Bluedragon

Another Success

Erica successfully imported her comments into her MovableType blog.

She informed me that HaloScan was going to charge $10 for her to export her comments. Glad I could help.

Zack had a suggestion: He (and Erica) were confused by the way the email addresses looked in the database. HaloScan has them “encoded” on purpose to try to avoid spammers. I wrote code to undo that, but did not execute it because my wife (and I) thought it was a good idea to keep them encoded. However, after Zack’s email, I thought it would be cool to add a radio button the import comments page allowing you to keep them the way they are, or to unencode them. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make that change.

Import Comments Success

Well, I’m happy to report that at least one user has been able to use the Import Comments feature I added to Movable Type (no thanks to my sorry excuse for documentation/instructions and blindness to emails).

Zack was able to import his comments, blogged about my “plug-in” and sent me a nice email.

BBS

That’s right, a Bulletin Board System. I have been going to ISCA BBS for around 7-8 years. I have logged in nearly 10,000 times. It has make topics you can read about and members from all over the world that you can “eXpress message” with.

As it is purely text based it is low bandwidth (which is rare in these days), but it obviously doesn’t have the graphic appeal or “coolness” of IMs.

You can telnet there and login as a Guest to look around: telnet://bbs.isca.uiowa.edu:23

You can get a client to enhance the experience at http://www.bbsclient.net/. (I hope to make my own client sometime soon, whenever I get some more free time).

Sparklers

The 4th of July is a pretty cool time because I like fireworks. Though usually sparklers are not that cool, when you take pictures in low light, the exposer is long enough to capture the sparkler in motion. Here are some cool pictures we took last night.

It is very difficult to get anything in focus with a long exposer and motion, so I’m not surprised they are a little blurry. As always there’s more pictures at my wife’s web site.