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.
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.
Yes, I blew up the site and rebuilt it. In Firefox, things look pretty good, although I have a little fine tuning to do here and there. In IE, things are quite wonky, as you might have noticed.
When I get a few minutes, I'm going to repair the damage for you IE lovers, because I know how damn many of you are out there. Can someone with IE7 please tell me if the left sidebar is at the top of the page or way down at the bottom?
Update: I need an IE7 and an IE6 user to email me a screen cap of this home page. There's a width issue I can't reproduce with my flavour of IE6 but with your help I'll know if it persists. My addy is on my contact page.
Some pages on this site must die so others may live. With less and less time in my day for blogging I thought about retiring Toronto Mike, but then I realized how much I enjoy this little hobby. I'd like to continue blogging, thank you very much.
As a compromise, I've decided to stop maintaining some pages that are part of this site but outside the blog. I'm no longer adding recently deceased celebrities to the Dead Pool page. If you want to see who's passed away recently, you'll continue to find that information at http://www.torontomike.com/rest_in_peace/.
I've also decided to stop maintaining my pictures page. I'm still sharing dozens and dozens of pictures, you'll just have to mosey on over to my Flickr account to see them. They're nicely tagged and grouped and everything. I'll let Flickr do the heavy lifting so I can focus on the blog.
That's enough cuts for today. Some gave all so Toronto Mike could live. This is the hardest part of the job hobby.
Nobody asked for it, but I'm giving it to you regardless. It's The Best of Toronto Mike.
I skimmed the last 6328 entries and tagged 79 that either touched a nerve, touched my soul or was simply significant in a sea of insignificance. You'll find those entries on one page at http://www.torontomike.com/the_best_of_toronto_mike/.
Sometimes you don't even have to ask to receive. Consider it Christmas in August... a really crappy Christmas in August.
The body of this site is a good old fashioned HTML table. It's simply two columns, but I've always intended to blow away this table and create the same effect with pure CSS.
In my spare time I've been hacking away at this CSS solution, and boy does it look sweet and behave perfectly. It's lean and mean and there's no table required. There's only one problem. When I view the new page in IE6, it's wonky.
According to these guys, 50% of web surfers are using IE6. That's a pretty big chunk of the pie. In order to accommodate this 50% slice I'd have to throw in a whack of work-arounds and hacks and it still won't look and behave quite the way it should. There is, however, another solution. I could build this site for Firefox and other modern browsers and not care about IE6 users.
It would negatively impact traffic, but since it's all about me, do I really care? I'm thinking about it...
I love that retro CBC logo with the orange, yellow and red colour scheme. You may have noticed I played off of it for the header image I threw on this site after FUVC went bust. After a few weeks of the Ceeb, I felt it was time for something a little more summery.
The new header was inspired by a picture I took this afternoon at James Gardens. As you will see, all I changed was the text.
And finally, I added a neat little widget to the Contact Mike page. If I'm online, you can chat with me in real-time. It's pretty slick, go ahead and give it a whirl.
Originally I was just going to tweak the way I post an entry time stamp and the category an entry belongs to. Then, once I started tweaking the templates and massaging the CSS, I thought more radical surgery was in order. I wanted something different.
It was a beautiful day during which I ran, went for a long walk with the family and BBQ'd, but I found time to finish phase one of the overhaul. Most of phase two will happen under the covers as I do away with all tables in favour of purely CSS alignment.
If I missed anything, or if you think something should be done differently, let me know in the comments. And to the two people who have written to tell me they hate the change, deal with it.
The Dead Pool began in September of 2000, a full year before the first blog entry. It wasn't really planned, I just thought it might be a fun little competition for me and my brothers. That page has been a part of the main navigation menu for this site ever since.
Lately I've been less comfortable with the premise of The Dead Pool. Maybe it's being a parent or part of the natural maturation process as I age, but I find myself a little embarrassed by it these days. Sure, it's been around for as long as I've been regularly updating this site, but that doesn't mean it has a preordained right to such valuable real estate. Tonight, in the shadow of the Virginia Tech massacre, I removed The Dead Pool link from the main navigation menu.
I'll still maintain the page and you can find it, as well as all other Toronto Mike links, from the sitemap. A link to the sitemap can be found at the bottom of every single page.
Who says you can't teach an old blog new tricks?
I'm trying out a plugin for Movable Type called Promote This!. It makes it easier to add quick links to add entries to Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit, Google, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites.
I'm now building these links here on the home page, on the permalink page, the monthly archive page and the category page, so I don't know what this extra strain will do to rebuild times. Let me know if you experience any weird delays posting comments or whatever.
While we're discussing delays, the Archive page now gets built once at night instead of every time a new entry or comment is added. That's why the recent posts and comments you see on that page are always from the previous day.
That is all. Remember, if you like an entry, it's now really easy to Digg it, add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks and all that funky web 2.0 jazz.
I picked up TorontoMike.com yesterday. That domain name now resolves here at MikeBoon.com. Since I've adopted the moniker, it just made sense to buy it. Now I can act cool and tell people to contact dude@torontomike.com. Or asshat@torontomike.com or pimp@torontomike.com or you get the idea...
Toronto Mike, out!
Without failure, whenever there are rumours of a snowstorm, I get the same emails and instant messages from my mom. She wants to know how much snow we're getting and when we're getting it. For my mom, I made a little change to this home page.
Beneath those photos on the right I've got a little Weather Network module that shows the current Toronto weather. My mom now knows that she can click that forecast and get all the details from the Weather Network. They'll tell her how many centimetres are falling and when they're falling.
