Tyler Hunt

Sorry about the recent downtime. The server this blog (and several of my other sites) run on is hosted at a facility that uses a wireless link with a building downtown. It turns out someone else came along and placed a new antenna on top of that building that caused a good deal of interference for that network link, and this has caused the incredible slowness of the site over the past couple weeks. Everything should be back to normal now, which means more posts should be forthcoming.

As with most blogs and sites on the Internet, this one has gone through several iterations, and tends to get refreshed on a somewhat annual basis, but this time around I’m taking an entirely new approach to the refresh.

I took some time tonight to run my feeds through Feed Validator and get things up to par with the current standards. The RSS feed only needed one minor change, but the ATOM feed was quite a bit out of whack since it was still based on ATOM 0.3. Everything should valid fine now, for both ATOM and RSS.

I may look into using FeedTools soon to abstract things out a little and make things a little more DRY in the Builder views.

Since I switched the site over to run on Ruby on Rails, the categories haven’t been updated. Until now. I just took the effort to implement category functionality into the site, and updated all of the new posts with their proper categories so all is back into sync again.

As a side affect of the installation of a new wireless router today, some of the old means of accessing this blog are now invalid. Please make sure your links point to the following address to ensure connectivity will not be interrupted again should such a change be repeated in the future:

http://thunt.blogsite.org/

In an effort to try to get this site working better across the web, I have changed all of the links to redirect through another server. If you notice any problem navigating the site, please post a comment to this entry. One of the benefits of this change is a newly functional syndicated RSS feed. More about how to use it in the weeks to come.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with the layout or design here, but I was feeling like it was about the right time to get away from the default every-so-slightly modified Movable Type theme and come up with something original. I wasn’t sure which direction I was going to take with this design, as is usually the case when I work on new projects. My method goes something like this: open Photoshop, pick some nice colors, make boxes for content, and then maybe find a photo or some graphical element to tie it all together. Only lately my choice of color has mostly been blue or blue (this blog being an unusually green exception), so I tweaked the process a little and started with a photo this time. I went through a few the had potential, but it was this third one that caught my eye. As soon as I saw it I knew right where it was going on the page. It fits in that spot perfectly, and red and gray is a classic scheme that I’ve been wanting to work with for some time now.

The hard part was getting it all tied into Movable Type’s spaghetti code of HTML and CSS and MT tags. While it all works together somehow, Movable Type can hardly be called an elegant system. During the conversion I also turned everything into PHP files which should allow for more future flexibility, but I also ran into some snags with getting everything to work together nicely. I persevered and came up with a solution that worked, even if it felt as dirty as the original on the underside. Hopefully the new look will go over well. And the new name as well. While the old one may have looked more impressive, the unoriginality of it always bothered me. And while the new name isn’t exactly original, at least it’s my own, and I think I’ll stick with it for a bit.

The blog is back up on dynamic DNS now, with a brand new domain name. My hiatus from a publicly accessible blog didn’t achieve its intended effect of forcing me to set up an actually domain for this site, but I think the end result is still better than the previous configuration. This should make things easier for everyone now.

For those loyal readers who asked about the site while it was down, thank you for your patronage. While I do this blog primarily for myself, it’s always nice to know that other people find entertainment in it, as well.

After working (somewhat) hard at getting my Google ranking up for tylerhunt.com, I’m now proud to say that a search for “Tyler Hunt” brings up the site as the number one hit. All I can say is, it’s about time.

Today marks the second anniversary of tylerhunt.com. I pantiently awaited the months leading up to the expiration of my namesake domain before pouncing on it the instant it became available. I don’t know what that other Tyler Hunt was thinking when he let it go, but I can assure you I’ll be holding on to it for quite a while.

Well, it looks like my pleas and desires for more comments has resulted in a plethora of new postings. This is definitely a good thing that I’m excited to see happening. It makes the work I put into this blog all the more worth it when I get feedback from my readers.

There were some posters who had issues with giving away their true identities, so I disabled the requirement entering a name and email address. However, I think it will be both safe and helpful if commenters would, at the very least, input their first name or nickname and not some random series of characters.

A survey of a random sample of the blog population shows that out of 4.12 million blogs, 66% of these blogs are abandoned after about four months of activity. On average, blogs tend to be updated every 14 days. About 105,000 are updated once a week, and only 50,000 blogs are updated at least daily.

It’s sometimes hard for me to find things to blog about, and the quality of the content probably suffers because of this dedication. Thus far, I’ve tended towards quantity over quality, because sometimes that’s the best way to keep people coming back regularly. It doesn’t matter how good the content is, if the site isn’t updated frequently enough, visitors tend to forget about it over time. Hopefully my posts are appreciated, even if they are forced at times. It’s hard to know exactly what people think since I so rarely get comments or feedback. That’s what the Comments link is for at the end of each post. Use it!

I added another great new feature to the site yesterday. It’s a related entries listing, like you find on a lot of mainstream web sites these days. While not always guaranteed to be truly related, I figure it’s better than nothing. Based strictly on categories, the relevancy of the results are entirely dependent upon my categorization of the content, which may be twisted and totally unrelevant at times. Enjoy.

While it’s not quite Thursday yet, I’m going to post about The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler anyway. This “weekly question & answer blog” proposes three thought-provoking questions every Thursday. One thing I like about this site is the clever use that has been found for TrackBack. Basically, anyone with their own blog (theoretically any, but MovableType blogs are supported best) can post their answers, and a link to their response will show up on the Thursday site.

In my opinion, TrackBack is one of the most clever and underutilized web technologies to be developed recently. It allows instant notification of site updates and cross-linking between related information. This can only be good for the web. Unfortunately, I can’t use it on this site with my current server configuration. Hopefully that will be changing soon.

The site was down earlier today for a couple hours. I finally broke down and bought a UPS (Costco has a 1000VA Tripp Lite for $100), but in the middle of the installation, I was distracted numerous times. Sorry for the delay, I know how much you all missed reading this blog. At least the server is now protected from brownouts and short outages. Well, sort of. The box will still be up, but if the power is actually out, the rest of the network will be down, so the site won’t actually be accessible from the outside. It’s still cool though, and I will get much enjoyment out of it. A UPS is one of those computer accessories that everyone should have, but few people do. Especially in Florida, where the power supply can be very unpredictable and interuptable.