PolarLava::Blog

Let's review the year of slow to no progress.  And it's unlikely to get much better so for 2009 I'm going to just continue to meet the goals I missed here.

In no particular order, here are PolarLava's goals for 2008:

• Resume getting the backlog of all my writing online. PARTIAL, I did get more of them online, but there's a long way to go.
• Explore/Move my PhotoBlog to a separate photblog specific platform.  FAIL, Did look into this a bit, but not too seriously.  More than anything now that I got a new camera I need to take more pictures!
• Start commenting on my PhotoBlog entries so some of them are not quite as abstract.  SUCCESS, This I have done as it's relatively easy.
• Add the ability to drill down and view monthly summary and individual rides from the Yearly Summary page of my Cycling Log.  FAIL, But I still want to do this at some point.
• Add graphs to the Calendar and Yearly Summary pages of my Cycling Log.  PARTIAL, I did this everywhere except the yearly page.  And doing that shouldn't be to tough, but I just haven't gotten to it.
• Add a route mapping feature to my Cycling Log.  This might be either adding an external link to a third-party mapping site or ideally some sort of mapping within my site.  FAIL, Would like to do this as an integrate feature, but likely to go third-party as that's the only way it will probably get done.
• Write a DB class for PostgreSQL and integrate it into MyClient so you can connect to both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases at the same time.  FAIL, Another no progress thing I'd like to do, particularly for MyClient.
• Start learning a little Ruby.  FAIL, Ditto.  I actually looked at buying a book about though a couple of months ago.
• Complete project pages for my current and future projects. FAIL, Unlikely to get done and may get scaled back as I just can't support so much FOSS these days.  Bummer.
• Actually release an update for Yapter.  FAIL, This might get killed as an independent project.  I'd like to keep it and I still use an updated but unreleased version.  Really needs a complete rewrite as I'd like to use it on other projects.  Then again, I've been thinking of moving to a framework for those.
• Add a calendar entry view to PolarBlog.  FAIL, This actually is about 90% complete, but I just haven't tied up the loose ends.

So here's to another year —five in total now, of spewing out this pointless, self-serving drivel.  And like last year, this past year I've mostly been posting to the PhotoBlog and Beer topics, but occasionally have time to ramble on about other nonsense.  I guess the other big diversion this year was Twitter and my brief addiction to it.  I might go back, but right now it's just idling and gets automated posts.

Here's the obligatory links to previous blogveraries:

  
• 4th Blogversary
  
• 3rd Blogversary
  
• 2nd Blogversary
  
• A Year of Blogging

From the "Who really cares besides me" department…

I've updated the error page so when one enters a bad URL you can now correct it and redirect to what is hopefully a valid page.  And if you try to redirect anywhere but a PolarLava page, you wind up on the error page again.  Allowing redirections to outside locations would be ripe for abuse by spammers, phishers and similar treacherous cretins.

I'm guessing this is largely useful to me more than others, but basically if you fat finger a URL you can now easily fix it and get to where you were headed in the first place.

I'm certainly not looking for a job right now, but I've updated the contents and generation of my Resumé.  I didn't particularly like the look of it so I've changed to a layout that (I think) looks more professional.  Hopefully you'll agree.

It's a substantially modified version of Alex King's HTML Resume Template with a bit of header colorization and positioning CSS poached from Rob's resumé.

And as alway, a few extra tweaks were required to get it look the same in Internet Explorer.  I'm still hopeful that someday CSS will be "one size fits all."  But I'm certainly not holding my breath.

As of today I've changed the configuration of my blog to drop all trackbacks and comments that are flagged as spam by the RBL system.  Since adding the RBL feature I've had it setup to save it, but not display it.  Being I really don't get that many comments (i.e. I'm talking to myself!) I routinely have to delete a bunch of spam comments that are never displayed.  So if you have a legitimate comment and you get blocked, sorry.  You can contact me and I can make sure you're whitelisted in the RBL.  If you want to quickly check if you OK or not, just comment on this entry.

As a side note, if you're a PolarBlog user, the next update that should be out soon (?) has additional comment spam protection.