Monthly Archives: February 2007

Tag Filters

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I’ve a feature request for all you php ninjas out there, particularly those of you who develop plugins that do strange and wonderful things with tagging:

How about making the ability to tag posts in WordPress a little bit more powerful? For instance, I use “Ultimate Tag Warrior”:http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ to create a site index here, and it’s nice to be able to click on a particular tag and see all of the entries that fall under it.

Here’s the thing, though – I’d like to see it be possible to filter down still further into those entries. Instead of, for instance, being able to see the entries that fall under speculative fiction only, I’d like to be able to add more tag filters and see all the entries that have been tagged as _both_ speculative fiction and tv shows, or to be able to add still more filters so that I could see all entries that fall under speculative fiction, tv, shows, and heroes, if I wanted to get that specific. It would also be cool to be able to filter by an ‘OR’ command, so that I could sift through all my entries and see all posts that have been tagged as _either_ science fiction _or_ fantasy, for a larger list. I believe that this could easily be done using AJAX to add and remove tags at will. “bbPress”:http://bbpress.org already has something like this in place for individual posts, so I don’t think it would require much effort to modify that script slightly to make it do more and go further.

So, any javascript/php geeks out there looking for a new challenge to expand the functionality of some of useful tools to make them even _more_ useful?

Book Reviews: Night’s Dawn Trilogy

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Peter F. Hamilton’s _Night’s Dawn_ trilogy has been likened in epic scope to fictional universes like Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. And in terms of size, the universe that Hamilton has built in this series is huge. ((It’s so big that the three books had to be further subdivided into six volumes.))
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Company Man

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Tim Kring is really starting to stretch even _my_ suspension of disbelief. I’m perfectly willing to assume that certain things are true within a specific speculative fiction universe for the sake of enjoyment. I’m not one of those people who like to critique and criticize to the point of complete deconstruction in order to make sure that every last bit of minutiae is spot-on perfect (though the more homogeneous and consistent the universe is, the more enjoyable it is). And there have been a number of objections raised by several reviewers that I’ve been willing to either grant out-of-hand or merely wait too see if Kring addresses them in an intelligent manner.
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And… We’re Back!

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Well, that could have been a whole lot more painful. After three days of inactivity, we’re back up and running. New host, new server, better control panel, better options, better everything.

After three days of silence and no response from my former webhost “iPower”:http://ipowerweb.com, I decided enough was enough. I’d already researched other webhosts and had found one I liked much better (even demoed the control panel), so I switched everything over to “Bluehost”:http://www.bluehost.com. That went smoothly, and even the DNS change populated much faster than expected. ((The projected DNS population time was 24-48 hours; mine updated in under six hours.))

File uploads – all 164 MB of them – took a bit of time but went off without a hitch. And three of the four databases I used were imported in myPhpAdmin just fine. But I discovered rather quickly that there are drawbacks to having maintained a blog for over three years – the database that powers Writer’s Blog was 111 MB large – all in a plain text .sql file. The maximum upload size for myPhpAdmin is 51KB, so I had to find an alternative way to bringing that in. It took me a while to find a solution, but ultimately I found this handy-dandy import script called “Big Dump”:http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php, which is a staggered MySQL dump importer. It basically drags a large database in to MySQL in chunks, maintaining the rules of database imports. Once I had everything configured properly, the script took only a couple of minutes to import the database.

All the databases had to be hacked, of course – it couldn’t just be a simple import process. Basically, my database username changed with the new host, so I had to update that in all the .sql files. I also had to modify the file paths throughout the databases in order to get everything to point in the right direction. Nothing that a Ctrl-H didn’t fix, but with my Writer’s Blog database I actually had to make sure I used a fast enough computer to be open a text file of that size. I ended up having to use Microsoft Word (shudder) on my wife’s computer for that one ((The final page count for the database was 31,687 pages.)) in order to make the necessary modifications before uploading the whole thing back to my server and then running Big Dump to import it into MySQL.

It was a learning experience, to be sure, but now I’m much less intimidated by having to change servers in the future. ((Though I’m hoping to not have to do this again anytime soon.)) Bluehost is already amazing me with its intuitive control panel and speedy customer service. I even get root access (if I can just figure out how to use it)! So, here’s to better things.

Time now to get caught up on all the writing I wasn’t able to do the last couple of days.

Moving (Hopefully) To a New Server

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Just as an FYI, I’m in the process of trying to transfer my website over to a new server in order to take advantage of more recent software updates on the backend (e.g. MySQL, php, etc.). So, it’s possible there may be a slight interruption of services for a couple of days while everything repopulates to the new DNS. I’ll keep you posted.

Will It End?

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Of course I drag my feet long enough in responding to this that the original source article is no longer available. But Tobias Buckell “recently referred”:http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2007/01/11/25-of-americans-believe-world-will-end-this-year/ to an AP article that reported that 25% of Americans think that Jesus will return this year. ((The actual verbiage is that 22% of Americans think that Jesus’ return this year is ‘highly likely’.)) To which I resond:

Why? What makes this year any different?

Now, granted, that quarter of the population may turn out to be right, but I _would_ be curious to know what ‘evidence’ they would refer to in making such a prediction. Matthew 24:36-39 makes it quite clear that no man will know when Christ will actually return. This from the mouth of Jesus Himself. Many have tried to predict His return, even being so conceited as to seat these predictions inside so-called ‘prophecies’. And time and again, those predictions have been proven wrong.

The only thing we can know with any assurance is that we live in the end times. Even Paul and other apostles of the early Church claimed that they were in the end times. But we don’t know how long they will last or when Christ’s return will occur. It’s best to live like His return could be any day, but it seems foolhardy to try to actually make concrete predictions about this event.