Gillius's Programming

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Conversion to Movable Type - Part 1

The original Gillius.org site was entirely static content. In order to move to Movable Type, I needed to first convert the original site's content in a way that would be compatible with the old one, both in looks, content, and even the URLs themselves. I did choose MT partly because it appeared to be easier to import. I also looked at Drupal and Wordpress as well.

In this first part, I will cover conversion of the blog posts, conversion of the style, and parsing the original static HTML pages into a format that can be uploaded into MT. Read on for the details.

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HTTP Caching and the Refresh Blues

While developing the updated Gillius.org site, I noticed that sometimes the pages would not update when I went to them, until I hit refresh, even after I exited the browser and restarted it. I was using Firefox, which I learned made the problem more apparent versus IE, but I learned that it was my site's cache settings that was having a problem. I've fixed the problem, so if you see content that doesn't look right, missing comments, or is out of date you might have to refresh manually once, but hopefully not again after this. Read on for the details.

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Gillius.org Now Out of the 90s

Previously, I used to maintain this site as static content (with the exception of the news page). Now I am using the popular blogging software Movable Type to help manage the site. My intention is to start doing a lot more blogging posts, rather than articles/static content that have been seen (and hardly touched) over the last 10 years.

Moving to a proper system now means that you can search the site, leave comments and trackbacks, and navigate by categories/tags/dates. It also means you will see more content as it is easier for me to post now.

In the short-term, my next posts will detail some of my experiences converting my existing site to Movable Type.

RealDB Finished

As of October 5th, I'm finished with all of the requirements of my master's degree! I gave a presentation of RealDB, which can be seen on its page. Source code is also there, and the project is licensed under GPL v3.

I know that it's been some time, but I plan on bringing back the site somewhat as a blog. I've been wanting to do that more for a time but felt weird putting it here, as it is the "news" section. I might just make the posts here, or maybe I will start up a separate section just for the blog.

GNE Page Updated

After responding to a bug report in the forums, I updated the link on the GNE subversion, which was obsolete since SourceForge changed their SVN URL scheme. Users working with GCC 4.3.0 should now be able to compile GNE when working with version 0.75.

Master's Project

I have created a site for the work on my master’s project, RealDB. More information is coming soon on its site.

CSS Handheld Profile Support

Sorry for the news spam, but one last item (seriously)… I’ve also added handheld support to the CSS profile. I used ems in the CSS sizing before for the site and it always looked well, but now I have some handheld-specific tweaks. I’ve tested this functionality against IE in Windows Mobile 2005 only so far. I plan on doing a little more tweaking in the next few days but please make comments if you have any.

CSS Printing Support Enabled

I added some print rules to the style sheet, so that the site should print out better on a printer, if that’s your thing. Please feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions.

Site Code Changes

I switched the site from a table-based layout to a div-based layout. In order to make my time with CSS easier I had to change the style a little, but I also took some other liberties. I might change the style a bit more soon – I’m not sure I like a few of the colors.

Forum Software Switch

I just migrated from PHPBB to Simple Machines Forum because of all of the hacking and spam bot accounts I was getting on the PHPBB boards. I'm not sure if SMF is any more secure from these things, but we will see... If you have any issues with your moved account or using the new boards please let me know.

Also, the new URL for the forums is http://forums.gillius.org/, so please update your bookmarks. I will try to keep that URL as permanent as possible, however URLs underneath that may change if the software changes.