Posts Tagged ‘meta’
I haven’t seen anything as slow as this server for a long time. In addition to being just slow, it has to be manually rebooted once a day to work reliably, which is not a real option for me. If you should notice this site being slow, buggy or even offline, please excuse me, and keep trying. Hopefully, in July I’ll have time to fix that.
Sorry dear readers and commenters, the comment feature on this site was broken for an unknown time, so any comments you tried to write in the recent past may be forever lost. If your comment already appeared online, it’s probably still there (unless you are an evil spam bot).
The feature has now been repaired so you can start commenting again.
Thanks to Dominik for reporting!
Just in case you are interested in the cause: The plugin WP-reCAPTCHA has stopped showing a Captcha input field and prevented anyone from commenting. If you are using it on your site, you should check if it’s still working.
After more than a month of testing and optimizing, my project portfolio is now fully available. This means, you can now get an overview of what I’ve done (mostly while studying “Medieninformatik”) and what I’m currently doing, as well as read all the details about each of those projects.
In addition to what was online before, the usability and performance is now optimized, and the undocumented projects were removed from the filtered view, so you don’t end up in pages telling you “No content yet”. They will be re-added when I’ve had time to document them. And then there are even more projects to add, so it won’t get boring in the foreseable future.
This site features an RSS feed, but since not everybody likes RSS, you can now also subscribe to this blog by Email. Rest assured that I’m not going to sell your addresses to spammers or anyone else. (I’m expecting no more than 1 new subscriber per month, so there’d be no big deal for me anyway).
After entering you email, you will get a confirmation mail, and after visiting the link, you’ll have the chance to adjust your notification settings, e.g. to be notified about some categories only.
If you were here before, you probably noticed that I redesigned this blog. This is not only because I became aware of the previous ugliness, but is also needed as preparation for the next big change on lenaschimmel.de: Launching the “project archive”.
There is a new link at the top, called “projects (beta)“. This post is not intended to attract more visitors to that page, not yet. It’s here to keep some of you from doing so, because it is not yet finished. I will ask a limited number of people to test the new features as they are implemented.
If you really wish, you may want to proceed into the project archive and play with the current version without explicit invitation, but since you cannot know which features should already work and which are broken by design, you won’t be able to do any useful testing without prior instruction.
But if you find any (new) errors in the blog (like missing or mis-aligned pictures, dead links, CSS glitches), please leave a comment!
Update:
The project archive is now functionally rather complete. Still, scaling and animation don’t work very well together. Also, it is currently not usable with Javascript turned off. It will be easy to add limited functionality without JS, but would be several hours of work to make all of it work.
The biggest “drawback” is probably the lack of content. But since I can now add/modify projects from within the wordpress admin interface, I will add new content every now and then. Whenever there are bigger additions, I will blog about it.
…and so is my blog.
(I know that “out of order” applies to technical stuff, an normally one would say “I’m currently too busy”. But depending on how busy you are, there isn’t a clear distinction anyway)
It might seem as if my blog was dead even before it started living. But rest assured, this is just a temporal break. Currently, my studies and other affairs are so demanding, that blogging just doesn’t fit in. It was even hard to find a moment to post this post, which just emphasizes its message. But as I think that having time for blogging is a crucial right of any human being, I’m constantly trying to change my life in a way that will give me that time back (and time for other things, of course).
There are so many things to say, mostly unwritten but well thought about, so that in the not-so-distant future, when I’ll have the necessary time, there’s no risk of running out of ideas. To make the waiting worthwhile, I’ll present a (not even complete) List of topics that I want to cover soon:
I can’t guarantee that each topic will be covered, or that I will manage to do this any time soon, but if some of this sounds interesting to you, you should consider coming back or subscribing to my RSS feed.
PS: One note on the choice of language: This will be an english blog. But if I have something of interest only to a limited, german-only audience, I fall back to using german. If you’re an english speaker, you probably don’t miss anything.
Since I had an Internet connection, I also had a homepage. Because PHP and other dynamic web languages were not part of the free hosting services at this time, I wrote my own offline homepage generator, or what would be called a “content management system” nowadays. It’s “offline” because it ran locally on my PC, generated an number of html-files, and left it up to me to upload them over my 33 kbit/s line.
As you can see on the picture, I had a well planned site structure for the site, which regrettably has never been filled with content. For me, the work flow was not “Oh, today I might want to fill in some of the gaps on my website… like… err… this one: Musik”. Rather, I had some thought and just needed a platform to express it.
Because of this, I added a post system to hpd2, which allowed me to put a new post on the home page that would push the older posts into an archive. It turned out that my early posts either belonged into the “private” category, or into “programming”, so I implemented a simple category system. Sadly, the most “recent” picture of that website is about 10 years old and just before I built the post system.
Some time late, I remember it to be around Christmas, one of my PCs ran into serious hardware problems, which made me personally unhappy, at the same time hindering me to fulfill my programming visions regarding Open GL. I could still update my website and share my sorrow with the world , but should this go into “private” or “programming”? This was the first time I felt the need for something better than just categories. And so I went ahead an invented what would late be known as “tags”.
Some months later, I finally realized that no one is interested in reading about my life, both privately and programatically, so I eventually stopped updateing that site. After maybe a year without updated it had undergone the automatic garbage collection of the web host and was lost until today, when I found an old offline copy on one of my hard drives.
In the retrospective, it’s pretty clear that my website was a blog, but at that time, I did neither know the word “blog” nor the concept behind it – it was kind of my invention, even though I was not the first to invent it. That’s typically me: Being on the bleeding edge when it comes to my own creativity, but lagging years behind in noticing what’s happening around me.
Some years later, blogs became so popular that even I heard of them. My first thought was: “Who would be interested to read that stuff?”, and only after that the resemblance of “blogs” and my first website came to my mind. So I thought about blogging as a collective abberation, with myself as one of the first to have gone through it. I came to my senses and stopped it, and so would they.
Consequently, my next website was planned from the beginning without a blog. Anyway, it was at least as ugly as the ones before and suffered other fundamental problems which made me abandon it rather soon.
Well, time has proven that blogs are not that brain dead, and now that I have familiarized myself with reading blogs (as you can see on the right sight in my blog roll), it seems to be the right time to come back to that good old habbit of writing a blog.
So what can you expect from it? It’s definitely going to be kind of nerdy, as I’m definitely a nerd. Whenever possible, I’ll be trying to write in a way that lets the non-nerds understand me, so that after some time of constant consumption of my thoughts, they might eventually also become nerds 
Other than that, don’t expect anything, ok?