blivet.com

I don’t know whether I get enough readers to notice but the site was really misbehaving yesterday. Just before 2 a.m. on Monday (and yes, I was awake so I noticed) one of my ISP’s routers went toes up and its fall-over system apparently did just that — it fell over, clattering loudly on the floor. Normally DreamHost, my ISP, has excellent uptime and handles any network hiccups with a quiet burp and a polite, “excuse me,” but Monday was filled with slow-motion throughput and mostly unreachable services as DreamHost struggled violently to stay online.

However, this was particularly disturbing when it first happened because:

1. I had just completed a major site restructuring, rewriting code and templates and such for the new content-management-system-that-isn’t-Movable-Type.
2. It was really late, I was very tired and thinking even less clearly than normal, if that’s possible.
3. Nothing was backed up yet. Nada. It was still all on a server which didn’t exist anymore as near as I could tell.

Scary. But now that everything — or at least the network — is back to normal. I have it all backed up, hidden away, and safe from nuclear holocaust.

Now before I get a comment asking, “are you ever going to switch your site over to WordPress or what?!?” let me just say that, “yes,” a WordPress-driven blivet.com is coming to an internet near you — a slightly hacked version of WordPress (more on that later), but the work is almost done except for the new style sheets. I expect the new look and feel to be rolled out, appropriately, for April Fool’s Day.

In the meantime, I’ve reconfigured my current Movable Type installation to use Textile to format all posts and comments. Why bother? Well, I plan to use Textile with WordPress and this was a good way to get all the content tweaked before I import it into the new system. Why Textile instead of Texturize? Especially since Matt fixed my nasty bug?

I’m such an ungrateful wretch. Really. Well, for one thing, that bug fix is in the unreleased version and has to be hacked into the stable release. But that’s easy and I’ve done so anyway. No, it’s mostly because Textile allows more complex formatting like the ordered list earlier in this post.

It’s also partly because Texturize requires three dashes to indicate an em dash instead of two, which it interprets as an en dash. I know this is a little thing and I’m sure I sound pretty old and particular as you read this, but I’ve been typing two dashes for so long that I just can’t make that change. Without hacking the code, of course.

Matt, if you’re reading this, you could always make the Textile and SmartyPants “dash” behavior an option for anal-retentive former typographers, like me.

Anyway, stay tuned for the new site. It’s coming any day now. Really. No, Really.