Zac Garrett

Before doing anything on a server make sure you have a valid backup. I had an issue with PHP and I thought the issue was with Postgresql. I started tweaking with the database settings and made a mistake somewhere along the way which cleared out the entire database server. All users accounts, everything, gone.

The backups I was making turned out to be worthless and therefore my only backup was prior to the server move. I imported those posts and then used google reader to find my other posts.

The site is going to have some glitches for a little while. I am still tweaking with everything, so please let me know if you find anything wrong.

As I am sitting at McCarren airport waiting for a hour delayed flight when I find this little gem.

The Onion is simply ingenious with some of the stuff they create.

After nearly twenty-four hours of playing in Photoshop and then in CSS I’ve got a new theme uploaded. As you’ve probably noticed it is much lighter in color than the site has ever been. The reason for this is due to me getting a 24 inch screen with a massive resolution. I found that light text on a dark background is very difficult to read on a really good monitor.

Let me know what you think about the new color scheme.

Thanks to Dan for helping resolve some last minute things and making the site look much better.

Comments have been enabled for all posts up to 30 days old. To post a URL in the comment you will need to use bbcode, just like most forums. This is to protect the site from spambots. On the plus side I do not use nofollow. All links posted on the site will be followed by spiders.

If anyone has an idea for the site I would love to hear about it.

New site layout. Posts should now be easier to read and I think the design looks better.

I am still updating quite a few things, but it was good enough to go live tonight. The static pages still have some design issues. I should get most of the issues resolved within the next few days. If you see anything that looks bad contact me.

I’ve been tweaking the site to add more features, but keep the simplicity of the design. I added a right navigation bar that is primarily used to provide additional resrouces people might find interesting. All of the main site navigation should is still in on the left.

An email updates option has been added to the left hand side. You can use this option to recieve email updates whenever the site is updated. The emails are powered by feedburner, so if you have any problems let me know. Continue Reading »

It had been six months since I changed the design of the site and I had the urge to update it. The design is based off the old one, but I changed quite a few things. Besides the obvious color change I’ve added some rounded corners. I found a neat little script to do most of the work for me called Spiffy Corners. I had to tweak the code a bit to get it working properly with Serendipity, but it seems to be working on all browsers.

I do not consider myself a web designer, so any and all input is welcome.

About two years ago now I wanted to learn to code PHP better than I already did. The idea came to mind to build a simple game just to play around with the language. The game turned into such a mess that I started calling the internal functions exactly what they where, crappy. When I finally ran out of time/gave up, I just called it what it was a crappy game.

A few months ago I was cleaning out my server when I found little ol’ Crappy Game once again. I found it in a state of non-functioning, the login and signup scripts were both broken due to server upgrades. I spent a few hours working on it to get it all back up and running again.

Now, go play some Crappy Game!

Word of caution: This game is not that secure. I know that the formula I used for hashing passwords is not any good. I would suggest using a random password just because I know there are probably SQL injections and all that kind of fun stuff in the script. My server should block most of these problems, but just be safe.

Yes, I have been neglecting this site the last few months. I've been busy with quite a few other things, so this has been on the back burner. I will be picking back up posting shortly.

I started this site using WordPress as it was the easiest tool to start with that I knew of. Yesterday I found a new script Serendipity that is about 100% better than WP and came from the recommendation of the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf who uses it on his toys page. After about an hour of playing with the program I was convinced that I had to use it.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours or so working with Serendipity, s9y for
short and I am always finding new features that amaze me. One of the
neatest features is how its plug-in database works, its online. Unlike
many plug-in and template systems this allows you to single click
download and install items. This is so simple it is just neat.

The template system is built on Smarty
which allows for very simple templates that can do advanced stuff. I
was able to take the default layout and turn it into this one in just a
little bit of time. It is the neatest and easiest template systems I have seen to date, especially in an open source project.

Like many systems of this sort it has plug-ins that allow to further
customize the site. They have a decent size database full of scripts
and also have decent documentation for creating your own ones. I have
yet to sit down a write my own plug-in, but I have looked at the code
in many of them and it is very clean and easy to read. I will be
writing my own plug-ins in the future and will probably write more
about this in the future.

The conversion from WP to S7Y was fairly simple. The only issue I had
was that the user you use to do the conversion needs to have
permissions on both of the databases. After giving the user full access
to both databases the conversion was very simple. There is also an
issue with images just linking from their old positions rather than
importing into the new script. I really did not expect this to be
automated though. I am still working on getting all of the images going
in this new version.

I am currently very happy with Serendipity and I believe that I will be
using it for a long time. If any of the developers read this I would
like to say thank you and keep up the great work.