For the record, we don't expect any precipitation from Tuesday evening to Wednesday evening.
As I enter my fifth year of blogging, I find myself 360° from where I began. In the beginning, I was writing for a few members of my family and a few friends. That was my audience and the stats proved it. I remember when I first saw the number of unique visitors creep into double digits and I recall being surprised when there were returning visitors who weren't friends or family. In the beginning, I didn't care how many people were reading, I was just having a blast writing.
At some point a couple of years ago, I saw the number of daily visitors hit triple digits and I slightly modified my focus. Heading into 2006 I decided to blog less about the completely Mike Boon-centric aspects of my life and more about subjects that would appeal to the average Torontonian or displaced Torontonian. I started focusing on the traffic, I moved to Movable Type, opened all entries up to comments and even added ads to the interior.
In 2006 I saw the number of daily visitors hit quadruple digits but I realized the content of my blog would never have mass appeal. If I wanted more eyeballs and if I actually wanted to make any money from this, I'd have to dramatically modify my entire approach to this blog. It would become less interesting for my family and friends but more interesting to the thousands of new visitors who hit this site after Googling. I'd have to sacrifice the current organic state of my writing for a more manipulative, skewed approach designed to increase returning visitors. I'd also have to add sponsored links to the home page.
Here we are in 2007 and I find myself right back where I started. I'm going to write about what I want to write about, regardless of whether there are 20 people reading or 20,000 people reading. I'll always be naturally curious as to how people get to this site, but I'm not going to care about how many unique visitors there are or how many returning visitors there are. It just doesn't matter.
From now on, it's all about me. This is a hobby, a public display of a passion for writing. It's Mike Boon-centric and you can either visit or not. I'm a regular guy who loves his family, his city, his hockey team, his music and his Simpsons. When something interests me, I'll write about it. Everyone is welcome to follow along, but when I write I'm writing for a few members of my family and a few friends.
It's just like it was in the beginning.
Whenever I update my pictures page, I archive older pictures on that page to a second page. Today, this second page refused to rebuild.
I believe I've hit some sort of Movable Type limitation with regards to file size. That second pictures page was getting awfully big. Being the genius that I am, I've decided the solution is to spread these pictures over three pages instead of two.
I see my Dead Pool page is getting rather long as well. I wonder how long it will be before I hit the same ceiling.
I launched the Guest Blog service on November 16, 2003. At the time, this site was hand-coded without any CMS, and comments weren't accepted. A Guest Blog was an easy way to promote a sense of interaction. If you had something to say, you could say it.
Now that this site is powered by Movable Type, anyone can comment on anything. For those who enjoy following the comments, a few recent changes have made this much easier. Recent comments are now displayed on the Recent Posts, Recent Comments & Categories page and you can subscribe to the comments RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TorontoMikeComments.
Over the years there were many guest blog entries, and you'll find them all archived right here. Frequent contributions were made by Jill/jewelgurl, twins in bolton, Roshan, James, Vanessa, The Grinch, Kara, Annemarie and Mike H. If you guys or anyone else wants me to write about something in particular, contact me.
If you're looking for one page that lists every page on this site including RSS feeds, the site map is always current. The Guest Blog had three good years, but now it's mainly used by evil doers as a tool for spamming me. She did not go gently into that good night.
I'm a big fan of RSS feeds. Using the Firefox add-on Sage, a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator, I stay up to date with my favourite blogs and news pages throughout the day.
I have a favour to ask those of you who have already subscribed to my RSS feed at http://www.mikeboon.com/index.xml. Could you please unsubscribe to that feed and subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TorontoMike instead? It's the same content, but it makes my life easier. I appreciate it.
For the rest of you, if you want to add my feed, it's easy to do at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TorontoMike.
Before I forget and while there's a pause in the overtime action, there is now an RSS feed for comments made on this site. A request was made and I thought it was a pretty good idea. This new comments feed is at http://www.mikeboon.com/comments.xml.
The regular ol' entry feed remains at http://www.mikeboon.com/index.xml. If you're wondering what the heck this RSS thing is, read this.
Back to overtime...
I made a few modifications to this site to help people find what they're looking for.
Some people like to track recent comments to see who's discussing what and where it's all going down. I've added a new column to the archives page that lists the fifteen most recent comments, who made them and what entry they were made on. http://www.mikeboon.com/archives.html is the page to go to quickly browse the 40 most recent entries, the 10 most recent comments, every category and monthly archive. A link to this page can be found on the right of every page, just above the link to my Flickr page.
I've also freshened up the sitemap so it's sorted by theme and all-inclusive. If it's a page I maintain, you can link to it from there. A link to this sitemap is on the bottom of every page in the copyright footer.
Finally, I've installed a sweet Movable Type plugin for faster search results. Results are now instant when you search via the search field you'll find on every page. Go ahead and try and break it. Remember though, it's only searching blog entries, not static pages.
That is all.
Last night I got that itch again. You know that itch you get when your blog has had the same look for months and months? I got it last night and by the time I logged off at 10pm my site looked like this.
I'm still tweaking it, but so far I'm digging the change. For the first time in the history of this site, I fixed the width. 800 x 600ers be damned! If you're one of those that now has a dreaded horizontal scroll bar, let me know in the comments. While you're commenting, let me know what you like or dislike about the new look. The header banner is temporary.
