Andy Chase

Welcome. If you’re reading this, it probably means that you got bounced from an older domain (andy.greyledge.net, achase.net) which I have recently decommissioned.

After years of having stuff strewn all over the internet, I’m making a concerted effort to consolidate my online presence into one domain, and you are now on it. Some old content may be left behind - if there was something you were especially hoping to find and it’s not here, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can’t accommodate you.

In the meantime, feel free to poke around or search the site.

I spent a good chunk of time upgrading this site to Drupal 6 and giving it a nice clean theme over the holidays.

I lost some of the work I had done on this theme thanks to a sudden hard drive failure last week, and because I don’t feel like redoing that work right now or waiting until it’s redone before launching, I decided to just reenable anonymous content access and let people (and search engines) wander in. I have no doubt that numerous broken links and images may still be found among older posts, but a lot of cleanup has taken place there too. Not bad for 700+ posts dating back to 2001.

It’s April 7, 2007 and once again I’m migrating my web site to a new platform, and a new domain at NiceOld.com.

The shift in platforms should come as no surprise; since I began maintaining a more or less active web presence in September 2001, I’ve hopped from a homegrown blogging tool to PhpWiki to another home-grown blogging tool to MovableType to TextPattern to WordPress, and now to Drupal.

My basic reason for switching each time has been that something better has come along… “better” is a subjective term, so for the sake of avoiding religious wars about content management tools, let’s amend that to “better for me.” I think the earliest version of MovableType was out when I started keeping a weblog in late 2001, but I didn’t know about it - even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have used it. At the time I was all about reinventing the wheel, which I think was a good thing for the relatively inexperienced programmer that I was; I learned a lot about content management by hacking on that first primitive, one-user tool, even if I never really finished or released it as free software as was my original lofty goal.

By the time I got some exposure to MovableType 2.x and decided to switch, I had gotten the “If I don’t build it myself, I’m less of a coder” chip off my shoulder, and I wanted something that “just worked.” The fact that it was written in Perl was actually a plus at the time, as my unfamiliarity with Perl enforced my vow not to poke around under the hood.

Subsequent jumps to TextPattern and then WordPress were both inspired by the desire for a somewhat more sophisticated tool that would accommodate journal-style weblogging along with static pages, and perhaps the occasional photo or two… a content management system, in other words. I’ve been up to my elbows in one full-blown CMS or another since spring of 2004, but until fairly recently I was convinced that a CMS would be overkill for a one-man operation like mine, at least with the tools available. I had written Drupal off until the last couple of months because I tried out a very early version of it some years ago (possibly even pre-1.0,) and found it unusable and/or inscrutable at that time.

So what changed? My approach to “putting stuff online,” for one thing. I’ve wrestled quite a bit with the best way to organize, categorize, and present the various things I write, photos I take, and audio I record. I’ve also wrestled with the notion of personal online presence versus professional online presence; what’s appropriate, do I keep putting up a portfolio and yanking it down depending on whether I’m job hunting, et cetera.

I still don’t feel like I have all the answers, but the exposure I’ve gotten to Drupal over the last couple of months at work makes me feel like it may be the tool to help me find at least some of them. More than any other open-source CMS I’ve encountered so far, Drupal feels like the most carefully-architected one; built from the ground up with a consistent, extensible framework as opposed to a spaghetti code framework crudely bolted onto a halfway decent blogging tool.

As for the domain, I was domain prospecting this morning, looking for domains that were either

1. somehow related to my name or interest(s)
2. Short .com domains OR clever fractured spellings like del.icio.us or burri.to.

Thinking about my penchant for “old things”, I tried “goodold.com.” It’s the sort of name that conjures up lots of nostalgic imagery; good old days, good old-timey music, et cetera. Of course, lumped in with all of that you get “good old boys,” but it was worth looking into anyway.

As I expected, goodold.com was already taken, but astonishingly niceold.com was available. In many ways it’s a better fit for my sensibilites anyway. I really like nice old things… architecture, tools, instruments, traditions, music… and I like the way that this domain’s meaning will change for over the years; right now in 2007, the notion of a “nice old .com” is peculiar; the internet and the web have been around for a while, sure, but nobody thinks of “old sites” the same way they do about “old cars” or “old jewelry”.

