Okay, so the upgrade to Movable Type 3.31 went swimmingly, despite Six Apart’s somewhat lacking documentation. Their instructions on how to go about upgrading were some of the worst I’ve seen. I sort of guessed my way through the various steps, Things Happened, and then all of a sudden my screen said “UPGRADE TO MOVABLE TYPE 3.31 SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED!1 LOL!” Well . . . that wasn’t the exact phrasing used, but it’s what I half-expected from Six Apart.

3.31 looks kind of weird. It’s a lot more colorful, certain elements were renamed, and there are new features that seem scary and wonderful at the same time. I’m hoping that the much-hyped spam fighting tools are as good as people say. I intend to experiment with those in the near future. If the commenting policy changes (from the current moderated approach), I’ll let y’all know.

JAB

Just me in the house for the moment. Roland and Linda came over a bit ago to celebrate his and my mom’s birthdays (his was the 11th, hers today). Before we go get something to eat and do the assorted birthday stuff, everyone but me is going to the Englewood Fine Arts Festival. That’s really a much classier name than the festival deserves. “Possums ‘N Crafts Festival” would be more apropos, or possibly “Y’all Like That Art Crap? Festival.” It’s a decent-sized collection of vendors selling their crafty wares, assorted trucks selling festival food, live music, and other random shit. I guess I’m making it out to be lamer than it really is, since it’s apparently popular with a number of people. The Northmont band plays the festival every year, of which I was a member all four years I was in high school, and I guess I really got burnt out attending. Plus crafts and stuff aren’t really, y’know, my thing anyway.

So, like Macaulay Culkin I’m home alone now, putting the finishing touches on JBdN’s new design. It’s actually a similar design I was going to use for the much lamented Novelogue. Since that side project is going to be incorporated into the main site, i.e. JBdN, and I really like this new layout, applying the new design to the whole shebang seems like the natural thing to do. The redesign has been simmering for about two months now, with me doing the bulk of the work before I left on vacation. I’ve also been wanting to take another wack at Thirty Well Spent v0.6 recently. But dividing my time between two big projects means I just sit around wringing my hands on which to work on, and that just results in nothing getting accomplished. So last week I resolved to finish JBdN v6.0, then focus all my attention on TWS.

Before I sign off, I want to direct any of you people who are fascinated by grammar and its many intricacies to an interesting news story about a 2.13 million dollar comma. Being a bit of a grammar-nazi myself, I find this to be immensely indicative of just how important copy-editing can be. (Via Neil Gaiman.)

JAB

That’s how much comment spam I just deleted from JBdN. And that’s just since yesterday around seven, when I deleted another one or two hundred. Barely 24 hours. Gods above, I’m just glad I’m holding all the comments for approval.

So that’s it. I’ll be instituting TypeKey in the next week or so. I have some time off this weekend, so maybe I’ll do it then.

Goddamnit, this fucking pisses me off.

JAB

I checked my email earlier and was annoyed to discover that there were over 200 pieces of comment spam posted on this site since yesterday. 200! This kinda pissed me off so I enabled comment moderation, which means that whenever you post a comment I have to approve it. ‘S’not a big deal; just means your comment might not appear for a few hours.

I don’t like doing this, however, so I’m considering one of two other options in place of it.

Word Verification: When you go to post a comment, a little image appears with six or seven letters, which you have to then type into a box to post your comment. Pretty simple to do, unless you have trouble reading the letters, which are usually wavy or some such nonsense. I’ve never had any issues with it, personally.

Typekey Registration: With Typekey, the very first time you’d go to post a comment, you would have to click on a link which would take you to another site, which looks like this. There, you would register, which is really easy to do, and then you would follow a link back to my site, where you are free to comment. The nice thing about Typekey is that the username and password you create don’t onlywork for JBdN, they work for any other blog that chooses to use Typekey. Also, it gives you an option to remain signed-in for two weeks at a time. If you post a comment after ten days, then you’re good to go for another two weeks. You can visit my Typekey profile here.

If you can’t tell, I’m leaning towards the Typekey route. It would just be make my Interweeb life a whole lot easier. So what are your guys’ thoughts on the matter? Do you have a preference between the two? If I did go with Typekey, would you bother to create an account, or would you just cease commenting?

I was going to post some pictures tonight, but the commenting issue distracted me. I’m also starting to get sick, courtesy of my mom and sister, so I believe I’ll just retire for the evening and possibly finish my book.

JAB

Earlier today, I hopped on the Web and found that JBdN was back. Gleefully I wrote a post about it in my email program, as I usually do (it has a good spellcheck program). Here is that earlier post:

As I’m sure you noticed, we were down for the past day or so. But, surprise surprise, everything A-OK now, Dr. Jones. AxisHost had a hardware failure, so everything went poop for a bit. They’re a really good company, so they’ve responded to my emails very quickly and hurried their asses up to get me and, like, a million other people up and running.