"Things do not change; we change." ~ Henry David Thoreau
It's been quite the week for this little site of mine. On Thursday, the company that was hosting this site suddenly realized I had blown past my bandwidth allotment for August. The thing is, I had exceeded my limit back on August 14. I just assumed it was a very soft cap and nobody was paying attention. On August 31, they locked down this site until I forked over more cash for a bigger plan. In my brilliance, I decided to leave the site down for the remainder of Thursday knowing that Friday wasn't just another day, but another month.
On Friday the site was back, but there was a sporadic outage. Something about the account being moved to a different server and DNS changes having to propagate. Of course, there was no warning.
On Saturday I awoke, had access to my site, and backed up the Movable Type database. I threw up Homer's Quote of the Week, as I do every Saturday morning, and noticed I was just about out of space on my hosting plan. I had a few MBs left. This was the weekend for Plan B. Then, I lost access to this site completely, as well as a few other sites I maintain on the same server. According to my real-time stats, people were visiting. A quick chat with my brother, my mom and a friend confirmed they could all see the site. For me, however, the connection timed out. I ran a tracert for the domain, saw it stall at the first stage and blamed my ISP for what I perceived to be a DNS or Routing issue. Three calls to Rogers later, a million trouble shooting checks and a reboot of the modem and I still couldn't access my own site. Everyone else could, only I was in the dark. Eventually I did something that would change my IP address and suddenly I was in like Flint. The company hosting my site blocked my IP address from accessing the server that was hosting sites I own and maintain. I immediately updated the DNS name servers for mikeboon.com and kicked off plan B.
Plan B was essentially me moving this sucker over to my friend's server. The price was perfect. At my new home I installed and configured Movable Type, installed the database back up I had grabbed that morning and waited for DNS propagation. I went to bed Saturday night with the assumption all would be back to normal Sunday. I was wrong.
Sunday was pasta sauce canning day. We spent the entire day at my moms canning tomatoes. Check out the pics! Periodically, I'd check out the site to see if it was pointing at its new home. I was assured the transition would be seamless. Around 10am, mikeboon.com began resolving at its new home, but the results weren't what I was expecting. The site couldn't be found. I threw my bud an email explaining what I had done and where we were at. I went to bed Sunday night still waiting for a reply.
Here we are on Labour Day Monday and all is well. My helpful friend missed a configuration step on his end, which explains yesterday's outage. I spent this morning getting the forms working again, installing the FlickrPhoto plugin, and rebuilding everything. All seems well.
If you're still with me, rest assured things have stabalized. Humble Howard fans will be happy to find http://www.mikeboon.com/2006/07/humble_howard_are_you_okay.html back online, family will be happy to see I finally updated the pictures page, Simpsons fans can get their Homer quote fix and celebrity death watchers will be shocked to learn of The Crocodile Hunter's demise. Now I have an entry to write while the CNE is still open.
Six hours of uninterrupted up time. Sweet.
At some point early yesterday morning, the company that hosts this site realized I was way over my bandwidth limit. In a bold attempt to extract some more coin from me, they threw up a 509: Bandwidth Limit Exceeded error and took me down for the remainder of the month. Luckily, it was August 31st and I decided to ride it out for 20 or so hours.
Here's the problem. The traffic to this site is more than I anticipated, so something has to give or this sucker will be offline for the last half of September. Nobody wants that. So, I'm going to plan B, and I've got to get there fast.
Sorry for the outage. Welcome to September.
The new look of this site is one week old tonight, but I hadn't given it a solid look in Internet Explorer until this morning. Sure, I gave it a cursury glance in IE to make sure the new code actually worked in the world's most popular browser, but my primary focus was how it looked in Firefox.
This morning I blew away the old main navigation menu at the top of this page in favour of a different look to complement the recent overhaul. It was quite easy to get things where I wanted it in Firefox, but IE didn't play nice with the new CSS. A tweak here and a hack here and I got her to an acceptable point for those viewing this site in Billy Gates' browser. While I was in IE, I decided to click around and I didn't like what I saw.
For starters, the background image in the top left hand corner of this site seems to reload with every page change. That causes an ugly flicker effect that you don't get in Firefox. What's the point of clearing the image only to bring in the same image in the same place? The CSS has it in the body tag and every page in this site is reading the same CSS file, so wtf? For those of you not yet using Firefox, you really should give it a whirl and see what you're missing. Furthmore, I hated how IE interpretted the line spacing I had in the CSS. Why didn't any of you tell me that there was all that space between lines of text? You don't see that in Firefox. As a result, I stopped controlling the line spacing in the CSS file which seems to have fixed things in IE.
I won't bore you with yet another list of reasons why you should switch browsers. I'm sure, like a chain smoker, you've heard all the reasons in the world to stop doing what you're doing but for one reason or another, you can't help yourself. If you need a refresher on why you should get Firefox, here are all my entries that reference the word "firefox".
On February 7th, I relaunched this site, powered by Movable Type. I went back and manually put all previous entries from 2006 into MT but I left entries from November 2002 through December 2005 in their original files. The plan, as I outlined it here, was to knock off one month's worth of entries every week. I guessed I'd be done by the fall.
A little piss and vinegar and a lot of tedious effort late and nights and here and there and I'm finished way ahead of schedule. It took almost three months of concentrated effort, but all 4355 entries are now here in Movable Type and therefore indexed for the search you now find on the right side of every page. Also, where appropriate, I've thrown these 4355 into relevant categories, which you'll find below.
Phew!
It started innocently enough. Last night, at about 10:00 pm with the kids asleep and a little time on my hands, I decided to muck around with the css for this site. By 11:00 pm I was modifying templates and completely redesigning the side bar options. This afternoon, I tweaked a little more here and there and threw an image in the top left corner. The results are before you, unless I've gone and messed things up a little more between the writing of this entry and the time you read it.
