Scott Boms

Our September 2008 Back Catalogue

Fixing Gravatar Support in Movable Type

One of the small tasks I set out to accomplish as part of moving this site (and numerous others) over to Slicehost was to fix a few plugin-related problems and template logic that broke at some point, possibly due to Movable Type updates, other template changes or just insufficient testing.

Fixing Gravatar support in the Notebook was one such problem. There are a number of versions of the Gravatar plugin for Movable Type floating around on the internets, but all are outdated and as such, incompatible with version 4.x. So I set out to figure out why, and as it turned out, the fix was simple and straightforward.

The problem came down to this: the URLs being constructed by the plugin were wrong, likely due to the plugin being developed long before Gravatar’s 2.0 re-launch a couple years back and whatever changes were introduced as part of that. So for anyone else who’s run into this issue, or wants this functionality for their own site, hopefully this saves you a few gray hairs.

This updated version of MT-Gravatar is also available from the Movable Type Plugins site, and the necessary documentation can be found within the plugin itself.

Download MT-Gravatar 1.4 (4 KB Zip File)

iPhone Wallpapers (Set 2)

It only took 9 months, but it seemed like a good time to put together a second set of free (as in beer) wallpaper photos produced specifically for the iPhone or iPod touch. These are taken from some of my favourite photos from my Flickr photostream over the last few months along with a few other unpublished photos.

A preview of a 2nd set of iPhone lock screen wallpaper images

As with Set 1, I ask that instead of redistributing the download, that people link back to this post.

Download the iPhone Wallpapers (442KB Zip File)

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A New Server and a New Face

Our planned move of wishingline.com along with a number of other domains to our lovely new slice at Slicehost didn’t go entirely as planned a couple weeks back due to a significant memory leak discovered when attempting to rebuild the Notebook.

The problem, after a few hours of debugging was found to be a broken version of ImageMagick installed on the slice which resulted in memory usage going through the roof, excess swapping and services crashing. All in all — very bad things.

On Friday night though, after a few additional minor changes and tweaks to the site, we finally flipped the switch and everything is now (we think) running smoothly at Slicehost. Most things should be a bit snappier too as a result of some simple under the hood server optimizations performed in the process.

Here We Grow Again

It’s been a crazy year all around, and although we weren’t planning on expanding Wishingline beyond myself and Anna this year, particularly during the summer, the absolute necessity to do just that made itself abundantly clear. We were slammed, as Greg would say.

Hello!? Recession? What [kitten parade] recession?

And so enter _the new kid: developer, code wiz, dude with the ‘stache, and all around man of the intertubes — theinterned himself — Ned Schwartz!

Ned of the interneds
Introducing the newest Wishingliner — say hello to Ned Schwartz

We first met Ned interned back in June during our Lunch 2.0 event where he obviously made a good impression on us. As it turned out, Ned was the first, and only person we got in touch with when we realized we needed to bring in the big guns.

As the song goes (don’t sue us Huey Lewis) — “Who ya gonna call…?”

Aside from his keen wit and wacky sense of humour, Ned brings truckloads of experience and a sharp, thoughtful mind. Even though he’s only been with us a week so far, he’s been kicking ass and taking names. Frankly, we don’t know what we did without him!

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