Yes, I've changed the site again. This time, two new features:

1. Links of the day look different to friends and stuff in the sidebar,
2. That nifty little changelog thing in the rants page tells you if there are recent posts on other pages.
3. I made it so you can post comments again
4. Added comment spam protection to the comment entry form. If you have problems, please email me (paul at cechner dot com)

Why did nobody tell me the commenting was fucked up?

Link: http://paul.cechner.com/gallery/poker

I've put up some new photos. The wildly successful poker night provided ample opportunities for posing with reflective sunnies and oversized cigars.

The photos can be found here.

b2evolution isn't quite up to my needs. I'll stick with it though, because it has a very pretty back-end that is easy to manipulate (that probably sounds seedy.)

So the plan: I'll give it the functionality it lacks (like the fucked-up over-simple links blog functionality that you may notice is all fucked up - I've put dates in the 'links of the day' category, but don't want them in the rest, and I want to be able to control the ordering of the categories; currently they are in alphabetical order.)

PLUS! when I imported from blogger, the script actually fucked up the database a bit. I have to make manual alterations to get my posts to show. The good news: it will be easy to fix.

The part of this site I personally find most useful - the links section - is being revamped. Currently I have to download-edit-upload the file to modify it, but I'll be making it administrable, for my convenience (I've just stopped updating it recently, it was so clumsy.)

But until that time comes, the links page will remain static.

Link: http://paul.cechner.com/news.php

The old site news can be found here. It was holding me back, I tells ya, having to manually download then upload that goddamn file every time. Now nothing stands between me and certain victory!

It was a tough decision, going with b2evolution. There are nicer looking systems out there, but I ended up deciding based on the feature set alone. One thing that did not come into it, however, was migration from Blogger...

There is a PHP script to help with the job, but there have also been problems using it. I've started by backing up my database - this proved particularly simple; just a matter of mysqldump --opt -h cechner.com -u my_username -p cechnerc_bvlt1 > cechnerc_bvlt1.sql

The obvious solution, of course, is to go with WordPress. This is as easy to install as b2evolution (they are both actually branches of b2) and has a nicer plugin set, to boot. But I think I'll stick with this one for now - see how it goes.

The next problem is deciding whether or not to use the 'everything' blog. It amalgomates all the blogs on a site (in this case, *rants*, development and news) into one mega-blog. The problem is, it treats entries to the 'links' blog as normal posts. This looks bad to me. The system is pretty customisable, so I may get that bit working...