Ch-ch-changes
Too Many Connections - It's Not You, It's Me
Published September 14, 2009 @ 09:24 in Ch-ch-changes
 Just a quick housekeeping note for a Monday morning. The server hosting this blog is experiencing a MySQL issue. When entries are posted, comments are posted or even searches are conducted, a write to the MySQL database is required.
Periodically, the maximum number of connections to the database are exceeded and when that happens there's a period of time when comments and such don't get through.
The staff is troubleshooting the issue, and we'll fix this. As George would say, it's not you, it's me.
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The History of This Site in Pictures
Published March 20, 2009 @ 10:42 in Ch-ch-changes
 I should have taken a screen cap of every design this site has had. I now do that, but from 1999 through 2007, all I have is what was archived by the Wayback Machine.
I just visited the Wayback Machine in an attempt to salvage screen caps of the evolution of this site. Here's what I came up with, for better or worse. Vote for your favourite in the comments.
1999-2001
The earliest instance of mikeboon.com I could find in the Wayback Machine was early 2001, when this was a personal homepage as opposed to a blog. It would become a blog in 2002.
The Wayback Machine didn't properly copy the images, so this looks a little off. Note, the tributes to Bill Barilko and Pearl Jam in Toronto are already online. Those pages have survived to this day.
Hazzard County, however, was taken out back and shot about a year later. Yee haw!
2002
The Wayback Machine really mucked this one up. None of the images came through, and the CSS seems AWOL. Still, you can see the structure as it once was.
The familiar Leafs table is already in play. The Canadiana page, however, has disappeared.
A link to the blog is now in the navigation menu, but it's not yet the home page. In 2003 I wisened up and made the blog index.html.
2003
I really liked this design. You'll see in the main navigation menu that I've introduced the Homer Simpson Quote of the Week. I updated that page every weekend for years. I've also introduced the Links page, which you'll find in the main nav menu today. Every time I try to remove it so it's only accessible from the site map, somebody complains, so I put it back.
The dot missing above the "i" in that MikeBoon.com image was a red maple leaf that blinked. Animated gifs, people!!! You had to have an animated gif in 2003!
The little image that appears in every entry was something I did from the start, after seeing something similar on Slashdot. By this point, every piece of markup is done with CSS. Note, this is the blog, but there is no server-side software managing it. This was an HTML file I manually edited and uploaded via FTP. Hence, you can't comment and there are no permalinks.... yet.
2004
It looks like I took a rest from Verdana and tried Georgia for a while. I also moved the nav from vertical to horizontal across the top... although I see the Wayback Machine isn't showing the proper markup. I assure you, the menu looked better than this.
Otherwise, this is pretty similar to how it looked in 2003. I have, however, introduced the MP3 page, where I listed every album in my collection. This wasn't a manual process as I found a script that would auto-generate the HTML based on the TXT file produced by Audiograbber after I ripped each CD.
2005
What's with that creepy eye? What was I thinking?
This design looks like 2003 and 2004 mated. Before I implemented Movable Type, there was one HTML page for every month, so the page would get awfully long. I think this particular page went on for a million pixels.
2006
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Movable Type. The blog is now a true blog, with RSS, comments, permalinks, searchability, category archives, monthly archives and more. Again, I went with a "less is more" design, and I like it.
By the way, after I introduced Movable Type in early 2006, I had to manually put all the old entries into the database. That was one time consuming copy and paste job.
2007
The Wayback Machine lost my header image here... maybe because it came from the CSS. I kind of like the sidebar here in the pre-Adsense era.
I eventually blew away that weather widget because when that service went down, the loading of this page would go on forever.
I'm also experimenting with social networking chicklets... I eventually shot them dead and went with the Feedflare from FeedBurner instead.
2008 Part 1
This was the last major redesign before the one this week. I really liked it.
The header image was inspired by Spacing. I actually asked them for permission before I used it.
2008 Part 2
This is how this site looked on St. Patrick's Day 2009. Heck, that was only a few days ago.
I was happy with this design, but I needed a third column for Tweets. Since I was mucking with the HTML, I decided to blow it up and start from scratch. Truth be known, I took the March break off to chill with the family, and while they were at playdates, my idle hands became the devil's playthings. This site didn't stand a chance.
2009
Here's where I'm at as of the time of this entry. You guys gave some good feedback, which resulted in some tweaks I believe improved things. That Twitter sidebar needed a background colour so the eyes didn't blend it with the main content, and the header needed an image for a splash of colour and something less boring.
I'm now happy with this. This should stick until my next week off, sometime in July.
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'Splainin' to Do
Published March 17, 2009 @ 15:18 in Ch-ch-changes, Movable Type
This morning, I blew up this website. I run this site with Movable Type, so all the entries, pages, comments, categories, etc. reside in a MySQL database. That gives me a lot of flexibility when it comes to site redesigns. Once I write the new CSS and XHTML, I just have to paste them into the right templates and publish the site.
If you hate the changes, blame Twitter. My old design was from the pre-Twitter era when I needed one column for navigation and Adsense and another for content. Now, as I Tweet more and more, I needed a third column for my most recent Tweets. That's the spark that set this site ablaze.
