filed under: geek, rainskit.com

Posted 165 days ago

After about 40 days of offline-ness, rainskit.com is back up, mostly. gwen.rainskit.com is still down, but the rest of the websites are up. tru_tags (and instructions) are back up. The gallery is working. From a visitor’s point of view, everything (except gwen.rainskit.com) is working as it was before.

Of course, all is not quite as it seems…

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filed under: dogs, driving, family, geek, kristina, life, motorcycle, politics, rainskit.com, truist.com, tru_tags, vegetarian

Posted 207 days ago

Wow, according to my last post, it’s been 144 days since I blogged. Too long, but it’s a sign of how busy life has been. I’m going to use this post just to catch up quickly, then future posts will hopefully be more insightful:

• I’m still a vegetarian
• The new job is good (and I was promoted!), but time-intensive
• The dogs are awesome
• Buying the Honda Element was very much the right decision – it is perfect for the dogs and for Kristina’s plant (and dirt!) hauling
• The new house is great
• I did buy that motorcycle I had my eye on (and I love it!)
• I sold my domain (truist.com) and replaced it with the one you see before you (rainskit.com). (And truist.com now has some very interesting content. But it’s a dumb name for a company.)
• We all finally hired the right president

But of course, all of that put a ton of stress on my life and my wife, and we are still trying to recover from it. Speaking of which, she (my wife) also:

• Turned 30, and got through a party that I think she would have preferred to delay
• Took care of the dogs while I was traveling
• Worked an internship
• Took over as president of Pi Alpha Xi at OSU, and has had a stellar experience
• Took a full load of classes this fall

Regular life things also happened. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of them, but notable items include:

• Discovered Pistacia Vera, an absolutely life-changing “dessert botique” (in Columbus!), that we now go to every weekend
• Found DropBox and Carbonite, which are similar services that finally make file sharing and backup (respectively) just work the way they should have all along
• Found Woot and its associated sites and got addicted; we’ve probably ordered 10 things from them so far
• Amitai visited and during that visit, I bought a first-gen iPhone and hacked it to work with T-Mobile. (I love it!)
• Had a very good Thanksgiving at my dad’s house, at which we learned some great news (that isn’t quite yet public)
• Released two new versions of tru_tags, and used one of those releases to make this site’s archive page

So anyhow, it’s been really busy, and many parts of our life have fallen behind where we’d like them to be. The busyness hasn’t really been a problem… it’s just prevented us from doing other things we might want to be doing. I think our priorities are in the right place, though – I’m doing what I love, and Kristina is working toward a new life where she gets to do what she loves. I think that’s how things are supposed to be.

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filed under: business, links, rainskit.com, truist.com

Posted 359 days ago

As of this afternoon, truist.com is no longer mine. I had it for 8 years, 4 months, and I find that I’m very sad to see it go :-(

But as Drew says: “think of the motorcycles” – and that is helping :)

So now that the sale is actually done, here’s the story:

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com, tru_tags

Posted 362 days ago

Today marks the beginning of rainskit.com – welcome! It looks a lot like that other site, truist.com… but actually, it’s totally different. See, you have to type R-A-I-N-S-K-I-T now instead of T-R-U-I-S-T. I keep getting that all wrong. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually.

I think everything has been moved over – email, web, other sites I host, other email addresses, redirects, telling every company on the planet not to use my old email address, etc. If you spot something that still says “truist.com” and looks like it’s an accident, please let me know. (Note that I left the truist.com tag on a few posts, intentionally.)

If you are following the RSS feed and/or are subscribed to the email list – you need to update your URLs and/or resubscribe to the emails. I’ve made the email service much more reliable and much easier to use, by hosting it myself. Just wander over to the sidebar, find the section titled “Subscribe” with the text field that says “email” and type your email address in. Hit enter. That’s it, you’re subscribed. I still need to work out a few improvements to the email service, but for now, that will ensure that you hear about each new post. The best way to follow this blog, though, is still through the RSS or Atom feeds.

The planned transfer of truist.com to its new owner will be Tuesday evening (-ish). It looks like google has already recognized rainskit and is starting to find the new home of tru_tags, but it’s lagging a little behind on finding the new home of Nathan Arthur. Hopefully they will figure it all out before Tuesday :)

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filed under: rainskit.com, truist.com

Posted 366 days ago

Heads up! I’m selling truist.com and moving this entire site over to rainskit.com. As of next Tuesday (July 8th), truist.com will no longer work.

My email address(es) (and Kristina’s) are changing; in fact, they have already changed. You can now reach me “@rainskit.com” instead of “@truist.com”. Anything sent to truist.com after the 8th will go to somebody else :)

As of this writing, rainskit.com doesn’t look like much, but that will be changing as soon as possible, to give the search engines as much time as possible to figure it out. As soon as I make the switch, http://www.truist.com/ will automatically forward to http://www.rainskit.com/... until the 8th, that is. After the 8th, you’ll have to go straight to rainskit.com.

Those of you following this blog through the RSS or Atom feeds will need to update your readers, once the switch is made. I’m not sure what will happen during this interim period. The best thing to do is to manually switch over in a few days. This will also be true for the gallery RSS feed.

