Just did some maintenance on the site because I noticed I hadn't been getting my e-mail notifications for quite a while. One of the modules was causing the cron.php file to crap out every time it was run preventing notifications from being sent. It never occured to me that the site was just saving them all up until I got like 500 of them in my inbox all at once. Hopefully most of you subscribed to this site will have gotten far fewer than that.

In any case, it won't happen again as I've disabled subscriptions in preparation to the transition to Wordpress.

If you have about 10 minutes to spare, won't you please consider taking our reader survey? Data from this survey will help me identify who's reading Neural Gourmet, what their interests are and possibly make changes to the site to better reflect NG's audience. And oh yeah, there's the possibility of selling ads based on our audience too. Sorry. I hate ads as much as anyone but NG costs money to operate and it'd be great if we could offset expenses. They're not coming very soon though and when they do I'll consider adding a subscription model that will allow users who subscribe to turn off ads. 

tng's blog | 2 comments

Props go out to Uri Kalish for showing us how to do scrolling blogrolls (as seen on our front page sidebar now)! Yay! Thanks Uri! Who knew it could be this simple? While I'm not thrilled about the use of the non standards-compliant marquee tag it works and that's good enough for now. For those who wish to do standards compliant XHTML with CSS, one particularly good javascript marquee solution (in my eyes) appears here. You'd still need to figure out how to read your blogroll into an array (NG's blogrolls are through Blogrolling.com) but that's probably not too difficult (and someday I may actually summon up the energy to do it).

I saw this at Mojoey's Deep Thoughts and you can download the code snippet for free preconfigured with Mojoey's Giant Atheist Blogroll'O'Doom (now 220+ godless blogs strong). So thanks to you too Mojoey for collecting together so many atheist blogs in one place!

OK gang, I've re-enabled the feedback form, this time with captcha validation for anonymous users. Hopefully this will allow anonymous users to provide feedback while preventing the fucking spammers from flooding my inbox with crap.

Oops. I just said fuck and crap. Guess that paid blogging position with the Clinton campaign is out now.

I've disabled the feedback form linked in the menu at the top of the site due to abuse by spammers. Gawd damn I hate spammers. It'll return soon with captcha validation.

I'm currently doing a major overhaul on Neural Gourmet's input formats subsystems. Several people have expressed a desire to use BBCode (used by popular bulletin boards) or Markdown syntax in place of the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. This makes a lot of sense, especially for those who only want to post in the forums.

So, what I'm doing is setting Neural Gourmet up to handle these three types of input formats.

Basic BBCode format will be the input format available to anonymous and regular authenticated users.

Regular authenticated users, and other roles will be able to ask for permission to use Markdown or TinyMCE in place of BBCode. Whichever input format you want to use, just let me know by using the feedback link at the top of the page. I'd prefer contributors to use TinyMCE since it allows the richest editing environment as well as easy (or at least not too terribly painful) access to uploading and including inline images in their posts.

These changes are going to take a while (perhaps several hours), but everybody already has access to BBCode. If you aren't familar with BBCode (chances are you are, but you might not know it by name) you can access the composition tips page for assistance.

Let me know if you have any problems and I'll update this post when I've completed the changes.

Thanks gang,
-- L.

I've been doing a little bit of demolition here at NG in prep for a major overhaul (which if you know me you'll know that'll take months). So if something you previously enjoyed has disappeared, sorry. It probably won't be coming back. Although all blog and forum content is sticking around.

And if anyone's interested in helping out with a new look, let me know.

1 comment

I had to disable the new module that gives us graphical previews of outgoing links. It's interfering with the img_assist module that NG uses for uploading and inserting images into posts. So... the snap module has been disabled until this problem can be worked out.

This message will brazenly flaunt itself until midnight whereupon it will go cower in the corner.

I'm upgrading the site to Drupal 4.7.6. As long as you see this notice, please do not post anything. There should be very little, if any, downtime. When the upgrade is complete this notice will be vanquished to the land of misfit toys per usual.

I just enabled a module that relocates the 'read more' link from the links bar at the bottom of posts. The 'read more' link is now included on the last line of the post. This has the advantage of making it more visible while also including it in the RSS feed, which makes it convenient for people reading the site via feedreaders.

As usual, this announcement will stay here for about 24 hours and then go hide itself with the rest of the stuff nobody wants to read.

Wayne Madsen doesn't seem to have liked Neural Gourmet contributor Muriel Volestrangler's post revealing the underlying anti-semitic bias in Madsen's conspiracy theories concerning the radiation poisoned Russian spy.

[Note: It is always interesting how the neo-con Mafia reacts when someone gets close to their sordid actions. A web site that appears to be quite close to the fake progressive web site Democratic Underground had a fit with the exposure of the Litvinenko case}.