While I was mucking around, I finally fixed my pagination issue. The pagination within categories now displays 10 at a time and actually adds up. I also killed the ad at the top of the category pages, because I thought it looked awful.
I also got rid of the popular header status message feature, because I don't have time to create a new image every day. Throw in a new favicon and a few other tweaks, and it's all new. Whether it's all good or not, that's yet to be seen.
Please share constructive criticism below. I'd love to see some change requests. Whattyathink?
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It's Perfect! Let's Blow 'er Up!
Published March 17, 2009 @ 10:59 in Ch-ch-changes
The design of this site has been evolving since 1999. Over the past decade I've introduced a few different looks and feels, but none I liked as much as the one in place at the time of this entry.
Even though I'm a big fan of this design, today I will blow it up and start again. I can't help myself.
For the rest of the day, things might look a little hairy over here while the work is in progress. Mind the mess, as they say. So I can remember the way it was, here's one last picture.
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The Devil's Tools
Published December 27, 2008 @ 13:48 in Ch-ch-changes
Idle hands are the devil's tools. Whenever I find myself with a little free time, I get overwhelmed with an urge to blow-up and recreate this site. Not the content, but the layout and design.
I just completely re-wrote the xhtml and css and realized I actually like the current layout and code. I'm just bored of it. That's when I got my header idea...
I've got a masthead header image on the top of every page of this site. For the past year it looked like this:
Now, it's more malleable. I'm going to change the image and bi-line frequently, with whatever pops in my head. For example, new visitors would be surprised to learn that I haven't yet seen The Dark Knight. It's a fact.
Speaking of movies, if you had to choose between Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which would you see?
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Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have Pagination
Published September 5, 2008 @ 11:09 in Ch-ch-changes, Movable Type
In this entry I mentioned my need to introduce pagination for my category pages. Some categories have many hundreds of entries making the pages very long and painfully slow to load.
MT-Hacks has a slick little pagination plug-in for Movable Type that introduces pagination. I've got it working now. For example, if you visit my Toronto Blue Jays category page, it will only display the 20 entries at a time and you'll have to advance the pages via the menu at the bottom of the page.
This is very small world we live in. The chap behind MT Hacks is the same guy who works worked with me on SLS. He was also in the passenger seat when I ran my new car into the back of a pickup on he 401 while rocking out to Everlast back in '99, but that's another story.
If you're using Movable Type for your blog or website, you really should check out MT Hacks.
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Movable Type 4.2
Published August 14, 2008 @ 10:31 in Ch-ch-changes, Movable Type
 This blog has been powered by Movable Type 3.2 for years, but last night I decided it was time for an upgrade. Movable Type 4.2 was released Tuesday and it's faster, more secure and loaded with tons of new features, especially when you compare it to 3.2.
So far, so good. Let me know if you detect any hiccups.
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Subscribe to Toronto Mike Blog Entries by Email
Published May 17, 2008 @ 11:11 in Ch-ch-changes
 I'm an RSS guy, but I'm also a realist. I get the fact that most people still don't know what the hell RSS is, how to subscribe to an RSS feed and why somebody would ever want to do that. My RSS feeds are how I read 90% of my daily web content but I understand that most people simply visit sites and blogs in their browsers, you know, the old fashioned way.
For those of you who don't want to dive into the world of RSS but like the idea of having these entries pushed to you, you can now subscribe to Toronto Mike blog entries by email.
Go ahead and give it a shot. You can always unsubscribe later...
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Category RSS
Published February 15, 2008 @ 10:55 in Ch-ch-changes, Movable Type
I got a request last night to create an RSS feed for my Toronto Blue Jays category. A Blue Jays fan site wants to syndicate the content, but my regular feed is for every entry I post, regardless of category.
I quickly learnt this was pretty easy to do in Movable Type. I now have an RSS feed for each category, if you're interested. Here are the feeds for a few of the more popular categories.
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An Update On The Site Renovation
Published November 5, 2007 @ 12:32 in Ch-ch-changes
Well, that was frustrating. Yesterday evening, while I watched the Colts and Patriots play a fairly entertaining football game, I decided to multi-task. I figured I could blow up and rebuild this site by the final whistle. This time, I'd go pure CSS.
Everything was going swimmingly. This site is still using Movable Type 3.31 which means there are templates for the permalink, monthly archive and category archive. I modularize the crap out of the code so there ends up being three template modules I pull into each template. A complete rebuild later and I saw what I expected to see... in Firefox.
IE6 has poor CSS support, and I quickly realized that the sidebar would start at the conclusion of the main body on the permalink pages. I started going through the CSS and HTML line by line, and I got everything working on the home page, but the permalink pages would no cooperate. I eventually gave up and started hacking away at it again this morning.
Right now, I believe the structure is sound and working in Firefox and IE. Let me know if I'm wrong. Now that the structure is stable, I'll start tweaking the actual appearance over the next few days. This look and feel is sort of temporary. The header image you see at the top was blatantly stolen from Spacing.ca. I "borrowed" the style because I like it. I'll call it a homage and temporary, which makes stealing A-OK on the web.
Since I can now focus on perfecting the navigation, display styles and formatting of what you see, now is a great time for you to tell me what you'd like to see and what's currently here that you can't stand. Getting a pure-CSS design to work properly in IE is more than half the battle. Now it's time for the fun part.
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