New Goober Server

Goobertech is on a new server (and all the other goober-sites, too). Now there’s twice as much space and twice as much speed. There shouldn’t be anymore lags in load time and no more damn MySQL timeout errors. Woohoo.

Twitter updated with Facebook and Aggregating on Goobertech

Got all that? It took a fair amount of effort to make it all come together.

If you’re uninformed, Twitter is a social networking site with the sole purpose of creating a list of status updates (like Facebook), or maybe some of you are still stuck with Myspace’s version. Anyway — the potential for niftiness with Twitter exceeds all and so I’ve begun my plunge into its depths.

Here are the steps I took: read more »

New DVD List

A new feature on goobertech. Using the same nifty javascript trick from the links page, I’ve recreated the lost list of all DVD’s in the collection in alphabetical order. The Rabbit in particular missed this.

It already exists in the sortable table format, but the new page is even more clever in that when you click on the movie title, the page expands instantly with the movie’s details.

Go give it a try…

Goddamn Internet Explorer's idiot CSS reasoning

I will cheer loudly the day Microsoft finally goes away bringing the god-awful Internet Explorer down with it. It’s been a sinking ship for the last few years anyway. Please people — for the love of sanity — abandon explorer and start using Firefox today. You won’t even notice the difference (other than you’ll have less ad/pop-up/virus/etc issues and things on the net will look better and you’ll surf faster and more efficiently.) read more »

Goobertech gets a kick in the ass.

Things have been kinda pokey around here lately. So I’ve done a few things to speed it up.

• The pages are now cached per session. This means images already viewed will be faster. You can always over-ride this manually by deleting your browsers cache. Otherwise it will happen automatically every hour.
• The various drupal css sheets are now conglomerated with java. Instead of multiple server draws to load each style sheet, the latest Drupal can splice them all together and make just one server call. This alone should make the largest difference.
• Background images are once again prettified and reduced to load faster.
• Not speed related — but pixel problems have been rectified. No one will probably even notice anything here, but a lot of little issues that have been bugging me have been fixed. Namely the task link positions at the end of each entry and various gallery function pages.

I’m not even going to bother looking at how Internet Explorer mucks things up now. If you still using that sorry browser it’s your own damn fault. Get with it and join the rest of the intelligent world with Firefox.

Don't delete your Drupal variables table

Mon Deiu, what a nightmare. Drupal quit working, gallery quit working, lots of settings that used to be there — now mysteriously gone. I had to grab my old table from the old site and rebuild the damn thing from scratch. Then re-install gallery and reset all of the Drupal 5.2 setting customizations that were made.

Damn phpMyAdmin. They really ought to add a “are you sure?” button to the delete buttons. That’s twice I’ve eliminated tables inadvertently without meaning to. Thank Jebus for backups.

Upgrade to Drupal 5.1 Successful

Here it is — soon you won’t notice any difference between this “new” site and the old one. Maybe you don’t notice anything already. Shows how much attention you pay to detail. But here are some clues…

• This funny symbol [’] has replaced apostrophes in strange places. Other ascii problems emerge every once in a while, too. This has to do with the utf coding of the database. I’ve found it easier and quicker to fix this by hand when they’re found. I’ll get ‘em all eventually.
  Update — I think I got ‘em all. With the exception of a few entries in the Rabbit’s guestbook.
• The gallery works fine, but things look a little funky for now. This is a simple fix of uploading my custom gallery themes. It’s on the “to-do” list next.
  Update — this is now finished, with some further tweaking to pretty things up a bit (like the Slideshow page).
• Some other little tidbits have yet to be upgraded, like the links and contact forms. And I still haven’t proof-checked all the pages.
  Update — Done!

Basically I’m just anxious to switch and since the database has successfully been swapped and upgraded (not without much pain and trial and error, mind you), I’ve gone for bust and made the switch so I don’t have to update two sites.

Successful relocation of Gallery 2

Now that’s how it’s supposed to happen! Works the first time like a charm. With the re-porting of goobertech from Drupal 4.7 to 5.0, I first recreate the entire site on a new location so the original can stay un-adultered and live. After re-doing the new drupal installation (with a few errors and tribulations), I set about duplicating the 1.47 gigs of gallery data on the new location. Here’s how I did it:

1. First Backup the g2data folder. I did this easily with shell access. The command is…
   tar -czvpf gallerybackup.tgz g2data/
   This created a tarred zip file of the entire gallery file data. This includes all of the albums and actual pictures/files.
2. Then I backed up the gallery database. Since I combine my drupal and gallery databases for some fancy and complex site manuevers, this took a bit more doing. The drupal database already existed and since phpMyAdmin can only handle about 5 Mb without timing out, I had to move most of the gallery tables one at a time. I simply exported them from the original database, and then opened them through sql in the new database.
3. Now the fun part — waiting. It took almost 5 hours to download the zipped gallerybackup file and then upload it to the new location.

   UPDATE - with my new shell interface as root on the server (use putty), I can now do all this from shell. Now download/upload. The trick at this step is to copy the backup file to the new user directory. Inside the old user directory (with the backup file) type:
   

   cp gallerybackup.tgz /home/new_user_dir
4. Meanwhile, I uploaded the new gallery 2 system files and installed a virgin copy in the new location. I simply let gallery do its own database table creating and gave it a new g2data folder to get a clean install.
5. Once the backup file was uploaded, I renamed the g2data folder used by the fresh install to something else, (g2data2), for example. Then I unzipped the backup with this command in shell…
   tar -xzvpf gallerybackup.tgz
   So far so good.
6. Then I recursively chmodded the entire directory with this…
   chmod -R 777 g2data/
   Now all the files and directories in g2data have read/write permission.
7. Without touching the gallery install yet, I deleted all the gallery tables from the new database. Then I used the backed up tables from the original database to recreate them with phpMyAdmin’s sql tab.
8. Now I browsed to my gallery install (direct link). The gallery wizard did an upgrade and all was well!
9. The last step was to copy the original site’s .htaccess file (the one in the root directory). Otherwise gallery had login/permissions errors. I also had to update the member data in gallery (the owner, specifically) to match the new owner/admin name in drupal.

And that’s it — a perfect relocation with no links lost. I did have to re-activate the urlRewrite module and the matrix theme. But afterwards, everything simply worked. As it should be!

Gallery Comments!

Not that you all interact with this site much anyway — (did you catch the challenging sarcasm?) — but now you can leave comments on the gallery albums and on individual photos as well. So go ahead, leave your thoughts and observations etched in goobertech infamy.