Entries by Julian

The NZ Herald was proudly touting it's bevy of Qantas Media awards in Saturday's edition and on their website. Good thing the judges don't hand out the gongs for sub-editing, isn't it? On the front page of the same paper Northcote College was apparently put on "probabtion" for it's basketball recruitment scheme. In the awards article itself the Herald claimed to have beat "allcomers", and on the same page (A3) discussed a survey of 18,000 "moythers", announced that "Aucklanders should be able to the washing dried" and left a double quote off the end of Miss World's comments.

Today in the online edition, Hezbollah gunmen have apparently started their "withdrawl" from Beirut. Retreat with a Southern accent perhaps? Who can say?

Funnier (or is that sadder?) still, if you search the website for "probabtion", it asks "Did you mean probation?". Probably, NZH, probably.

Still, it could be worse. They could outsource the editing to whoever does the captions for TV1's morning news. Now that would be truly dire.

Isaac was born very early this morning. 4.48kg (that's 9lb 14oz in old money) and 54cm long. He had a full head of dark hair and very long finger and toenails when he was born. Mother & baby are both very well, pictures here, more later.

We've relaunched this website using the Serendipity weblog engine, which is really nice, but one thing that's really been bugging me is the way Serendipity builds permalinks to entries on the site.

Serendipity's default permalinks look something like /archives/123-Title-of-Post.html. Now I don't like the "archives" bit or the numeric ID, and I want the post title to be always in lower case (and preferably be a separate field from the title so I can clean it up a bit in some cases) and I don't want to see ".html" tacked on the end. Permalinks are important, they're intended to be permanent and hopefully survive across relaunches, so it's worth a bit of effort to get them right in the first place.

I realise that sticking the ID in the link helps a bit with efficiency – it's quicker to pull something out of the database given it's ID – but frankly I'm prepared to work those Xeons in VPSLink's server farm just that bit harder in order to get good looking links.

So far I've managed to make the permalinks look more like /2007/07/12/title-of-post which I'm pretty happy with, but I haven't yet looked at how much it would be to add a separate "url-title" field separate from the post title.

Changing the format of link is really easy in Serendipity's configuration, but there didn't seem to be any way to force the permalinks to be lower-case (maybe there's a plugin for this but I couldn't find one). Fortunately Serendipity is pretty well put together and there's a single function for generating permalinks called serendipity_archiveURL in include/functions_permalinks_inc.php. Change the last line of that function to be

        return strtolower($path);

and everything Just Works. If you've already created some entries and you'd like to lowercase the existing permalinks, they can be easily updated in the serendipity_permalinks table in the database. If your site is already live then it'd be a good idea to keep the current capitalized links and add new rows to that table with the text in lower case, so you don't break any existing inward links to your site from other places.

Happy! I went hunting for recipes for Kim-chi fried rice, my current lunchtime crave, and found a really good recipe for it at Lily's Wai Sek Hong, which has a ton of other great looking recipes (including lots of nyonya ones).

I have laid in supplies, and my lunches are sorted from here on in. My first try was pretty tasty, but a bit too meaty and not kim-chi-ish enough.

Another good site I found while on this hunt was TriFood which has a good guide to various Korean dishes and some recipes.

After a very long time away, tiddly-pom.com is finally back on the air again. This time it's thanks to Serendipity and PostgreSQL on our new Slicehost server running Debian.

We'll be changing and tweaking things over the next few weeks until it's good. For now I can't be bothered sorting out effective comment spam protection so for now, all comments require moderation. That will change eventually. Also the template and fonts are a bit broken. That can wait. For now, it's just good to be back!

OK, it's officially late and I have sleep to catch up on.

Update... we moved to a 512 meg slice at Slicehost for hosting after a few glitches with VPSLink and some glowing reports I'd read about Slicehost. So far, so good.