I left work early today. I’d gotten everything accomplished that I wanted to do, and we were slow as fuck, so leaving seemed like the fun thing to do. I’m getting ready to go work out, then head to Tim Horton’s and finish editing “Corporate Responsibility” and start something new.

And it’s sunny out, to boot!

JAB

Huzzah, what a happy and cheerful post! I clicked on the link to Movable Type homepage and was immediately presented with a white screen and a message: “Got an error: Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client.”

Bad things were afoot in JBdN-land.

My mind immediately sprang back to that terrible October of 2003, when an entire month’s posts were lost to a great fuck-up. I emailed Tina at AxisHost, who in all her awesomeness, fixed the problem while I was at Tim Horton’s.

So all is well, nothing was lost, and I’ve got stuff to do.

JAB

Can everyone see the banner at the top of the page? I was at Habitat earlier, and on the computer I was using the banner was not visible. I checked the source code, and it didn’t even show that an image should be there. Very strange…

Now that I’m thinking about it, how does everything else about JBdN look? I’m not sure if I’ve asked before, and I don’t feel like going through my old posts to find out.

A week or so ago, I changed the font style and made it a bit bigger. It seems more readable now to me. Do you like it better?

And while I’m on this tangent, what are your feelings towards me? Do I talk too much? Too little? Am I funny looking? Are my thoughts on sensitive subjects — like intelligent design and mormonism…ism — too mean or idiotic to you?

Let me know, bitches.

JAB

If you haven’t noticed, I’d like to point out that I redesigned JBdN. Again. For like, the eighth time. I like it now, though. ‘Course, this will probably change again in a month or so. I’m just — what’s the word? — fickle.

I’ve been sick for the last few days, and it’s still lingering. It’s awesome because I’ve also been mostly off the last few days, so I don’t even get the pleasure of calling off work. Instead, I just sit here in front of the computer and the TV, getting fat. Hence why I’ve been doing a good bit of writing, and why I redesigned again.

I need to go watch the next-to-the next-to-the-last episode of ‘Enterprise’ now. And maybe eat a donut.

JAB

I was going through some old files from high school tonight, and I ran upon a folder containing a story and a poem for a class I took my senior year: Writing for the 21st Century. It was probably one of my more favorite classes in school. Among other things, such as writing a short story and a poem, one of the projects was to design a web site for a teacher. I chose my old biology teacher, Kevin Jones, for mine. Curious if my web site still existed, I went to Northmont’s home page and found that, yes, Mr. Jones was still using the site I created waaaay back on September 22, 1999.

Now bear in mind, this was the first web site I ever designed, and it definitely shows. We used some sort of weird program, though I don’t remember what it was. What I do remember is how proud I was of the logo I created, even though it looks pretty crappy. And I recall I had a whole lotta trouble with the anchor links, which served to link to various sections on the same page. They wouldn’t work properly, failing to call up the proper section when clicked upon.

It looks so damn terrible to me now, I sort of wish I could redesign the whole damn thing, if only so that my name isn’t attached to such a boring and displeasing-to-the-eye web site. Fortunately, I doubt too many people, other than Mr. Jones’s students, have ever been subjected to its visual…failings.

So without further ado, here is Mr. Kevin Jones’s Official Homepage.

JAB

The redesigned Yummy Reviews is now up and running. The new design is pretty fucking cool, if I do say so myself. I’m almost jealous of Nate’s new layout. It’s way better than mine, so I’m thinking of re-redesigning JBdN too.

While I’m on the subject of Nate and web sites, I should also mention that he keeps a shitty Myspace blog too, which he updates fairly regularly. His posts make for great reading, full of wit and anger, but let’s face it — Myspace blows. It’s like the slutty-girl-at-school of the Internets. Everyone and their mom has experimented with it, a lot of people frequently use it, and even though you feel ashamed and dirty every time you visit it, you still find yourself being drawn back. So I’m trying to convince Nate to write a real blog, as he is quite funny. Much funnier than I. Go read his other crappy blog, then come back here and tell him how much you want him to start a real blog.

JAB

For the most part I have the layout the way I want it. Yeah, there’s some other crap I wanna add — like the late, sort-of-great Gallery, an About Me page, a Links page, and a Short Story/Writing page where I can post the bilge I keep on churning out — but the layout looks pretty fuckin’ sharp. The only thing that needs major fixin’ is the individual entry pages — y’know, the ones where I allow the three of you monkeys who desire to comment to do so.

On the right-hand sidebar, amongst the list of blogs I like — or as some of the more gay sexually ambiguous members of the blogging community like to call it, a “blogroll” — you will notice a new one: Sexy Politics, by my friend, the esteemed Allan D’Angelo. On his blog he generally discusses, aptly enough, “sex, politics, and entertainment.” He has some great ideas, especially if you’re a liberal, including labeling conservatives as Anti-Freedom instead of Pro-Life and Pro-Family, and suggesting that Wal-Mart should sell porn next to the toasters (though I personally think Wal-Mart should sell porn in the huge-ass dump tables that fill the main isles).

JAB