Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

I’ve been fooling around with web development for quite some time, but I’ve never been all that serious about it. I wrote a photo gallery plugin for Wordpress in PHP, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.

This evening I’ve been working on the AJAX portion of my plugin and I finally decided to look for a tool to make debugging the Javascript easier than adding message boxes. I quickly found Firebug, a plugin for Firefox. It does everything I need. Troubleshooting Javascript using an actual debugger is something I should have pursued long ago…

For another project, I run a simple bulletin board using phpBB. Over the past several months it’s basically been unusable due to spam. I think the bots are able to defeat the standard captcha that phpBB provides. I tried a number of solutions (increased requirements for posting, hidden fields, reducing the reward for spamming, etc.), but nothing seemed to work very well at reducing the spam volume.

Thankfully, I think I’ve got it licked now, at least for the time being. Anti-Spam ACP seems to be doing the trick. It’s showing in its logs around 150 spammer registrations per day that are being denied. It’s nice not having to manually delete all that junk!

Although things were going OK with GoDaddy as my web host, I decided to switch over to Dreamhost. The migration seems to have gone basically OK, though with the limited upload speed of my cable modem, the file upload will take over 20 hours. Transferring the databases and changing the name servers was easy to do as well.

Dreamhost offers a lot of extra features over what I had before. Here are a couple that were important to me:

• Ability to host multiple domains on one hosting account
• Better (in my opinion) web control panel
• Shell access
• IMAP mail support
• Cron jobs
• Subversion repositories

I agreed to a one year contract, at $10 a month. By agreeing to a year you avoid the $50 setup fee. Thankfully, I found a promo code (”MAX97″) that took $97 off my bill. My first year of hosting is going to cost me $23!

So far I’m really satisfied with Dreamhost!

If you notice anything not working on the site, let me know. I’m writing this at 11pm and about to head to bed, but a bunch of non-critical files are still uploading. I’m setting this post to not be published until the morning, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

One of my projects is a Wordpress plug-in called Lazy-K Gallery, which runs the photo album on this site. I just released a new version, and now you can comment on each photo in my gallery. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to adding some more photos.

Alright, I finally got this site to the number 1 spot on Google- well, when you search for “Korey Atterberry”, that is. I had some old sites out there that were getting the top results, so I had to get rid of them. I also had to put in the meta-tag keywords on this site so that the search engines knew what this site was for. This site really should be #1, as I’m the only Korey Atterberry in the world that I’m aware of, and this is my definitive site. Yahoo, on the other hand, still puts this site on about the 4th page…

For what it’s worth, this site is the #2 hit for “atterberry” and the #30 hit for “Korey” (after all the pages about Korey Stringer). I was kind of surprised those were so near the top… It’s also interesting searching for my old jazz combo’s name: “four wild and jazzy guys” (with the quotes) and seeing how many matches there are.

By the way, welcome to my new email subscribers. Sorry for the mistaken notification the other day, and I hope I don’t bore you too much!

Tonight I added a “Breadcrumb Trail” to most of my pages. If you’re not familiar with that term, it basically means a list of what pages you’ve visited. In this case, it shows the title of the page you’re on along with its parent page, its parent’s parent page, and so forth. The point is to help you know where you are, how you got there, and how to get back.

I’m using the Breadcrumb Nav XT plugin, after spending a good portion of the evening trying write my own.

Play around in the “Fun Stuff” area (for example) and you’ll see what the breadcrumb trail looks like. I’d like your feedback for improvements, or if it’s worthless, I’ll get rid of it.

Do you find my site so entertaining that you want to be notified immediately when something new has been added? I’ve got just the thing for you. If you visit the Subscribe tab above, you can sign up to be emailed whenever something new is posted. All you have to do is enter your email address. Now, if you have registered on this site, you will have more subscription options that you can set on your profile page.

Well, I finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a LiveJournal account. I’m not going to blog there in any real way, but some of the social networking features are kind of neat. You can use it to find blogs of people who went to your high school, share an interest in camping, etc. Having an account also allows me to comment on other member’s blogs as well and makes me easier for friends to find.

My url there is http://korey99.livejournal.com

I’m doing some basic updates, so I added links to a few LiveJournal people (Tweets95, Dante8, Wyoming_1) who wouldn’t admit to knowing me if asked. I have empirical evidence that at least one of them has seen my website, and they post a lot more than I do, so visit them if you’re bored with me.

Well, I took the leap and installed the new version 2.0.1 version of Wordpress. It mostly went OK, but unfortunately it broke my photo album (i.e. the only thing worth looking at). Thankfully it’s my own album so I just have a little debugging to do. I hope to have it back online soon.

Update:

I figured out the problem. For some reason, $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] was behaving differently than it did before the upgrade. Before it would give the URL to the photos page, but after, it was always returning the URL to index.php. Come to find out, I didn’t need to use it anyway, so I think it’s all fixed now.