My objective was to create a little more white space and clean things up somewhat. I felt a colour change was in order, so I ran with TTC rocket red. In order to make things a little more user friendly, you can search the archives from every page and jump to any month since I started the blog back in November 2002. I'm still migrating old entries over to Movable Type, so you won't find November and December 2005 quite yet.
I've received a couple of notes from people who miss the old look. My mom, however, likes the new one. Of course, she's my mom and might be telling me what I want to hear, so I need you to give me honest feedback in the comments.
In the words of the immortal Dr. Johnny Fever, give it to me straight doctor I can take it.
Remember when I celebrated my new big ass web 2.0 font last month? Considering my Leaf recap will be detailing yet another loss, I'm thinking the smaller the font, the better.
I'm back to 10 pt Verdana. I always seem to come back to 10 pt Verdana. I'm clearly a 10 pt Verdana kind of guy.
If you're having trouble reading this, hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and roll your mouse wheel towards you. If that didn't do anything, get a real browser and try again.
Now that I've made the move to Movable Type, I've got years of hand-coded archives I want to migrate over. This has to be done manually, one entry at a time. There thousands and thousands, dating back to November 2002.
My intent is to bring over one month's worth of entries every week. While this construction is ongoing, you might find an interesting discrepancy between the MT-generated archives and my old hand-coded archives. If you want to view a previous month, my old hand-coded archives will be your best bet until everything's converted.
So far, I've got all of 2006 moved over. Now, I've decided to start with November 2002 and work forwards until I eventually hit December 31, 2005. I suspect that will happen some time in the fall.
Tedious: (adj.) Tiresome by reason of length, slowness, or dullness; boring.
Another benefit of moving to Movable Type is an automated RSS feed. I was manually maintaining the old one.
The new RSS feed for this site is at http://www.mikeboon.com/index.xml. Now we're cooking with gas.
I warned you more changes were coming. This is the biggie.
For years I fought the push to implement a CMS solution. I derived a great deal of pride from hand-coding this entire site and ensuring it successfully validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Even the CSS and RSS feeds were hand-coded and validated by the W3C. I wrote about my CMS resistance here, here, here and here.
Today marks a new era for this blog, powered by Movable Type. New entries will have Permalinks, Comments, TrackBacks and all that bloggy goodness. Big props to my pal Mark for giving me the final push I needed. I recreated February's entries in MT, but I've left everything previous in its old school state. If I ever find some free time I'll start recreating older entries as well. There are thousands, so it hurts to think about it.
Although I implemented the Guest Blog because I didn't allow comments, I've decided to keep it. Anyone can write one and I'll post it as I always do. On the right I'm using a neat little plug-in that displays the last ten pictures I uploaded to my Flickr account. Let me know what you think of the changes in the comments.
It's evolution, baby.
Just last night I unveiled some changes to these pages. Judging from the immediate response, 12 point is just too big for you guys. Perhaps the jump from 10 to 12 was just too dramatic.
I've dropped her back down to 11 point. It's still larger than it was yesterday morning, but smaller than it was last night. I'll let it ride a little in this current state but you can continue to share your opinion with me.
More dramatic changes are currently in development. More on that, later...
No, I haven't thrown a bunch of Ajax in the mix, but I did follow the lead of many so-called Web 2.0 sites and made a couple of changes to the aesthetics.
For starters, I changed the font family from Verdana to Arial. That seems to be the way the wind is blowing these days. More significantly, I've upped the main font size from 10 point to 12. Most of you are reading this on a 17" screen or larger and just about all of you are 1024x768 or greater. You've got the room for 12 and I'm sure you'll find it an easier read once you get used to it.
If you hate the changes, don't worry. I'm bound to get bored and change it up again soon.
For years the central tones of this site were blue and white. My blue of choice has been #000080 and I've splashed it all over these pages. The header and main menu, the <H1> tag, the entry dates and titles, all borders, the footer bar and even the input buttons. Life was good.
I've weeded out all instances of good ol' #000080 and replaced it with #000000, better known as black. You might have noticed. I'm back in black, I hit the sack, I been too long I'm glad to be back. Yes, I'm dead loose, from the noose that's kept me hanging around.
Lemme know if you hate the black and white thing or if you just miss the blue. Also, if there's a colour combo you want me to try, spill it.
Still valid XHTML 1.0 and valid CSS, as if you give a damn. You should but you don't and I respect that.
Some say an idle mind is the devil's plaything. I believe it's more correct to say boredom is the devil's plaything. I woke up this morning, took a look at the layout for this site and was bored.
It's a fresh year and I'm thinking about a fresh presentation. I made a few minor tweaks today to get me over the hump and I'll be thinking about a more radical makeover over the coming weeks. I've only tested today's changes in Firefox 1.5 and IE6, so please let me know if things look hairy. You might want to reload the page <F5> first, to ensure you're reading the new style sheet.
As always, all code is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and valid CSS and thrown together by hand in a simple text editor. Some things haven't changed.
Back in July, I wondered aloud as to whether or not I should alter the naming convention I utilize to organize my collection of MP3s. Should "The Flaming Lips" be "Flaming Lips, The"? Is "Neil Young" better sorted as "Young, Neil"?
I decided the answer to both question is yes and I've made the changes on this page. While I was mucking around in there, I took soundtracks out of "Various Artists" and placed them under "OST". I also took the Christmas discs out of "Various Artists" and now sort them by "Christmas Music". Should a Christmas album be from a single artist, like the Barenaked Ladies' "Barenaked For The Holidays", that remains under "Barenaked Ladies".