Those of you following this blog through email will have to re-subscribe on the new website, once it is up. Sorry :-(

And I’m sure you’re all wondering “why RainSkit.com???” Well, I chose it because it was available, short, easy to remember, easy to spell, and had very few hits on Google. I found it by taking anagrams of words that had meaning to me. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the source word :)

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filed under: programming, rainskit.com, tagging, tru_tags, usability

Posted 393 days ago

I’m working on the next version of tru_tags and one of its major features is the ability to create a tag-based archive page, like this one. After implementing the feature, I tried it out, and I liked it so much that I decided to use it on this site. Specifically, I removed the old “About” page, merged some of that content into the “Links” page (and generally edited that page), and put the “Archive” page in where the About page used to be.

This should all make sense if you look at the menu links at the top of the site. For those of you reading this via the feed – click here to see it.

It’s a really interesting page to browse through – I find it strangely fascinating to see so clearly all the articles I’ve written, and how they clump together. I’ve also used it a few times as a faster way to get to a specific page. It’s somehow more powerful than the normal tag cloud, functionally and emotionally, and that surprises me.

Or maybe it’s just late :)

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filed under: rainskit.com, usability

Posted 523 days ago

Inspired by my copy of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, I’ve been working on a redesign of this site since last March, and I’ve finally finished it and published it. The redesign doesn’t change the actual content at all, and in that sense is somewhat unimportant. It does dramatically change the look of the site, though, and in that sense is somewhat interesting. I also took the opportunity to refactor the underlying code that generates the site, to make it easier to maintain and redesign in the future.

Of course, if you’re reading this via the email feed, it’s not going to look much different! Click here to go to the website and see it for yourself, and/or read about everything that changed.

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filed under: rainskit.com

Posted 1166 days ago

…be aware that the reason you keep getting multiple emails from the site, each with seemingly the same content as the last, is that each time a person comments it causes a new update to be sent out. You can tell the difference by the number in brackets after the subject; that number tells how many comments there are. So, for example, you’ll soon be getting an email with a subject of “My belief in God [4]” because I’ll have added the fourth comment to it.

The problem, then, is that you can’t see the comments in the email that gets sent to you. Thus, I recommend that you always click the link to read the article directly on the website. In that way, you’ll get the article in it’s original context and you’ll have the comments.

Questions? Please post them in the comments for this article ;-)

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filed under: geek, rainskit.com, tagging, textpattern, tru_tags

Posted 1216 days ago

When I first created this blog I wanted it to have tagging support, which doesn’t come built into Textpattern (my blog software). At the time (Christmas 2005), tagging plugins for Textpattern were virtually nonexistent. Hunting around the web, I found ran_tags, chh_keywords, rss_unlimited_categories, and ajw_technorati_tags. They were all unworkable for me, because of bugs or complexity or feature-set, so I was left without tagging support.

So I wrote my own, based on ran_tags. I published it on the textpattern forums and subsequently released about a dozen new versions, each with new features to make it more powerful and/or easier to use. The plugin has seen a lot of adoption, and seems to be popular among the textpattern community. You can see it in use on this site.

It’s written with ease-of-use, simplicity, and security in mind, and it has a very rich feature set. To learn more, please check out the features list. There is one (potential) downside for some users, though. To help keep the code simple, I call out to the Textpattern code to actually do the tag search. That means that articles can only be tagged via the Keywords field, rather than using a custom field. Some people use the keywords field for other purposes, so they can’t use tru_tags. There are also a few other minor annoyances documented on the features page.

tru_tags can be downloaded from the releases page, and you can learn to use it by reading the detailed usage instructions. If you have questions, please post comments to any of these articles, or in the forum, and I’ll get back to you quickly.

Enjoy!

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filed under: life, rainskit.com

Posted 1245 days ago

1. I’m not reading any of my (30) RSS feeds any more. (It’s amazing how disconnected I am from the geek world, now.) I’ve stopped because I can’t find a decent web-based feed reader anywhere. I usually use Thunderbird, which does it just right, but then my feeds are tied to a particular machine and I switch machines (and logins!) too often for that to be acceptable. In the meantime, I’m working on writing my own web-based reader and once it’s done I’ll switch to it. (If you’re interested, my reader is written in Ruby on Rails, and it will work much like Thunderbird, but in a browser.)
2. Matt and I are slowly working on a wishlist app so we have a good way to keep and publish and track our wishlists. This seems like an obvious thing that ought to already exist, but it doesn’t. I’ve been using Amazon’s but they seem to enjoy making it less-useful occasionally, and it won’t let me track things that aren’t available on amazon.com. So again, once this new one is developed I’ll switch to it.
3. I will eventually be converting my existing gallery to ZenPhoto, because Gallery sucks. The only reason I haven’t switched before this is that there wasn’t a better product out there.

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filed under: rainskit.com

Posted 1251 days ago

I’ve turned on commenting, so you’ll be able to add comments to any articles I write. It was an unexpected pain to get it set up and looking right, but at this point it should look good and be easy to use. If something doesn’t work well, please let me know.

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