Home of Heath Allyn
Actor/Musician Extraordinaire!

I added a ton of new links to all the latest geeky tweaky tools I’ve recently discovered (mostly courtesy of Lifehacker. Also updated my page of Firefox extensions that I use.

Added some new pictures to my gallery (Bloody 1, 2, 3, 4 and Magic at the Manor).

Under the Sights/Sounds section I added various videos I’ve produced. Check them out!

Updated my links page with some new links and pruned some old outdated ones. Stop by there if you haven’t in a while. I’ll probably be doing more updating there.

Updated my Bio page to reflect my current location on the highway of life.

*Cue everyone screaming as their brain is taken over with Tom Cochran’s “Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long.”*

There has long been heated debates as to whether a website should specify whether or not links open in new windows or not. One side says they do not like having that choice forced upon them, while there’s also many web newbies who don’t know about the various methods to get a link to open in a new window and therefore might get lost and confused if they click a link and are suddenly taken away from the site they were looking at to some other site.

That of course is a gross oversimplification of the matter, but suffice to say, I have removed all “target” attributes from all my links. This means that none of my links will open in new windows unless you take some action to make it so. The links are free from oppression! Enjoy the brave new world of choice!

I personally use Mozilla Firefox and ctrl-click or click the middle mouse button if I want a link to open in a new window. Even better is that the Tabbed Browser Extensions plugin for Firefox has many settings allowing you to control the opening of new windows. I love the setting that automatically opens links that refer to external sites (sites other than the one I’m browsing) in a new window, or a new background window.

I have switched my home page (and for the moment, only home page) from Movable Type to Wordpress. Consider it an experiment. I’m thinking of switching my “Human” page but wanted to wait until I had fully experimented enough to make sure I would be happy with the switch. This page is a bit simpler and less active than my Human page so it made a fit test subject.

So far, I’m quite happy. I foresee Movable Type quite possibly being totally abandoned by me for Wordpress in the near future, but we shall see after a much more in depth and extended usage test. Why? Well, Wordpress has many things going for it:

• It’s free and open source, yet still quite robust, with great features plus many more available via plugins
• I’ve read that the community is really great. Bugs are addressed in a timely manner and since it’s open source, anyone who knows what they’re doing can help improve it and write great plugins for it.
• It uses php to generate web pages on the fly. No static pages just taking up your web space. It also generates in strict compliance with web standards! Wooot!
• Once I got past the initial learning curve of staring at some php and going “duhhhhhhh” I found it actually much easier to setup, maintain, customize, hack, and manipulate than MT. Surprisingly simple and lean. When I though of a feature I wanted but it didn’t have, I quickly and easily found a plugin, installed it and had it working in the blink of an eye. I easily uninstalled and reinstalled several times. It was only a matter of minutes before I was completely back up and running again. The one or two times I had to start Movable Type from scratch were a huge pain, and I try to avoid it at all costs.

All in all, I’m extremely impressed so far, but just want to take some time and make absolutely sure before I do a total switch.

Added some new extensions to my Firefox Tweaks.

After upgrading to the latest Movable Type version which corrected a major exploit, new entry notification no longer works. It’s apparently a known issue but they don’t seem to be forthcoming with a timeframe when they will release any kind of fix for it. The upshot is that you will not receive email notifications of new entries right now. Sorry. Blame Movable Type. And throw things.

I have upgraded and fixed the ability to sign up for comment notifications. Here’s the current setup:

At the top of the page is the form to sign up for new ENTRY notification. When I make a new entry you will be emailed.

On the individual entry pages there are check boxes which will subscribe you to any comments posted to that entry if you check the box and post a comment. Be aware that if you use the “preview” function, you will need to check the box on that page before you click “post”. There are also fields where you can enter your email and subscribe to comments on that entry without posting a comment yourself, and a field to subscribe to all comments posted to any entry on that blog.

This page and my “Human” page are technically separate blogs so you’ll have to sign up for each one separately if you want notifications on both. I hope this doesn’t sound too confusing, because it really isn’t. Let me know if you find any bugginess, or problems with receiving the notifications you want.

I would also like feedback as to whether you would like entry and comment notifications to remain separate. I could change the blog subscription field to instead subscribe you to all entries AND comments by default (which you could then change later). As it stands now, if you wanted to be notified of all new entries and all new comments you would need to sign up for entries at the top of th4e page, and all comments on the comments page.