If you find any mistakes or have any further suggestions, please let me know.
You know that "to do" list we mentally keep of things to bang off as soon as other stuff dies down? I keep one, and it had a list of things to do to this web site as soon as other projects wrapped up. This weekend, I finally found the time to complete everything on my MikeBoon.com "to do" list.
One thing I've been meaning to do for a while is clean up the way navigation is handled once you're in the Archives. For example, if someone is viewing the entries from March 2004, I wanted it to be simple to visit the preceding or following months. Sure, the main menu has links for the home page and aforementioned Archives, but I've always envisioned a horizontal band along the bottom above the copyright information. I've now done just that.
When I recently edited the CSS to change his site from navy blue to this new greenish blue, I quickly realized that the "more" button I had beneath the entries shortcuts on the right hand side wouldn't change because it was an image. I made a note to myself to delete the image and replace it with something utilizing my CSS so when I change the colour scheme I also change that button. Done, and done!
At the top of all the archived news pages there was a heading indicating what month of archives you were looking at followed by a "To visit recent blog entries click here" statement. It was totally redundant and therefore unnecessary so I blew it away. I mean, c'mon... there's a link to the home page of the blog at the top of every single page.
Finally, I got rid of all back arrows that appeared on the bottom of every page. This was just an image of a blue arrow pointing to the left that, when clicked, invoked a javascript that read the previous page in your browser's history. It died for several reason. It was an image and therefore hard coded to be blue, it was a javascript and I'm simplifying the code wherever possible and it's unnecessary. If you want to go backwards in your browser, you've probably got an arrow in your browser's toolbar and if you don't you can click ALT + back arrow on your keyboard. It's your web and you're in control.
Otherwise, I just did some spring cleaning in September repairing broken links, ensuring each page validates, fixing typos and cleaning the source code. Exciting stuff like that.
Before you mutter to yourself that this was one boring entry, remember, these notes are really here for my benefit so I know what I changed and when I changed it. I learned long ago that the target audience for these notes and ramblings is yours truly. It certainly works as my recent note to self has reminded me that I have a new "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to enjoy tonight. Giddy-up!
I finally got around to creating an RSS feed of this blog. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and you can read all about it here.
You'll notice I opted for the orange "RSS" buttons (check beneath the Recent Entries list on the right) instead of the popular "XML" buttons. I followed the BBC's lead on this one because I've always felt the "XML" buttons were confusing. Sure, it's an XML document, but it's only ever used for RSS readers and news aggregators.
My feed is at http://www.mikeboon.com/index.xml.
The CGI script I was using for searches within this site never really pleased me. It seemed a little too buggy and unpredictable for my liking, so last night I tapped into the powers of Google and will use their prowess to power MikeBoon.com searches.
As always, you can search this site from www.mikeboon.com/archives.html. A link to this search page is at the bottom of every page. Go ahead and try the new and improved search at MikeBoon.com.
I made four changes to the presentation of this website. There's no way you'll be able to spot all four. Sure, you might get a couple, but all four? No way.
The four subtle changes are:
I'm currently fighting an urge to blow up this whole thing and try a completely different look and feel. It will all be hand coded, of course, and will be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with valid CSS. Accept no substitutes.
I've changed the way I share pictures from this site. I've always had a Pictures page where I post pictures I want to share, and I'll continue to do just that, but henceforth these pictures will actually be hosted by Flickr.
This alone won't create a noticeable difference to visitors, but since every picture I share is actually hosted by Flickr, I thought I may as well link to my Flickr page where people can access any notes I've added and peruse the various tags. If you go to Pictures now you'll see a new reference above the date in the first row. Clicking that »Flickr« link takes you to the Flickr page for the picture, if you're interested. If not, just click the thumbnail as usual for a larger photo.
I'd post new pictures from Michelle's birthday party yesterday, but she just chewed my USB cable and broke it. That's the second one she's done that to, which means the pictures are stuck on the camera for one more day and I'm moving to an XD card reader.
If this site looks a little different today, it's because every font you see is Georgia. Everything had been Verdana for such a long time I felt an itch to switch.
Periodically I change up the font family of my site, but I always end up with Verdana or Georgia. None of the others seem appropriate. I use Courier New throughout Custom's site, but when I tried it here it just seemed wrong. We'll go with Georgia for a while until I get sick of it again.
Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through. Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.
Good news everyone, the highly entertaining content on this site remains completely free! All of this glorious insight, interesting news, weekly MP3s and cute pictures of my kids continues to cost you absolutely nothing.
I considered putting ads on this site in an attempt to recoup some the costs associated with the domain name and hosting, but I refuse to sell out. This note's for you...completely ad-free.
If you want to throw a quarter in the bucket, I am now accepting donations via Paypal. You certainly don't have to contribute, but if you so desire you can simply click here to make it so. It's Paypal so you know it's secure. I won't bug you with this begging again so if you decide to contribute at a later date you'll find a Paypal button on the very bottom of every page.
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.
This site has been hand coded in valid XHTML 1.0 for quite some time now, but it was XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Yesterday I changed my DOCTYPE declaration and tweaked each page so it's now valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. See for yourself!
Because I was already writing in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional it wasn't that big a leap. Mainly I just had to move my image alignment and hspace into the CSS where it belongs. CSS is a wonderful thing.
In September 2003 I converted these page to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and now I've converted them to XHTML 1.0 Strict so where do I take them next?
