WPtouch is the best solution for WordPress blogs. It’s as simple as a plugin installation, and it is very decently polished.

It renders in “mobile” mode only for iPhone/iPod/Android clients. It has an option for those clients to still view the site in “normal” mode. It uses JQuery for various AJAX and visual effects. It just works and looks good while doing it, and I’ve recently installed it on this blog as well.

Maybe I'll actually blog about specific code examples more often now, because I'll know I won't have the hurdle of wrangling with TinyMCE.

So now I can post beauteous code snippets like this:

This is all thanks to the WordPress plugin by Amit Gupta over at iGeek.info called iG:Syntax Hiliter. You might note that it doesn't support ColdFusion out of the box. However, this plugin uses the GeSHI syntax highlighter, which does in fact support ColdFusion. So, as Adam Fortuna points out, getting ColdFusion syntax rendering is as easy as getting the cfm.php file from the GeSHI package and dropping it into iG:Syntax Hiliter's geshi directory.

After that, there may be some tweaking or style alterations you may want to make, but after activating the plugin, you're basically done. Thanks Amit!

As it turns out, I was having a heck of a time with user management on a fresh WordPress install. When I initially logged in as Administrator, I immediately changed the default password, but then the new password wouldn't work. After several attempts, it finally accepted the new password. Later, I tried making other changes to the profile, and they just wouldn't take. But then later, some of the changes would start showing up. Very odd and perplexing.

Well, caching issues usually do cause very odd behavior. Sure enough, I disabled the caching, and everything was fine. And to further verify that this is a valid solution, if you look inside the ~/wp-content/cache directory, there are two user-oriented cache subdirectories: "users" and "userlogins". WordPress v2.0.2 apparently doesn't handle the caching very well when updating user information.

Thank goodness for the default WordPress spam blocking functionality! Even though it left over 400 spam comments to moderate for Nazin and over 200 to moderate for my personal site (over the course of a week), at least it caught them and prevented them from appearing on the site itself!

My email client checks my accounts every 5 minutes, and on every refresh, it would pull down about 5 new comment moderation messages. That means that by yesterday, my site was getting comment spam or trackback spam once every minute during parts of the day. That is incredible.

You know, comment spam seems like a logical step for spammers, but you have to admit that the Trackback Spam, or Sping, is absolutely vile in an irritatingly clever way.

When you reach this level of blog spam, you realize how helpful services like Spam Karma are, and how incomplete CAPTCHA is as a solution to spam. It was never meant to be a total blog spam solution, but some people flog it as such. I used to be one of them. And now I'm glad I have Spam Karma. Except for its glitch (which I think was database related, not actually a fault of Spam Karma), it has had a 100% success rate for positive and negative spam identification.

Sure, the existing spam protection prevents spam comments from being visible. The stupid spammers can never figure out that gobs of links give away the fact that it's spam.

Or I could use a spam service like Akismet. Either Akismet or Nio's Anti Spam Image plugin is what it shall be.

UPDATE: Okay, and when it's all said and done, I went with Spam Karma 2. They seemed pretty good. We'll see how things turn out.

What was the main motivation for the new site design? Microsoft IE 7. Thanks Microsoft, your new browser completely choked on my old WordPress theme. It's for the better, though, because it moved me to action, and this new design is awesome!

I came this close to dropping WordPress and going with BlogCFC. Not so much out of a dislike for WordPress, but due to discomfort with PHP and WordPress templates in general, compared to thorough knowledge of ColdFusion. Alas, I stuck with WordPress for a few reasons: (a) It forces me to tinker a bit with PHP. It's a good thing. (b) WordPress has a billion themes, and I'm picky at how my site looks. (c) BlogCFC just feels a bit too plain sometimes. This is not an insult to Ray's fine work.

So here I am, with a fine theme called "Scary Little" by The Scary Little Monkey. It features some fun JavaScript effects, a great stylish look, and let's not miss the AJAX-driven search, which is great fun!

I've tweaked it a bit to include my tags (aka categories) in the menu navigation and to make pages (not blog entries, but the CMS pages) fill the whole site width, with no side menu.

Future tweaks I hope to get to: (a) A new header graphic that is flash-driven to incorporate just a tad of stylish animation, perhaps even an occasional image change; (b) Tabs at the top of the header, for moving between the different major website sections (I'll expound in a moment); (c) Either a better editor or tweak the default editor.

