Zibblog

In a previous post, I talked about how the move to WordPress simply left the image links pointing to photos1.blogger.com. When I was clicking on images in WordPress on zibbler.com, I was getting some random errors talking about a failure to retrieve the image from the cache that were coming from the blogger image server. After a little bit of trial and error, I realized that if I viewed the image first using zibblog.blogspot.com, I could view it by clicking on it from zibblog.com. My only explanation for this is that the webserver for blogspot is reading for img tags as it serves up the page and makes those images ready to be served up. Images that are on blogspot pages that haven’t been looked at for awhile, therefore, wouldn’t be in the cache. It would be interesting to know how they’ve structured their serves to know exactly what this is optimizing around, but it isn’t hard to guess a few schemes where this makes a lot of sense. This will make writing something to pull down the images a little more tedious, but it still probably not too bad. However, for the moment, the zibblog will remain here.

On an only somewhat related note, I’ve been playing around with the “DreamHost Control Panel”, and I’ve got www.coveringdistance.com/zibblog pointing at the new zibblog. In all seriousness, despite the fact that I put it in double quotes and italics, the DreamHost admin features have been really nice. They put a nice gui around a lot of good features while still allowing you to do whatever you want. I used their automated install for WordPress and it worked really well. I’d highly recommend it for anyone wanting to set up a permanent domain without too much trouble and still have a good level of control.

In my search for the domain name that screams “Zibbler!!!!”, I’ve settled on CoveringDistance.com. It works as a running reference and it embodies some of my opinions on life and the zen of running. It will be the final home of the zibblog and all things zibbler. I’ve got some ideas for non-blog content that I’ve been wanting to put up for awhile, so we’ll see how it goes. Thanks to all of the suggestions from friends of mine that included

• s.az
• shawnoftheneb.com
• ilikepastries.com
• zellerziggurat.com (based on a random joke about my opening up Zeller’s Ziggurat Bar & Casino some day in Korea)

In between waiting for my development server to redeploy and restart (anyone that has worked with me knows how long that can take), I’ve been playing around with the migration from Blogger to WordPress. I found a nice tutorial with some updates to the standard import. It works by having you modify your blog entry template and set up your blog to deploy to your wordpress installation. It had problems about halfway through the deploy transferring with sftp, so I switched it to normal ftp and it went through fine. There’s a few little things I’m probably going to change before the final move, but you can look at the results at zibblog.com. The biggest problem is that blogger has some nice support for uploading images. However, all my images are now on their server and I need to figure out some way to slurp them down and rewrite the links. I may just need to write some php or something since that is what the wordpress importer is written in.

While I was at work waiting for code to compile and deploy, I decided to play around with some domain registration. zellerfurniture.com is working and displaying a site coming soon message that dreamhost puts up. In preparation for a move of the zibblog to a “real” hosted solution where I can put up photos and other web pages, I registered zibblog.com and pointed it at the current zibblog. Scott swears by WordPress while other people that I know (like Rus and Dave) currently use Movable Type, so I’ll probably end up needing to do some research before I finally take a plunge. What was kind of funny was that I looked to see the current state of zibbler.com and found that it is currently registered to Tucows and they have some sort of coming soon site up. I’m currently trying to come up with some domain that really screams at me for a more permanent url.

Joe’s comment to the previous blog entry has started me realizing that I am about 15 years behind on blog entries (the first 12 years of my life didn’t contain much that I really believe to be blogable (is that with 1 g or two? (can you really nest parentheticals like this?))). That is why I am throwing this post open to all of my friends that have blog entries they just can’t wait for. Some possibilities include:

• the end of JAG
• wasn’t Tom Cruise supposed to be in Batman Begins?
• Zibbler’s guide to Zibbler’s movie ratings
• CDs currently in Zibbler’s car

Feel free to put your ideas and/or votes in the comments.