Earlier this afternoon I glanced at my site and felt an itch I had to scratch. I realized it's been over a year since the last major change to the look and feel of these pages so I started hacking away at the CSS in an attempt to freshen her up a little.
Many of the modifications are subtle but the change I made to the main navigation menu is pretty damn obvious. We were vertical and now we're horizontal. This way I've got more real estate for the body. If you're looking for the search field I had at the left of every page, I've moved it to my new search page and link to it at the bottom of every page, right beside the link to the Site Map.
I'm sincerely interested in whether this is an improvement or not, so if you have a thought or two pass it on.
I've maintained a website at http://mikeboon.com since 1999. Over the past five years, there's always been a page for news of sorts or the hot items of the day, but this detail was never archived and would just vanish when I over wrote it with another blurb. Until two years ago today, this front page was divided into four quadrants, each hosting a different item of interest. Then, on November 30, 2002, I started this blog with an entry I called "Grunge Forever". Below, in it's entirety, is that first entry.
November 30, 2002 / 12:27 EST
Grunge Forever
Music peaked in 1991-1994. Specifically, the days between the release of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and the moment a self-inflicted gunshot pierced Kurt Cobain's brain. There is little doubt of this fact.Here we are in the year 2002..almost 2003 and this music from the early 90's "grunge" scene continues to dominate rock charts. Lets take a closer look at the current top 7 from CFNY's (I'm well aware they're now Edge102, but they'll always be CFNY to me) Thursday 30 which I have posted below.
- Nirvana - You Know You're Right
- Foo Fighters - All My Life
- Pearl Jam - I Am Mine
- Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows
- U2 - Electrical Storm
- Audioslave - Chochise
Notice anything interesting about these bands? Am I stuck in a time-warp? Holy moly Marge...every band represented or at least a part of every band represented is straight outta 1991. Let's take a closer look, shall we?
Nirvana - A band straight outta 1991.
Foo Fighters - A band with a lead singer and song writer straight outta Nirvana which is a band straight outta 1991.
Pearl Jam - A band straight outta 1991.
Queens of the Stone Age - A song with a drummer straight outta Nirvana which is a band straight outta 1991.
U2 - A band straight outta 1991.
Audioslave - A band with a lead singer straight outta Soundgarden which is a band straight outta 1991.Get the picture? Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell and Dave Grohl have something to do with 6 of the top 7 songs in the current Thursday 30. Further proof that 1991 Seattle was the epitome of rock unquestionably, undeniably and unarguably.
Thanks to the Internet Archive waybackmachine, you can take a look at this site as it appeared on April 5, 2001, October 7, 2001, October 20, 2002, and December 19, 2002.
I made several changes to the main navigation menu of this site today. For starters, I completely altered the way the menu is rendered by rewriting the entire CSS. Although it doesn't look that different from the previous menu, the code for this is a great deal cleaner. Less is more when it comes to CSS.
While I was changing the aesthetics of the main navigation menu on the left, I decided to blow away the links to Videos and Hyperlinks and added links to my Tragically Hip and Bill Barilko pages. I noticed I get a great deal of traffic from people Googling one or the other so I promoted them. Homer's Quote of the Week, however, remains the page Google refers to the most. Google Homer's Quote and you'll see why.
A single Pictures page wasn't cutting the mustard any more. I'm adding pictures all the time and the Pictures page keeps getting longer and longer. I've split the page into two so that the Pictures page continues to host the most recent pictures while another page hosts archived pictures and old favourites. It's pretty straight forward, you'll catch on quick.
I've made another change to the two Pictures pages. You may have noticed that next to each thumbnail I posted the date I took the shot. Apparently there was much confusion with the formatting of these dates. Which number represented the year? Which number represented the month? Wonder no more because I'm now using letters to indicate the month. Pictures posted today, for example, will show a date displayed as follows: Nov 19, 2004. I've also reduced the date font to a 6 point because I felt like it.
Finally, I've amended the code of all pages referenced on My MP3s. Previously, visiting the page for a CD in my collection like Neil Young's "Freedom" resulted in a dead end. There was no link to the rest of my site. Every day dozens and dozens of people Google their favourite songs and end up on one of my pages only to go away without experiencing Homer's Quote, the Dead Pool or this exhilarating blog. That won't happen again. I won't let it happen again. All 519 album pages now include the main navigation menu.
My work here is done.
You're viewing this page in Firefox, right? If that's a little blue "e" in the top left corner, you haven't made the switch yet. Firefox is my web browser of choice and I strongly urge everyone to install and use it.
If you are viewing this page in Firefox, you'll notice the navigation menu to your left is static. (You may need to reload the page - press F5) As you scroll down this page, the navigation menu stays put, making it much easier to visit other pages without having to scroll all the way back up to the top. This is done quite simply with CSS using code that has been blessed by the W3C, yet it won't work in Internet Explorer.
Today, the Mozilla Foundation unleashed its long-awaited Firefox 1.0 web browser. This has resulted in an overwhelming amount of traffic to getfirefox.com as hundreds of thousands of people look to download a better browser. If you're still using Internet Explorer and need to install Firefox, it would probably be best to wait another day or two before trying to access the download site. Then you can enjoy the fixed navigation menu on this site.
You can now search the contents of this website. On every page you'll find a search field beneath the main navigation menu on the far left side. You can't miss it, it's the one labelled "Search MikeBoon.com".
Search to your heart's content. As a test I just did a search for papal fridge and learned I used the term back in July 2003. That term is highly under used in my humble opinion. A Pope's gotta eat, right?