Madsen's website software apparently doesn't support permalinks so here is an archived copy of Madsen's front page as of today.

tng's blog | 8 comments

I've turned off the brainsnacks (aggregated content) section of the site temporarily. There's a bug in Drupal 4.7 aggregator.module that's not reading some of the feeds correctly and causing other problems. I think it's time to redo this section of the site entirely anyway since it's not really what NG is about anymore (heck, it wasn't really what NG was about from the beginning really). Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I'd like to explore using aggregated content in other ways. Perhaps as a scrolling blog roll or something. We'll see.

This message will go hide in the usual place after noon tomorrow.

The Drupal logo: Neural Gourmet is now running on Drupal 4.7.OK, the site may be looking just a little bit different to you. Over the long holiday weekend I upgraded Neural Gourmet to Drupal 4.7.4. There are a lot of changes and it was by no means a walk in the park. Hopefully most of the changes will remain invisible to you, but tomorrow I'll get around to posting about the ones you should be noticing (I'm way too exhausted now). Among what you can enjoy in this new incarnation of Neural Gourmet is free tagging, much improved image uploading and handling, Lightbox JS 2 for displaying large size images (click on a thumbnail -- you'll see), a chat module that actually works properly, and more.

In the meantime, you may have to clear your browser cache and any cookies that Neural Gourmet has set in the past. Then close and restart your browser. The old cached files and locations will cause trouble for you. If the images in the blog posts are looking rather disturbed you'll definitely need to clear your cache. Also, you may run across one or two menus (I count five of them) that are not working. They're mostly minor menus and the module they called is not available for 4.7. I'll be getting around to creating a solution for that problem shortly.read more »

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to go crash. It's been a long three days! Oh, and the test posts below will unpublish themselves in a day or so.

2 comments

I'm doing maintenance on Neural Gourmet involving the database. You'll want to hold off on posting until this message disappears, otherwise your posts and comments will be lost. Thanks for understanding. This allows me to leave NG active and fully available while doing the maintenance. Hopefully this won't take too long. In the meantime, enjoy some Kome Kome Club.

Google changed the ping URL for Google Sitemaps so we were getting an error whenever new content was submitted (including blogs and comments). I installed the newly updated version of the GSitemap module. Problem appears to be resolved. Please post here if you continue to receive an error that looks like this:

warning: parse_url(/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.neuralgourmet.com/gsitemap)

Thanks.

Pathauto has had a longstanding bug where if dates are included in the path alias it will intermittently lose the current date information setting the path to be 1969/12/31/titlestring. The following 4 lines were added beginning at line 204, immediately following while ($node) { in pathauto_node.inc to correct this problem based on information found here. This problem is supposedly corrected in the latest version of pathauto for 4.7 and 5.0.

$fullnode = node_load($node->nid);
$fullnode->src = $node->src;
$fullnode->dst = $node->dst;
$node = $fullnode;

Hopefully this will correct this issue. Please let me know if you encounter it again.

Googlebot apparently went all HAL on us because it was crawling NG every few tenths of a second and preventing anybody else from using the site. While I love that Google loves NG, I could use just a little bit less love than that. Anyhow, Googlebot apparently gave up and went home so I was able to put NG back online, but I still have no idea what happened. More info as I get it. 

2 comments

There's a bug in mySQL 4.1.21 that Neural Gourmet seems to have just run into that affects the SELECT DISTINCT(x) command when using ORDER BY. The effect it's having on Neural Gourmet is that some users (like myself) may be seeing posts all out of order. I'm trying to determine the extent of the users that have the problem so if you're having a strong sense of deja-vu and are seeing stuff from earlier in the year or last year on the front page please, please let me know in comments on this post. It doesn't appear to affect anonymous users (i.e.: people who aren't logged in) but some logged in users might be having this problem.

5 comments

And we're back... Earlier this evening the McLean, VA datacenter where NG's server is housed had a power failure. The generator kicked in, but unfortunately there was a problem with the mains feed to the UPS so after about 25 minutes the batteries in the UPS died and NG went down. The datacenter got electricians in right away though and about 10:17PM were able to get power to the server. Yay! And thanks everyone who expressed concern. I really appreciated that.

This message will stay here until 10AM tomorrow and then it'll go live with all the other missives of doom.

OK, the top search phrases used to get to NG from a search engine in September are inside. From this I think we can tell some very basic things: 1) Motorhead's new freethought song is popular (yay!), 2) people care about Congress trying to do end-runs around the Constitution (also yay!), and 3) varkam is as popular as Kirk Cameron (they love you varkam, they really, really love you). The weirdest search phrase was only used once this month, "butterfly blog sex".  [...]read more »

tng's blog | 3 comments