Five weeks since the last post? Wow, that went fast. No apolo­gies though. Look for­ward, not back­ward and all that stuff.

The web­site as it stands now is really just a big proof-of-concept. I’ve proved I can cob­ble together a fairly stan­dard two col­umn blog, with header and footer, and even post to it every now and then. But there’s a big chunk of semi-interesting con­tent in the side­bar that isn’t being looked at because all the ‘Of Inter­est’ con­tent isn’t view­able in the RSS feed or to those access­ing indi­vid­ual posts from the RSS feed.

This is around 60 – 70% of the stuff I post to the web­site. So you can see why I’d want to do some­thing to get peo­ple read­ing it.

I really need to bring my pho­tog­ra­phy back in a big way too. Although I did try exper­i­ment­ing with post­ing to the site through Flickr, it just didn’t feel nat­ural to me. There is the option of rein­stalling the basic Flickr bar. Only this time I’ll try and make it fit in with the design a lot better.

And now that I’m exces­sively post­ing to Twit­ter, hav­ing it inte­grate with the site is damn near mandatory.

While I’m doing all this I might as well upgrade to Word­Press 2.5.1 too (although the last upgrade was all kinds of pain). It’ll be nice to check out the back­end designed by the Happy Cog boys.

Con­sider the resolv­ing of all these points to be phase one of the new mas­ter plan.
Phase two being a new design or, if I’m feel­ing par­tic­u­larly lazy, a quickie refresh of the cur­rent one.

I’ve had a few com­ments from peo­ple that Inno­cent Bystander “just ain’t right” in Inter­net Explorer. Which doesn’t sur­prise me really, given the issues I’ve had with the browser before before.

I had a bit of time to spare at work, so I thought I’d check out the prob­lem. See what’s going on. I typed in the address, hit Enter and got this screen:

Yep, my site has been blocked by the inter­net fil­ter and I’m will­ing to bet that this tag is the culprit.

I could remove the offend­ing tag, but what hap­pens if that wasn’t it? What if it’s some­thing else on the site thats grab­bing the filter’s atten­tion? Do I remove the offend­ing item (be it tag, post or image) again? And if that doesn’t fix it? How far would I got to ensure my site gets around the filter?

I could keep ask­ing these ques­tions, going deeper and deeper into the rab­bit hole, but that way lies crazi­ness. Self-censoring really isn’t an option. Inno­cent Bystander is my own per­sonal web­site when I’m work­ing on my own per­sonal web­site. The best thing to do, I think, is just to keep post­ing as I am now and damn the filters.

Really, they’re the ones miss­ing out.

Of course there is still that prob­lem with my site and IE. But I guess I can just blow the dust off Inter­net Explorer on the home com­puter and tool around there. Leav­ing my work life and sexy blog separate.

Now that I have the gen­eral look of the site down of course new prob­lems are going to crop up.

I’ve got one huge issue with the RSS feed. It’s full of mul­ti­ple copies of site posts, when there should only be one.

Also this morn­ing I noticed that the last post had decided to repli­cate a few times.

And I was so close.

[10:47] OK. I’ve man­aged to fig­ure out what went wrong. The site was post­ing a num­ber of posts depen­dent on how many cat­e­gories I’d filed it under. Once I dis­abled the Side­Blog plu­gin this fixed right up.

[11:10] I’ve got no idea what ver­sion of Side­Blog I was using, but I think it was at least two years old. I’ve tried a much later ver­sion and it seems to be work­ing fine.

After many, many hours of back-breaking labour and bruised fin­gers I’m done. Panama 2.0 is a go.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• New design (duh!)
• Installed a CAPTCHA. I was get­ting sick of the SPAM fil­ter fill­ing up and over­flow­ing into my mail­box. This will also mean that the logs are a lot cleaner too.
• Learned the basics of PHP.

While I’m happy with the site, I had a lot of issues with the side­bar. There are a still a cou­ple of things I want to add to it, but they can wait:

• Recent Com­ments
• Tum­blelog. This will be a short list of links and obser­va­tions. Things that, while being cool, don’t deserve a full post [4:25]Tumblelog is there thanks to some out­side help. Cheers, Pauly.

• [4:32]I’ve just noticed that bul­lets aren’t work­ing in the main con­tent page. Dang. Bul­lets are back, baby.

These will appear when (and if) I fig­ure out how to use the Word­Press Wid­gets. Of course, judg­ing by the time it took me to learn PHP expect these addons some time late 2008.

EDIT: This is a repost. The site was dis­play­ing the old one three times for some rea­son. I deleted one and they all went.

With just a few lit­tle nig­gling things in the new design to work out, I thought it’s time I put out a lit­tle teaser of what’s to come.