Last night I migrated this site to a new host. All in all it was pretty slick thanks to these guys. Hopefully you didn't even notice.
I'll be making some changes to this site over the next few days, introducing a forum for comments and the ability to search within MikeBoon.com. It's time to kick this up a notch.
Stay tuned...
I threatened to change the Pictures page now that I have a digital camera and I've just delivered as promised.
The Pictures page now has a caption beside each image. I've also added a picture taken last night and another taken moments ago. What are you waiting for? Get to it!
In the past I've written about how I hand code every stitch of this website. I use a basic text editor and hand code valid XHTML and CSS. I've been resisting the pressure to start using one of the many blogging tools, especially Movable Type. Mark has been suggesting I do this for well over a year now and I even went to far as to set up a test blog with Movable Type.
Movable Type is what drives our Smells Like Sour page and it's great for easy maintenance, comments and other cool things like that. It's also free...or at least it was free. The new version isn't free any more. You might have read that many a non-commercial blogger is pissed off about this. Once something is free, even if it's great, people don't like to hear it's no longer free. People get used to free and expect it to stay that way forever.
For MikeBoon.com, I'm going to keep it simple and continue hand coding it without an ounce of help from blogging software. That way, I'm in control and I never have to worry the free service I'm using might suddenly cost me money. Besides, if it ain't broken why fix it?
If you glance at the main navigation menu on the left, you'll notice a new link to My MP3s. As promised, I've made this page easier to access.
Since I completed my digitalization project back in December, I've made a few significant changes. First of all, I decided 128kbps wasn't quite good enough for my purposes. I re-ripped every single CD at 160kbps. This time, I pretty well ripped my entire collection, warts and all. A visit to My MP3s lists every CD in my MP3 collection and clicking the CD name will display every track on that CD. As James would say, "All done!".
You may have noticed a different appearance for MikeBoon.com. It's been soaked in green. Don't worry, this isn't permanent. The green will only be here through St. Patrick's Day.
The best part is, because all the presentation in this site is driven by a cascading style sheet, it took me all of 13 seconds to make this change. If you haven't gone CSS yet with regards to your site, you're crazy.
With 2003 coming to a close, I'm making another minor change to this site. Yesterday I announced that my "Quote of the Week" will be posted here every Sunday and the "Homer's Quote of the Week" will be posted here every Saturday. I'm also making a change to the way I handle additions to the Dead Pool list.
Every time there is a death in the celebrity world, I record it on my Dead Pool page. I'll continue to do so, but I'll also add a note about the death here on this front page.
When the passing is one I feel is very significant and affects me in a personal way, I'll write a few thoughts about the deceased like I did for Johnny Cash. Otherwise, I'll just add a single line explaining who they were and their age at the time of death. I just added a name to the Dead Pool list, so I'll be adding his name here in a moment.
I'm making a few minor changes to a couple of weekly features of this site. In the past, I've posted "Mike's Quote of the Week" every Saturday morning. You'll see this morning's quote right below this entry. Starting next weekend, I'm going to be posting "Mike's Quote of the Week" on Sunday mornings instead.
The reason for this minor change is because of what I intend to do with the ever-popular "Homer's Quote of the Week". For those who aren't aware, every Saturday morning I post a quote from Homer Simpson on the "Homer's Quote of the Week" page. I'll still do so every Saturday morning, but I'll also post the same quote on this page. So, if you want one stop shopping to access the current quote as well previous quotes from Homer Jay Simpson, "Homer's Quote" is still accessible from the left navigation menu. If you're a lazy bastard and you just want to check this front page for the latest, you can do that too. It's up to you. I'm posting today's Homer quote here in a moment.
Am I crazy to still be hand-coding this site? I edit every stitch of MikeBoon.com in a basic text editor (good ol' Notepad does the trick nicely) building and maintaining it character by character. I know the XHTML and CSS that make up this site intimately, but am I wasting my time? Sometimes I wonder.
A friend of mine swears by Movable Type. He uses MT to manage a number of sites and has been encouraging me to convert. Others maintain their blog with help from Blogger, Radio UserLand, LiveJournal or another weblog publishing tool. At the very least I should be using software to build this site, like Dreamweaver, Pagemill or Frontpag perhaps. Yet here I am hand-coding this very entry.
I know why I do it. I love the control, I take pride in the accomplishment and I find the entire process to be rather romantic. Allow me to explain. When you hand-code every aspect of a site you have absolute control over how it behaves. If there's an issue or something that needs repairs, you can make the desired change and achieve the desired effect in no time at all. Should you envision an enhancement, you know exactly how to make it so. It's your XHTML and your CSS and nobody will ever know it the way you do. This is where the romantic aspect comes in. You start to feel emotionally attached to the source code. You find yourself staring at it in Notepad and swooning. You're validating each page with the W3C MarkUp Validation Service and beaming with pride when the blue banner proclaims your page is valid XHTML 1.0. You're proud of your creation because nobody helped you. No software saved you time and cluttered up your code and no software managed your blog entries for you. Now if you don't mind, I'd like a moment alone with my code.
Apparently, if a page is not part of the navigation menu on the left, it doesn't get visited. Nobody visits the MikeBoon.com Sitemap to learn that other pages exist. Out of sight, out of mind I suppose.
As a result, I just added a couple of pages to the navigation menu. You'll now find links for Guest Blog and HyperLists. I launched Guest Blog about a week ago while my HyperLists page has been around since I first launched MikeBoon.com over four years ago. Guest Blog is a submission form where anyone can write anything and have it posted here. HyperLists is where I maintain my Top 10/5 lists with hyperlinks to a quality site on the subject.
