Site Changelog on Holyarmy.org

Switching to Hugo

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 17:11:34 -0600

The time has come to move to a new platform.

Over the years, Wordpress (in various forms) has served reasonably well, but it is a constantly moving target. Since it is SO popular, it must constantly be upgraded, maintained, etc. Both security and performance are significant concerns.

When I first started blogging, it seemed SO COOL to have a dynamic website. But in recent history, it’s just become a hassle.

Upgrades and Offline Photos

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:01:40 +0000

I’m working on some updates to my personal blog which have more or less taken photos down for a while.

Hopefully, all will be well again soon.

Updates to WPG2, and others

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:27:46 +0000

I keep the WordPress code on this site up to date with security and bugfix updates as they come out. Same for Gallery and the plugins. But today I saw that the WPG2 plugin had been updated from version 2.x to 3.0. This plugin integrates my gallery with my wordpress blog. In the old version, I had to hack up my theme and add custom widgets in order to display random image widgets and get a “Photo Gallery” tab to show up in my page list by the header of the page. Now the plugin does all of that automatically and more! It’s cool, because I can switch themes much more easily now, without all the custom stuff. Hurray for improvement!

WordPress Blog Goes Live for All of Holyarmy.org

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:50:28 +0000

I’ve decided to finally put this blog site out for public viewing. Never before has my blog been the base from which all of sherman.bz extends, so this is micro-monumentous.

I have kept the links that were on the former front page in the “Stuff @ Holyarmy.org” link section, but there was not much more to keep.

Granted I’ve ‘officially published’ the site, but I still expect to make substantial changes. I hope to improve the site graphics, photo gallery, and already existing content. Despite wanting to make changes, I felt I might as well get it out here and start using it. Enjoy!

Re-Conversion to WordPress

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:36:46 +0000

After much non-use and non-posting, I have been working to get this blog functional again. Spending a year in Iraq didn’t do a lot of good for my website maintenance, so that has contributed a bit to my delay.

Having come home with a clear mind, it now seems that Geeklog is a bit of overkill for my personal needs. Also, basic theme modifications require more mucking about the PHP source code then I care to do. So, I checked out WordPress and it did what I needed. I also found a handy database importer to pull my content out of Geeklog and into WordPress.

New Theme and Minor Upgrades

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 08:30:00 +0000

I stumbled across this theme oh… several hours ago and was quite taken with it. It’s pretty clean, it’s pretty simple, and it’s GREEN! How fitting. 🙂

So, “Commando” is the new default theme for my site.

Finally, more photos were added today! Quite a few. And Steph should be adding more. (Note: many of the new photos will be private access only)

Photos Online

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 01:50:00 +0000

The Photo Gallery is coming along nicely. I’ve been working on adding in my old photos from the previous photo album software I’d written myself. I’ve also added in several photos and albums that are completely new.

Everyone seems to want me to put up wedding photos. 🙂 Well don’t worry, they are coming… in time.

Old System 2 Geeklog

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:21:00 +0000

Huzzah! Again!

After working with WordPress for a while, it was nice, but it didn’t quite cover some of my needs out of the box. Then I discovered Gallery and set it up for my brother-in-law. I was hooked. I needed a blogging system that would let me use Gallery, too.

Enter Geeklog!

This software is great! It’s got all the user features I was looking for, it integrates with Gallery, it was easy to import my existing blog data to, AND, it has features and plugins I can add in to make my site much fancier, should I ever want them in the future.

Old System 2 WordPress Conversion

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:06:00 +0000

Hurrah! I’ve actually made headway on converting my blog!

I’ve converted all my core content from the old database to the new wordpress format. However, I still need to to do a bit of cleanup on it, tweak some things here and there. I need to get my quotes working, some clever hack should make that work, and if I’ve seen anything, it’s that lots of people hack wordpress. 🙂 I’m also looking into getting a much nicer theme for the site, but that will come in due time. right now I’m more concerned about data integrity.

Photos Temporarily Offline

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 13:39:00 +0000

As I’m in the middle of (slowly) moving my site over to ~~WordPress~~ Geeklog. It seems that my photos will have to be offline for a while.

Content Change

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 13:38:18 +0000

Due to personal and professional considerations, the journal content of this blogsite has been removed.

I will make a substantial effort to focus on updating the topical content, and I intend to add technical topics for java and compters, etc.

Postings similar to the journal content will continue on private mailing lists. Please contact me via email should you wish to be added to such a mailing list.

Update, Oct 4, 2003: My apoligies for not updating this like I said I would. Getting a new job, moving, going to school for the Army, settling into new apartment, settling into new job, and finding time for life have taken more time than anticipated. Will post an update soon, I hope.

Migration Fixes

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 06:27:26 +0000

Admin Pages:
- converted to pure PHP4, _SERVER[var, _POST[var], and _GET[var] references
- Main Pages:
  - removed referer display code until I can get it fixed

code cleanup

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 13:17:30 +0000

Main Pages:
- consolidated and cleaned up code; less redundant code is good
  - added HTTP referer display code
    - resized big photos for consistency and space saving
      - renamed templates from *.ihtml to *.html
        
        fixed a bug in “content_individual.html” blog template

Visible Links

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 03:45:53 +0000

Database:
- added “visible” column for link table
- Admin Pages:
  - added “visible” check box to editlink and addlink pages
  - Main Pages:
    - made non-visible links not show up in link displays

Cool Upgrades

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:19:36 +0000

Database:
- added table for counting clikthrus out of site
  - added table for counting HTTP_REFERRERs into the site
  - Libraries:
    - renamed hit_tracking.php to stats_tracking.php
      - add clikThruCount() method
        
        added redirect script for counting clikthrus
        
        modified Counter() method to track HTTP_REFERRERs
        
        Main Pages:
        
        added search capability
        
        renamed “home” topic to “blather”…. since it’s kindof the catch all blog topic

Tuesday Modifications

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 21:48:39 +0000

Database:
- wrote a script to strip the slashes out of my database. slashes were icky.
  - cleaned all code of unneccesary slash stripping.
  - Admin Tools:
    - made main admin page reflect topics for news entries
      - news edit and adding uses topics for ease of navigation
      - Main Pages:
        
        added “next/prev” navigation for individual viewing of entries.
        
        changed layout of “next/prev” on multi-view(default view)
        
        display time zone

Original System Notes

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 20:41:04 +0000

I originally wrote this website software to run on a crappy HP-UX box that only had PHP ver. 3.0.8 or something. It was horribly outdated for its time even. That was September 25, 2001. Nearly 2 years ago. Anyway… I started first by trying to implement the database with DBM. DBM sucks. I didn’t try that for long at all. After that I decided to just use flat text files with custom delimiters and a small API for accessing and updating the data in those files. That’s probably why I didn’t spend a lot of time writing admin pages at the time; the parsing of all that text got ugly fast.

updates to the custom PHP codebase

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 19:48:01 +0000

This week I’ve made several major and minor changes to the website code. I’ll start keeping track of what I do here. It’s high time I know what I do when with this site. 🙂

Database:
- Added hit counter tables
  - Added an order column for topics
    - Added link table
      - changed date fields in links and quotes to datetime fields
      - Libraries:
        
        Added Date_Calc class library for better handling of dates and formatting of dates. (File: Calc.php)
        
        Used in new code, haven’t yet retrofitted old code to use.
        
        Added Counter function for tracking visits to each page and direct visits to articles. (File: hit_counter.php)
        
        Added my_escape_SQL_single_quote function for cleaner data in database.