Posts tagged with keywords "Redbrick"
I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.
I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.
If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?
Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.
Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. Wordpress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.
It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.
For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run Wordpress (with some hacks), do Wordpress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.
Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…
It’s seems I’m back online again. The admins of Redbrick, the host of thedeadone.net, turned Redbrick off after it was discovered that people’s personal webpages had been hacked. Now it looks like everything is up again (if you find something a-miss on the site, drop me a comment). The admins have re-installed everything from scratch and re-instated all the user-data from back-ups before the attack. A pretty large amount of work for admins-slash-students to do.
In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.
I’m sure everyone is already aware that Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dunegons and Dragons, passed away on Tuesday. Was never a fan of D&D but without it, I wouldn’t be playing Nobilis or writing roleplaying stuff today. Muted feelings really.
Also announced on Tuesday (before the news of Gary’s death): STOCs (irishgamingwiki link) one of the oldest running Clubs in DCU proposed “merging” with the Games Soc. STOCs is/was the gaming & roleplaying society in DCU and even though I’ve been long out of college, I still have strong ties to the club. The “merging” is rather actually being subsumed into the Games Soc which is oriented towards Computer Games (though originally the Games Soc was an off-shoot of STOCs, I’ve been led to believe). STOCs ran the small annual games convention Sillicon with it’s popular Pub Quiz (irishgaming wiki link). I’ve even ran and wrote games for Sillicon in the past. I do not know the fate of the future of Sillicon. This has saddened me.
Kidic are number 26 in the Irish IRMA charts with their first official signal. I have copies of all their previous stuff at home and I remember when they were “Kid Icarus”!
(For those who don’t know or who aren’t members of Redbrick, Kidic are a rock band formed from various people who attended DCU. For the record, I did my third-year computer applications project with the guitarist).
Their music is pretty cool, similar to Radiohead before they went all weird. They have a music video, available online which is hilarious - only because I know them all from before, it’s so hard to take them seriously! 
I wish them all the best! (And, yes, I did buy and download their single. So, eh, Spock, any chance of a physical copy of the single, for the collection? )
If your running Wordpress on Redbrick, more than likely your using a version of Wordpress modified by me (see the wiki for more details).
One of the big problems of Wordpress on Redbrick was that Redbrick is behind a proxy so all outbound connections have to go through the proxy. Wordpress has no build in support for it. I worked out all the changes needed (here). I also submitted a bug report to Wordpress (#3082) detailing the issue.
Well, they’ve closed the bug. 
Because someone else has submitted a fix for it that supports it properly. So hopefully, in the next release of Wordpress (2.1.4?), it’ll be much easier to install Wordpress on Redbrick. You’ll be able to configure the proxy in wp-config.php and off you go. More stuff will just work “out of the box”!
Now it’d be perfect if the mighty admins of Redbrick get CURL up and running. I’ve been informed this in progress but should be soon.
Did it. Done it. And you shouldn’t have noticed anything, unless you happened to be gawking at thedeadone.net on Saturday 4pm.
I had setup a duplicate of my website, did a test upgrade, so I knew exactly the problems I encountered, which were really only one, once I had gone through all the modifications required to get up and running on Redbrick. Besides upgrading all the plugins, I also had to change my code syntax plugin (using now SyntaxHighter). It’s nice. The previous one suited me fine too but it was incompatible with Wordpress 2.1. Still suffers a similar problem though that if you edit the post, you lose all your tabs and inline spacing. Pain in the hole.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed, so far, is the built in spellchecker (uses aspell locally) and that you can choose to write your posts in “code” (i.e. html) or a fancy visual editor.
(This post also suffers a dual purpose. It should also cross-post to livejournal to confirm all is up and running! )
Update: Arg! First bad point. It seems that if you have a “more” tag (i.e. the “Read More” link you see on posts on the frontpage), it won’t include anything after that tag in the RSS feed! That sucks. I’ve always included the complete text of posts in the RSS feed. I know some folk like just the extracts, however I’ve turned off some blogs just because, all I get is that extract in their feed. Damn. Have to see if someone has written a plugin to “fix” it…
Update #2: FFS! The admins had to shut down my wordpress because it was causing a huge load on the webserver. I believe this was due to this bug in Wordpress 2.1. Hopefully it’s okay now. I guess I won’t be creating a wordpress 2.1 install script until 2.1.1 now even though I’ve fixed it locally (fingers crossed). And now, bugger it, my old posts are pingbacking other posts on my site. Wordpress 2.0.x never did that. I’m getting rather annoyed by this “upgrade”!
Update #3: CompleteRSS plugin solves my RSS complaints.
Update #4: AJAX is quite funky in action. However it sucks when your trying to find which PHP files are being executed.
Found this neat little feature in Pligg that allows you to easily add a link to Pligg. The simple code can be expanded so you can add a button to your webpage that allows it to be easily submitted to Pligg. It’s not world-shattering, nor is it an unusual feature to find.
However, if your a Redbrick Member you could add this piece of code to any of your webpages that would all you or another Redbrick user to submit it to Pligg.
If you want, you can replace “document.location.href” with an explicit URL. I guess what we really need is a icon for Redbrick Pligg!
I’m considering adding it to Planet Redbrick and Redbrick Wiki. Is it a good idea? I could package it up in a Wordpress plugin but I don’t know how many Redbrick Bloggers use Wordpress.
The same also applies for Game Crafter’s Guild’s Pligg, however this Pligg is specifically for Gaming and Roleplaying related content, and we don’t have an icon either!
I originally posted this on the Redbrick babble newsgroup. If you don’t know what Redbrick is, this entry will have little interest to you. However, I’m posting it here because I think it’s interesting and also I’m hoping that it might filter out to some of the other Redbrick users who don’t use the newsgroups.
Read More…
… and just a little soul draining. My last few entries on my blog have all been about the Game Crafters Guild website and mostly technical in nature. Here, here and here.
I thought the idea behind the GCG site was/is a good one. It would be something I would contribute to and participate in. So I made a new feature-rich version of it and it went live a little while ago. I didn’t just plug together some pieces of software, I wrote code to join them, tested it, created new themes and templates for and brought it all together. It works. It is alive.
However, it is barely shambling forward.
Read More…