Tim Danner

I seem to have lost interest in posting funny links, and I’m not sure why that is. It could be related to the intermittent screwups some people have noticed, where the site displays unstyled. When it’s in that state WordPress is also broken. I still don’t know what’s causing that. It just goes away on its own after a few hours. Could be an issue with the host.

Or maybe it just seems a bit pointless to post links to things that I essentially found on other sites that post links to things.

There’s still plenty of funny stuff on the web. Dave Barry’s blog includes so many links that I can’t even read them all. Boing Boing remains, as always, your best source for web strangeness and intellectual property moderation advocacy.

What I really ought to do (keyword: ought) is post more personal stuff, rather than just links. I should keep the “Recent Movies” sidebar up to date (or even say something about the stuff I watch–there’s a thought). There are photos I could post. I haven’t even mentioned here that I’ve started biking. And so on. For now, I’ll leave in place the scheduled job that copies any new links from del.icio.us to here.

In case you feel deprived by this, I’m posting the archive I kept from the old Python CGI funny link system I used before switching to a weblog format. There’s some good stuff in there, like Kikkoman and The Brunching Shuttlecock’s classic Either/Or. Link rot is pretty bad though.

(Warning: pointless geekery follows.)

The look I chose for this site is called “Simple Sky,” which I found in a big gallery of WordPress themes. It’s really just a CSS file that works on the default WordPress template, which makes installation trivial and upgrades more likely to go smoothly. I tweaked it a bit, but that’s all. It has sensible fonts and Rice-like colors. It would be nice if I could spiff it up a bit with a subtle text-shadow on the headlines, but the time is not yet right.

When I was using Movable Type (from August 2003 to June 2004), I wrote pretty much all of my posts using Zempt, a Windows app, because Movable Type’s web interface irritated me . After a month on WordPress, I haven’t really felt the need for a Windows writing app—the WordPress web interface works just fine. The only thing I miss is a spell-checker. If I used IE then I could use ieSpell, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent for Firefox.

A couple of weeks after rearranging the URLs and setting up the 301 redirects, I went through the 404s in the server log looking for things I had missed. I only found three types of URLs there: attempts to exploit bugs in IIS and common CGIs, robots.txt, and favicon.ico. There’s nothing I can do about the IIS/CGI crud, but I did create an empty robots.txt file to make those errors go away. My ability to draw 16×16 icons is an order of magnitude smaller than my ability to draw regular size graphics, which is pretty tiny to begin with, so I just stole one from the Iconfactory. Actually their terms permit this sort of use, and they have lots of nice-looking icons. I chose a boot icon from the Take a Hike collection because the top hit on Google for “danner” is Danner, Inc., maker of fine hiking boots, and because hiking is cool.

It has come to my attention that this fine, scholarly website is inaccessible from some public computers at the UT-Houston med school. That is all.

Back when I moved from the custom Python CGI system for funny links to a Movable Type weblog, I listed three reasons for the change. The third reason was “my geeky need to fart around with needlessly complicated web stuff.”

In that spirit, I have switched to a new system, WordPress, which seems to be the in thing these days. So far I like it better - the editing interface seems better designed, and the Apache mod_rewrite rules that it provides gives me shorter URLs. See? Geeky. I even added 301 redirects to point the old URLs to the newer, shorter ones. If you find broken links, let me know and I’ll patch them up.

Welcome to the new Funny Link of the Day System. The goals of this upgrade are pretty simple:

• I want to be able to add my own snarky comments about the day’s link.
• This leaves a more useful record than the old flotd-history.py system and makes it easier to find some random link from the past
• This satisfies my geeky need to fart around with needlessly complicated web stuff.