(Phaysis)

So. Welcome to the new Phaysis-point-oh. My nine years with Prohosting have drawn to a close, and with the change in webhost comes a change in journaling engines. After 9 years of trying, and failing, and trying, and failing, and trying again (and then failing), I have given up on building my own engine and have finally decided to take the path of least resistance. Phaysis.com is now powered by WordPress. Resistance is futile.

During the site’s downtime (you did notice it was down, didn’t you?), I took the opportunity to convert all my old journal entries from the original engine (and a long-lived hack) called “Sojournal” (clever, ain’t it?), into a format suitable for importing into WordPress. Took a week of work to build the conversion script. So after installing WordPress on my new webhost, doing some basic configuration, and selecting the temporary design theme, I imported all of my old entries.

Now everything I’ve written over the 6 years I used Sojournal are instantly accessible by tag, category, archive, permalinks, and by the nifty search box to the upper right. Amazing how handy that stuff is, considering that for years the only way to read specific entries in Sojournal was to step through the pages sequentially…aaaaall the way back to the start. I know a few of you who did that, and I apologize for never fixing that design oversite for so long.

In the future, I plan to post an import conversion how-to with code and samples. Because I’m pretty damn proud that I was able to identify the need, start the project, plan the solution, and implement the code necessary to finally, for once in my unproductive hobbyist career, finish the damned project. (I have to celebrate my victories, no matter how insignificant they are.)

The upside to using WordPress is that it’s one of the most widely-used blogging engines around, so there’s a ton of support, themes, plugins, widgets, debugging, etc. So the heavy lifting has been done for me already. And that’s intensely liberating, because after years of groveling at the text editor with no less than five journal-engine abortions — “Glyph”, “Raganotes”, “Craftix”, “Ph::Thing”, and most recently “Munde” (the names are more clever than the code) — I can move on with my life and get to posting. Which is why I started this site 9 years ago (I promise you).

The downside? Spambots. Common attack vectors. Well-published vulnerabilities. A treadmill of upgrades to fix problems. Actually, the upgrades are fine, since the pen-testing is done by the developer community instead of me. And the final downside: homogeny…that’s a tough one to overcome. Everyone has a blog; what makes mine so special?

This is my blog.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My blog is my best friend. It is my life.
I must author it as I must author my life.
My blog without me is useless. Without my blog, I am useless.
I must write my blog true.
I must shoot the shit straighter than my blogroll who is trying to ping me.
I must bullshit him before he tracks back. I will….
My blog and myself know that what counts in the blogosphere is not the flames we fire,
the noise of our posts, nor the threads we make.
We know it is the blog hits that count. We will hit….
My blog is human, even as I, because it is about my life.
Thus, I will learn it as an author.
I will learn its permalinks, its categories, its tags, its comments,
its pages, and its blogroll.
I will ever use it against the ravages of annoyances and indifference.
I will keep my blog clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other. We will….
Before RSS I swear this feed.
My blog and myself are the defenders of my personality.
We are the writers of our emotions.
We are the presenters of my life.
So be it, until there are no more emos. PEACE.

I’m seriously wondering if there will ever be a future for me in technology. My current project, developing a storefront site for a friend of mine, is moving really, really slowly, and it’s all my fault. You see, computers are my hobby; most of my non-work, non-sleeping time is spent at a computer doing god knows what. Sometimes, I even write program code. But when I mix money and heavy expectations in with my love for tech, what I get is cold disdain for the stuff and me not wanting to do much of anything.

The project itself is changing. Previously, we had set forth to write the shopping and catalog system from the ground up. I was planning the database, creating the models, thinking of workflow and interface design, doing what I could to get something usable. But I was moving not fast enough for my client. And there is the rift. What accounts for lead development time is too long for the customer who needs things operational now.

So I’ve completely scrapped the original plans to use Ruby on Rails to build a storefront. Instead, I’m going with an opensource PHP alternative, ZenCart. I know squat about PHP, but what I’m seeing is easy enough to understand somewhat. Nevertheless, the entire solution is prebuilt and usable from the get-go with a little configuration, which is exactly what the customer wants and needs. My plan is to set it up, allow her to add products and categories to her catalog and begin taking orders while I learn the templating system and make changes to the design.

For the paltry price I quoted, I should’ve gone with a prebuilt solution from the start. Now, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve gotten rid of the prideful righteousness that goes with saying “I completely wrote this”; such mindedness serves me no purpose and does a disservice to my client. Seems I’m finally understanding what the Industry considers a standard dictum: prebuilt is cheap, custom-crafted costs money.

Welcome to my site. Seems these days my site is more like an online storage space than a usable website. Not doing so many things for the site. Things around here are at a standstill, more or less.

Well, that’s a half-truth. I still peck at code every now and then, trying to build something usable for my site as a content management system. There are tons of those systems online already, but I want to roll my own. There’s pride in doing that.

So, yeah. Look at stuff. Enjoy the site. I’m considering a redesign some time soon. Meh.