The site will be expanding. It is not going to be just a blog. Some ideas I have for expansion (probably about in order of seriousness): (a) A front-end site for my freelance development work; (b) A Trac-driven projects page, to be used with my freelance work; (c) Finally set up my "Land of Nazin" story blog! (d) An Apple Computer history wiki site. Yes, I know there are some out there, but I want to make one that is really nice. After all, I'd enjoy the process of making it since I enjoy reading about it.

Stay tuned!

All is well now. Heh. Heaven forbid I have a moment of pride without a humbling moment immediately thereafter.

To prevent the lamentable agony of this kind of loss, I could: (a) Set up a WordPress scheduled task (with plugins that provide such functionality) to backup the database on a regular basis, or (b) I could backup the database manually after I post an article. As a different approach, and the most fun because it involves programming, (c) I could set up a scheduled task on my server at home to pull the RSS feed from my site on a daily basis and save that.

My server at home is a Linux box (currently Fedora Core 4), so a quick little Linux script is the best way to go. This is exceptionally easy, so let's take a look:

fn=/backuppath/rss/nazin-`date --iso-8601=date`.xml
url=http://blog.nazin.com/index.php/feed/
curl -o $fn $url

This obviously could be a one-liner, but to dumb it down, I put the backup file path and the URL of the RSS feed in script variables. The first line says, "Make the path inside the rss directory (relative to the location the script is ran from), with a file called 'nazin-yyyy-mm-dd.rss', using today's date." If you are new to Linux scripting, anything wrapped in ` symbols will be processed and replaced with its output. So "nazin-`date --iso-8601=date`.rss" will actually become "nazin-2006-09-07.rss" if that is today's date. The second line obviously just assigns the value of the url variable. The third line is then a basic curl call. It says, "Go browse the $url and put the output in the file at $fn."

I then just set up that script to run as a scheduled Cron job, and we're in business! A quick note about the path: You can leave it as a relative path, and the script will work fine when you execute it at a shell prompt, but it may fail as a Cron job. To be safe, provide an absolute path so that it works at both places.
Don't leave backups to humans. We're too unreliable. Leave it to your server to handle.

Its heart is pumping a new beat; in other words, I've changed my hosting provider. Perhaps an upcoming post can be the horror story that is eHostDepot. Let me give you the 5 second version now: If you don't want to be left hanging in the scorching sun to be pecked at by the life-sucking buzzards (figuratively speaking, of course), then do not sign up with eHostDepot.

Secondly, Nazin has a new engine as well. I've finally moved away from the feature-parched-but-insanely-easy-to-use Blogger.com to a nicer, more feature-rich, and self-hosted WordPress. My greatest motivation for switching was to get a database-driven engine that would run on my own site, not simply publish to my site. I also wanted lots of more features (at the most basic level, I longed for category support), and the WordPress community is, well, glutted with plugins providing extra functionality of any kind imaginable.

It is insanely late. I'm signing off. But it feels good to take the step and finally make this live, even if it is still a work in progress.

The overhaul continues. But at least now I can blog on subjects as the cross my mind.

My lack of posts are strong evidence of the apathy I've been experiencing lately, primarily due to just being so busy with non-technological pursuits as well as a lull in exciting development at work.

My attendance at CFUnited 2006 has helped end my famine of enthusiasm.

The only thing I've been remotely excited about lately has been AJAX. At the conference, I attended the AJAX class by Rob Gonda, and it has jazzed me to push forward with more sophisticated AJAX approaches, as well as consideration of different AJAX frameworks, like Dojo.

Furthermore, I'm excited about actually considering the adoption of an application framework (perhaps Model-Glue or ColdSpring), using a source code repository (like Subversion), and finally making the switch from Dreamweaver to CFEclipse.

If that weren't enough, the typical networking benefits of the conference have taken effect, and I've been energized by the enthusiasm of a lot of guys in the industry.

It is actually that last point that leads me to my determination to overhaul my website. I need to stay more active in the industry, and one way I should do that is by more actively working on my blog. And not just for ColdFusion, but for any other web development topics that interest me, as well as my typical interest an Apple, Linux, and Microsoft news.

Keep an eye out. The overhaul is coming.

For awhile, my webserver no longer had FTP access, meaning an external service like Blogger.com was useless for managing my blog (ahem, if I had gotten around to developing my own blog--or at least modifying a preexisting package like Ray Camden's BlogCFC--this hiatus would have been unnecessary)!