It’s a much more evocative domain than ‘greyledge.net’, which has meaning to my family but no-one else, or ‘achase.net’, which smacks of, “andychase.com, achase.com, and of course chase.com were already taken, but this is better than nothing”. It’s short, easy to spell, and it’s a .com - no small feat in 2007!

I seem to have a knack for discovering the limitations of content management software just when I have committed enough time and energy to learning it that I won’t back out.

In this case, I thought it would be nice to preserve the ‘Archives’ sidebar item on the Explosive Logorrhea, Music, and Lutherie pages, but have the menu (and its links) filter by the category you’re currently viewing. A feature that you would expect any reasonable set of template tags to accommodate, right?

Not WordPress 2.0.4, or any available plugins that I could find. Fortunately, somebody else already solved this problem. The solution involves modifying the WordPress core source code, but it’s manageable - follow the notes after the initial post, too:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/69776

You would think that after 10 years of messing around with these web page things that it would be easy to figure out the best way to corral all of the various tidbits that go to make up one's online presence and put them all in one attractive yet highly usable package. Things like a weblog, or self-recorded MP3s, or a portfolio, or (increasingly important on a web full of services like Flickr, del.icio.us, and LinkedIn) links to other services.

When I started monkeying around with category indices last night, I didn't fully realize what I was getting into.When I started monkeying around with category indices last night, I didn't fully realize what I was getting into; to date I had the site set up under the assumption that I'd only be making one post per day, regardless of category.

By indexing everything by category and date I can't realistically continue to structure the site using paths like /blog/year/month/day/index.html; in my need to play catchup with blog entries since last Thursday I'm going to have a couple of overlapping posts on the same dates but in different categories.

It's not a big deal to move to something like /categories/category/blogtitle.html, but it's a pain in the ass now that Google has crawled the old indexes for September, October, and November. I suppose I can keep those around and add a META robots tag telling Googlebot not to index or follow those pages any more. Eventually I'll have the server throw a 401 error and redirect hits to those pages somewhere useful. I'll probably maintain the /blog/year/month/index.html monthly indexes, but break the up the listings for each month by category then descending date.

Then there's the added complexity of having the site broken into much more distinct sections; it's now Category > Blog instead of Blog(Category). I'm already doing this to some extent using the categories' description field from the database, but it's still a little bit clunky.

Plus I want to clean up the icons a tiny bit now that I see them all side by side.

I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems.I'm hardly an authority on Weblogs, seeing as I seem to abandon every single one I try to set up or maintain after about 5 entries, but I think that's largely because I haven't been happy with any of the ones available at Sourceforge and other free software sites; systems like Slash and its PHP equivalent PHPNuke are fantastic, but way, way more than I need to run my pissant little waste of bandwidth. I don't need polls, or Slashboxes, or a message board, or 8 dozen pre-defined topics that I'll never use, or the bad, bloated HTML that always winds up in the predefined theme templates. Sure, they're heavily customizable, but to effectively design your own theme you have to learn a whole new API and chances are you'll have to use nasty, crufty HTML to make everything look right and align properly. For that matter, I don't need an extensive user registration or comment moderation system. If (God forbid) I should ever find myself getting enough traffic to warrant a comments and moderation system, I'd just as soon build it myself.

So it comes down to this: It's time to roll my own. I've made abortive attempts at this before, full of convoluted, poorly commented code that I can't even figure out myself six months later, but this time I'd like to approach it as a project that might be of use to somebody else... I can't be the only person out there who just wants a single-user blog that they can host on their own boxen without wading through all the extra features that come with the portal-style systems. It will need to be well-written, easily customizable, and extensible. It will defintely be written in PHP, and it will probably use MySQL for its database, as much as I'd like to use PostgreSQL. (mmmmmm, foreign keys.) Lots more people use MySQL, at least at the time of this writing.

I've learned quite a lot about programming style and programming in general since I started tinkering with PHP at Stan Lee Media, and I've used one hell of a lot of free (as in speech) software in the process. The nagging voice in the back of my mind that tells me I should give something back has been growing steadily, and since I haven't really learned C yet it looks like PHP will be the way I can do it.