Month: February 2007

7:30 P.M Chinatown

I took the dog for a walk that turned into a walk across the Manhattan Bridge.This spirit of adventurousness took us to Chinatown where we picked up a few things for the kitchen.
Bozzio was beside himself amongst so many of his best friends (anyone and anybody)and I was happy to find deals like 6 oranges for 2 dollars.

But the rain and the cold got to us and we wanted to go home.I realised I’d gotten us into a pickle because if cabs are hard enough to get when it’s raining, try adding a dog to the equation…sure enough not even standing right in front of the off ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge(where vacant cabs were off loading by the dozens)
was doing the trick.One genius stopped just to tell me that he’d let us in his cab if Bozzio was wearing a box(muzzle) over his face.

This seemed funny to me- cabs have plexi glass dividers between the front and back-so who was Bozzio going to bite?Me? And was I then going to sue the cab company? Because my dog bit me in their cab?

I don’t think he had the slightest idea that he was implying so many insane scenarios with that one remark.But when I accused him of making up stories he rolled up his window and became much less forthcoming with bs theories.

I’ve lived in the NY area since 1989-you’d think I would’ve seen a sign in one of the billion cabs I’ve ridden in about their policy about dogs…

I thought about trying to take Bozzio on the subway but I didn’t know the MTA’s policy about this.Bozzio is a 65 pound pitbull boxer mix.I’ve seen little doodad dogs in purses on the subway…but no one Bozzios size.I called 311 to ask.
311 didn’t know and they also didn’t know if there was a standardized rule about taxis and dogs.
311 was transferring me to the MTA when a cab did stop for us!
Our hero was 24.

He thought I was funny because I was telling him the trouble I’d been having.
He asked about Bozzio’s name and didn’t know who Frank Zappa or the Mother’s of Invention were!?
Anyway we got home and I think I tipped him the cost of the ride itself but it was worth it.

Wither Thou,Thickbox?

I can’t get ThickBox to run on this new site I’m working on. I know it’s my thickheadedness in figuring out the path(I have a mental block with paths)to the script,but why then am I able to do anything else?

Why am I able to get greybox and lightbox to work?

I’m trying to make something rather small like a minigallery for this new site but even though thickbox woulda been awesome-no luck.

More CMS Love

I told you I’ve been collecting and testing out various CMS’s and trying them out on 2 different server environments,right?

First, for that special little challenge of nothing working-I load it up to my dad’s host and start opening every script file included in the package and looking for session_start(); which means I then have to paste into every page that uses
session_start(); my session save path.This path is to an actual folder that will record and stash every blasted session id that gets generated by the script!This means that every once and awhile I have to delete that folder or it will bloat up to a million stored ids.Awesome!

When I’ve gotten that bit out of the way, I then try to get the CMS to do what it’s supposed to do:make php pages(I use php powered CMs’s because me likey). By “make” I mean create the page.
By “doing what it’s supposed to do”,too, I mean let me edit stuff in a created page and let me upload images and store the damn things to a folder the script makes for me.

Ideally things will go, unideally they won’t or the image upload won’t work.Or I won’t be able to figure out the correct path to something.
I have tried out and successfully ran the following CMS applications:

  • Doop
  • dokuwiki
  • daily
  • Pagemanager
  • Siteman
  • EditThisPage
  • fancy
  • cutenews
  • editPoints

I have failed at the following:

  • justVisual
  • LemonCms
  • cmssimple
  • modx
  • moodle
  • phpcms
  • spaw

I mentioned that I loaded these for the most part only to my dad’s retarded host.
Purehost runs php v. 4.3.0 with gdlibrary one.
They trust nobody so there are many built in restrictions and for the most part you’ve got to be pretty tenacious to get anything more complicated than a contact form to work.
You do not have access to php ini so there goes a lot of options right there.You can’t use gd library 2 functions so there also go even more options.You can’t even have a mysql database connection because this is really only for Purehost’s unix platform customers…although they will happily set one up for you
and charge you 5 bucks a month for the priviledge,too.Outside database connections also won’t fly(I of course tried this first).
In short Purehost has a very hostile environment to work within.
And all that session id saving is so backward-I can’t even begin to tell you by how much.

For that added touch of sheer frustration,any package I run will take forever to load.By forever I mean slower than dialing up an mp3 file.This usually means your save_path folder is bloated but it doesn’t always mean this and so you just have to close the page or close the browser and wait.

And since I am also designing web pages, this lull in waiting to see my results after closing the editing window can drive me so crazy I end up yelling obscenities and just shutting my project down.

I know that the culprit is Purehost and not my P.C. because I have been able to try out 3 different hosts besides Purehost and the wait time is negligible, comparatively.Meaning that for instance the exact same blog as this one on Purehost that I set up for my dad takes more than 5 minutes to appear.This one takes a fraction of a second, thanks Troywolf.com.
Even my rinky-dink angelfire site comes up instantly–all html and javascript no php allowed.
I guess the purpose of this blog is to let you know that before you badmouth a particular tool or application and tell everyone it doesn’t work-make sure you have tried to run it on at least one other host first.

I listed above all the cms that worked but I left out the rich text editors tinymce and fckeditor because technically you are suppoed to be able to turn any text area into an editor, but I was looking for something really a lot simpler.Basically I just wanted image uploading/ &page-management/creation/deletion but fckeditor is so heavy and so is tinymce- I loaded them but was afraid of them!so I didn’t use them.Fckedito’rs flaw for me was the abilty to save the page you made–I couldn’t figure it out! I’m not giving up on tiny mce-it’s got a lot of cool functions I just need to spend time finding out about all of them.

I’m not a total dullard as I was able to turn a text area into a tiny mce editing point–but that was as far as I got with it.