Behold, a brand new blog, as of today.

Not that I’m new to blogging. I’ve been using WordPress for a couple years now. My main blog is in a secure location so the terrorists can’t attack it. The only people who look at it are related to me. I’ve also got a few public blogs, like my KB Plugins blog and my course websites for when I teach.

So why this blog?

It’s public (like my plugins blog and teaching blogs), but it’s also for random stuff–like my personal blog that only my family gets to see.

Enjoy. We’ll see whether anybody even notices this is here.