I also eliminated the "Valid XHTML 1.0" reference on each page because I felt it was too geeky. I've buried that link in Links where it belongs.
I'm going to start something new. I've created a Guest Blog Submission Page as part of this website. Should you have something you'd like to express to a mass audience, you can use MikeBoon.com as your forum.
It's easy like Sunday morning. Click here and rant, attack, bloviate, declare, decry, denounce, harangue, hold forth, inveigh, lecture, mouth, orate, perorate, proclaim, rail, recite, soapbox, speak, spiel, spout or talk big about anything you want. I'll post your guest blog entry and credit it to you. You have a voice and I want to hear it.
I fondly recall a time when having four new messages in my inbox meant receiving four pieces of communiqué I actually wanted. I don't think I've experienced this sensation since the '90s. My personal email address has become a target for unwanted solicitation for everything from fake diplomas to penile enlargements and everything in between.
I have only myself to blame. I had links to my email address on the bottom of every page of this site and again on the Contact Mike page. Spammers use e-mail harvesting software to scour the web looking for email addys. In an effort to fight this war against spam, I have removed my email address from this site. You'll still find my email address on the Contact Mike page, but it's an image and not text. Spammers won't be the wiser.
Until we defeat this evil empire, I'm mike(symbol you get when you press SHIFT + 2)mikeboon.com.
I'm proud to declare that all pages within MikeBoon.com conform to the W3C XHTML 1.0 standard. That means these web pages are now full-fledged XML documents, which can be validated using any XML parser. Go ahead and click that XHTML 1.0 logo to the left and see for yourself.
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used for MikeBoon.com have also been validated by the W3C's CSS2 standard. You're welcome to click that CSS logo to the left for proof. Impressed?
In a previous blog entry (see August 25, 2003 / 16:03 EST), I ranted and raved about my attempts to validate my HTML 4.01 code for MikeBoon.com. HTML 4.01 was the standard before XHTML 1.0. The future, it seems, is XML and since XHTML is XML-based, and ultimately designed to work in conjunction with XML-based user agents, it was really the only way to go as I saw it. I promise future blog entries will be slightly less boring.
The World Wide Web Consortium specifies the standards for HTML 4.01. Their MarkUp Validation Service will actually check your HTML code for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. As a hand-coder who takes pride in the tidiness of his HTML and CSS, I wanted my code to be validated. Don't we all?
In order to validate your HTML, you must define a DOCTYPE. I added this code to the very top of my page: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">. I then added the appropriate character set to my meta tags: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">. Ready for validation, I submitted my pages and learned my HTML code did comply with the standards for HTML 4.01. All is well, right?
Wrong. Once I added the above DOCTYPE declaration, my pages were validated but Internet Explorer began forcing a horizontal scroll bar for no reason in particular. I went through my HTML code character by character but there was nothing that would force a horizontal scroll bar. It seems Microsoft is playing by their own rules and doesn't like me adding the DOCTYPE declaration for W3C validation. There is no way my site can be validated by the W3C and viewed properly in IE all at once. Isn't that ridiculous? This is wrong! There is clearly a choice to be made here. Either I keep the DOCTYPE declaration that will validate my code as being compliant with HTML 4.01 specifications or I can remove it so those using Internet Explorer will see the site as it's intended to look. What would you do?
In my blog entry of August 3rd, I announced that this front page of MikeBoon.com had undergone some major surgery. I also asked you to let me know if the end result was better or worse than the previous concept that had been around for the past seven months.
The clear consensus from those who bothered to drop me a line is that you preferred the old front page. To quote one visitor, "No sir, I don't like it". To quote another, "As my Uncle Oloff used to say 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'". And yet another, "I miss the old home page!".
I do appreciate the feedback, but here's what I think...this new concept is better! You'll notice there are more frequent postings and you're still only one click away from pictures, videos, the Dead Pool, Homer's Quote of the Week or whatever. With everythng time-stamped and archived, you won't miss a beat.
I think you people are suffering from Metathesiophobia. Metathesiophobia, or Fear of Change as it's sometimes called, is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. At some point in your past, there was likely an event linking changes and emotional trauma. Don't be a victim. Embrace change. Embrace the new MikeBoon.com.
MikeBoon.com has pretty much looked the same for about seven months now. As you may have noticed, things have changed.
This front page is now the Blog. Instead of posting just the odd thought or rant, I'll update this Blog every time I add a new picture, video, ticket stub, Homer Quote or celebrity death.
Consider this page your portal to everything new at MikeBoon.com and anything bouncing around Mike's feeble brain. Please take a moment to let me know if you like this new concept or if you really miss the old one. Feedback wanted!
I've been maintaining this website for about four years now. I tweak it just about every day, always in pursuit of the unattainable perfection I once read about in an Archie comic. I've cleaned up the front page by eliminating the border and reducing the highlighted pieces to four. Simplify, simplify a wise dude once said. I also added a cool scrolling ticker.
Many of you seemed to enjoy my "Homer's Quote of the Week" section I kept on the front page. I decided to give it a permanent home here. You'll find a link to it on the left navigation menu.
I also spent some time putting every song to appear on a Smells Like Sour CD into a table you can access here. It's sort of cool to see some of the tunes that have made the cut over the years. Admittedly, there are a few to be embarrassed about. Live and learn...
Please contact me and let me know what you like or dislike about the site. If there's something you'd like added, let me know and it might just appear. Any and all feedback is appreciated. Write Mike now!
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