Well, I will continue to limp along on Blogger.com, and I still do have plans on implementing a homegrown blog of sorts.

Even though I am still using Blogger.com as my blogging engine, I realized that I could still provide a search functionality via ColdFusion. To do this, I have used the Verity search engine included in ColdFusion.

Really, the search functionality is easier now than it will be once I develop a CF blog engine, because it is very easy to create a Verity collection by just scanning a directory of HTML documents.

One problem I experienced when implementing this feature, however, was the fact that I had a "Previous Articles" section in my navigation. The titles of those links would be pulled when performing searches, which was misleading and distracting. As a quick fix, I eliminated the portion of my navigation and reindexed the collection.

When I have a blog engine driven by ColdFusion and a database, this issue will be eliminated, because I'll set up the Verity collection via a query instead of a path.

What a concept, compress webpage code and content before transferring it, in cooperation with browsers that can transparently decompress the page upon receiving it. In other words, utilize that under-used CPU power to decrease web slowdown where it's bottleneck really exists: Bandwidth.

If you want to know more about HTTP Compression (not terribly grimy detail, just a nice overview), try this WebReference HTTP Compression article. I take exception at some of the wording about IIS on the second page in the bulleted list, however, because it says, "If it finds a pre-compressed version of a requested document it might send it but has no real-time compression capability. It will, however, use precompressed files if they are available." This makes it sound like some special process has to be ran to compress your site's pages before IIS can send compressed versions of the pages. But as described in Microsoft's HTTP Compression documentation, if no compressed version of a static document is available, IIS will send the document in an uncompressed form on that first, initial request, and compress the file in the background immediately thereafter. Thus, the static document will be available in it's compressed form on any subsequent requests, automatically. I can live with that. Further, dynamically generated documents are compressed on-the-fly. Granted, the article does explain this a little more clearly in the following paragraphs, but the introductory paragraph is very misleading.

All that being said, I've enabled HTTP Compression on my webserver for static documents, which is what Blogger.com uses, since it publishes the blog as HTML files every time a change is made. Cool.

Regardless of whether I describe my feelings on this matter as embarrassment or irritation, I'm glad to be here and blame my own stupid idealism as the culprit. You see, some personalities thrive on the possibilities of what could be, and get immense enjoyment out of the meditation of the possibilities even more so than arriving at the final product. These "dreamers" are in harsh contrast to the "productivity experts" who pride themselves in getting things done but truly have next to no imagination. Thankfully, most of us share a percentage of each extreme, albeit with a tendency toward one way or the other. Both extremes have the commendable strengths--although productivity is glamorized in the society we live in--and neither side deserves harsh criticism, rather, just a gentle push toward the center of the polarity to realize the best of both characteristics in a balance of the mindsets.

That being said, I will pride myself in my idealistic plans for a blog engine that I will develop myself and will be a lot cooler than Blogger.com. In the meantime, here I am.

On to the significance of the name, "Nazin". The "Land of Nazin" was an imaginary land that some of us geeks dreamed up back in highschool when we got bored of programming. We used this "land" as a creative and comedic outlet to post an ongoing story to a forum, where each post would be a continuation of the story of this land. Mythological or medieval in nature, the atmosphere of the stories was always epic in style, and always related to modern events occurring in our lives, or sometimes was just completely meaningless creative fiction. As I hinted at earlier, it was usually light-hearted in its seriousness, if that makes any sense, which usually made it very entertaining to read. Ever since its birth in Junior year, I've wanted to start a website or blog named after the "Land of Nazin". This weblog, driven by Blogger.com, probably will not have any stories written in true Nazin-style. But once I get my own weblog running, that separates all the blogs by categories, I will certainly have a blog category dedicated to the writings of Nazin.

On that note, I happily end my first blog. I look forward to many more.

I have full intentions of writing my own custom blogging engine in the near future, but in the meantime, I thought I ought to get a weblog rolling in the meantime. So I am using Blogger.com until I can get myself up and running on my own ColdFusion weblog.

In this interim state, I will write blog entries regarding my personal opinion on tech topics such as Mac computing, ColdFusion programming, or other general IT news pieces. I may throw whatever other interesting things come my way as well, but I foresee myself focusing on those kinds of topics.

When I develop my own ColdFusion-driven weblog, I look forward to being able to nicely categorize my blog entries, as well as support numerous other advanced features. But the feature that hurts the most right now while using Blogger.com is the lack of category support.