Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

You probably haven't noticed, but you are looking at a brand new site. After nearly six years of powering jennatollerson.com with Movable Type, I decided to follow the advice I've been giving out in my professional life for the past year, and rebuild the site using Drupal. This was not a particularly easy decision, as it meant migrating nearly 600 entries, and their comments, and their tags. Not to mention images, audio, and video files.

As you might guess, there is not a super simple way to do this. I got lots of help from this page, but it took a lot of trial and error, after which I went through and audited my content, trying to fix most things that were broken. Many links are still broken. However, it had to be done, because Drupal is a vastly superior CMS, and in the risk of having my salesman persona bleed into this site, I'll tell you why. This is going to be a developer-centric entry, where I talk about lots of geeky things. You might get bored , and for that, I apologize. If you came here looking for an entry all about my dark feelings, you'll have to wait for another day! Read More »

If you're seeing stars, I can tell you that you're probably not looking at my work. I upgraded my Movable Type installation today, and while I get some things worked out I dropped in the RAWK! style by Liz Lubowitz. This is mainly to gain a fresh start, but it's entirely temporary.

Why did I choose to do this today? I have plenty of work to do, but I'm also having one more bad day in a series of bad days lately, and as a result I'm procrastinating. It's unwise and irresponsible, but I think I'm doing it because this is the one little corner of the universe that feels at all under my control at this point, where everything else — and I mean everything — feels utterly unmanageable.

Only Jenna Tollerson would put off working on websites by working on a website.

Between this gentleman's excellent tutorial and my new MT paid support, I have gotten my new MT3D installation (mostly) up and running.

Good things about the new install:

1. Pop-up windows are history.

2. In the process of converting I finally paid attention to what my templates are all about.
3. All comments now have to go through an approved/non-approved screening process for unregistered users (which, I suppose, could also be bad).

Bad things about the new install:

1. Comment preview is now totally buggy and won't work like it should (they are working on fixing it for the next version)

2. The long anticipated comment registration system, TypeKey, won't work with my page for whatever reason. I am troubleshooting it with MT, but in the meantime you should still get yourself a TypeKey id.

So there you have it. Tread lightly, and if you spot something else that isn't working like it should, do tell me.

And totally off-topic: my site looks so much better in FireFox. You should switch. IE will only continue to disappoint you.

I'm upgrading to Movable Type 3.0D, and instead of being totally seamless as other upgrades have been, it's turning into a bit of a nightmare.

Please bear with me while I get things working, and...

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Read This

I am just enthralled with this woman. Her design is absolutely brilliant, and her photographs and commentary are awesome. I'm currently making my way through her archives. You should too.

(P.S. You are currently reading the 100th entry since my installation of Movable Type.)

to Movable Type 2.51. Oh yeah.

And it only took like, 20 minutes! I feel so smart.

Programming all summer has melted my brain.

I sit down to write, and not only can I not sit still for four seconds without parse errors going off in my head, but I have no real content of late. Just smartass comments and useless links and quiz results and nothing really. I could write about adventures in PHP programming but no one who reads this would even get it, and it's not even that exciting, really.

Previously, in such a dry spell, I just wouldn't post anything. If I wasn't feeling really passionate about something, there would just be no new entries. Granted, there were quiz results and smartass comments before but only interspersed with my actual words.

And that's when I realized: installing MT has completely changed the way I post. Interesting article? Link it! Silly graphic? Put it here! MT makes it far too easy. Which was fun for awhile. But I've got to stop. Or at least slow down. There has been one or more entries here everyday since I first installed it. Crazy.

I'm a link whore. I'm the #1 web whore, some say. And the more stuff you have up, the more stuff people have to read, and the more comments you have a chance of getting, the more active your site is, the more attention you get. I fucking love attention.

But then we get into the issue of quality versus quanity. Ben Brown wrote something more than two years ago that I just read today (I'm slowly making my way through his archives) that really made me think. Think about how I'm not really writing like I used to to, how I sorta just coast along on my cult status, by virtue of the fact that my friends like me, and will read my site regardless of there being anything worth reading.

I want to write about myself and my life but I have nothing to write about right now, so I'm going to try (even though I realize I won't be entirely successful) to stop being so trigger-happy with MT and wait for something to come to me, rather than updating every 20 minutes to keep my content fresh.

Case in point: you are still reading this, even though you haven't really read anything yet.

Lesson: Ben Brown can be more than just funny. He can also make you think.

Music: Better Than Ezra, Beautiful Mistake

So I lied.

C'mon kids, you knew I couldn't stay away. I bet you were even taking bets on how long I could hold out.

The answer: not very long. A matter of hours, almost. It's like telling myself not to just made the addiction worse.

I installed Movable Type, so now you have a fancy layout, archives, the works. This is a way to start over. If you must have them, you can still find every one of the first 80 entries here, however, I am leaving them behind for now. Too much craziness, too much fiery emotion and too much work. (Only fellow webmasters will understand the pain of doing all the html navagation by hand.)

Anyway, what better way to christen the new journal than with a nice, light survey, brought to you by none other than Sam. Read More »