Welcome to The New Old Emptybottle

*tap* *tap tap tap*

Anybody out there? Anybody left standing with an attention span intact? Any Wonderchicken Irregulars out there, hiding in the bullet-splintered woods, huddled in the snow and blood, waiting for what’s seemed like forever for the smoke and fog to clear, for this long international nightmare to end?

Well, I’m not here to make any promises, to blow smoke up any butts and extract sunshine. I’ve made promises before and broken them. I feel bad about that.

It’s not that I haven’t been busy, friends! I’ve been building websites at a rate of knots, including reworks of outsideinkorea and Wonderchicken Industries™ in the last few weeks, my busy gaming community is busier than ever, with well over 1200 members at last count. Just a few days ago, we made a $4100 group donation to ChildsPlay Charity, and I’m immensely proud of that.

But just the last little while, even though all of my creative juices have been directed to virtual barn-building (and repainting), I’ve been feeling the urge to make with the word-writing again. The old design of the venerable ‘bottle was kind of hurting my eyes, though.

So, this. Welcome to Emptybottle.org version Who The Hell Knows. Maybe I’ll even do some writing, once I’m done sweeping up the sawdust. But no promises.

Single Serving Site Alert

Just a quick note for those few, those brave, those patient who haven’t completely migrated to Facef*ck or ThighSpace or Twatter or whatever social disease network is the flavour of the moment, and still stop by or RSSize the ‘bottle to get an occasional taste of Grandpa Wonderchicken’s Old-Style Longform Bullshit.
A while back, one morning, when I heard that Kevin Rose (of Digg and the late, not terribly lamented Pownce) had a new Twitter-parasite site called WeFollow, I lost my shit (“You might follow, you tiny-dreamed weasel farts!” said I to myself, or something of the sort.) and bought a domain, threw up a WordPress site, wrote a screed and did a couple of photoshops, all before lunch. If I was that productive all the time, I’d be… well, I wouldn’t have the time for insane vanity mini-projects like that, I guess.
Still: here it is, the lastest addition to the burgeoning Wonderchicken Industries™ Network. Share and enjoy.

What’s It All About, Alfie?

I have operated on a few simple principles for more than two decades now, with good success.

First, do no harm. Or as little as possible.
Second, do not suffer fools or Bad People. They will rob you of your life.
Third, make choices with an eye to minimize future regret. In other words, imagine you were on your deathbed looking back – live your life to make that old bastard as peaceful as possible about dying.
Fourth, learn and wander. We may or may not be hairless monkeys, but there is wisdom out there. It may be an evil world, but there is beauty. Find it.
There is no meaning — in anything — but what our minds create. To search for meaning is to make the same mistake as those who search for happiness : both meaning and happiness are mental constructs superimposed by your mind on top of the actual conditions of your life. Seeking them in externals will drive you mad if you’re smart, or guarantee you failure if you’re persistent.

I wrote that in response to an AskMe question, almost 5 years ago, and had completely forgotten it until tonight, when I noticed that it had been favorited out of the blue, all these years later. The question was “Do you know what you want out of life? How do you know? How did you figure it out?”
I’ve been angry and silent lately, at least in terms of my own writing. I’ve been doing all sorts of other stuff online, sure. Built and run my own busy community over here, a bunch of other stuff. But I’ve decided tonight that I need to start stringing those words together again, laugh and glare ironically and textually dance on the graves and all, and tamp that anger down, or at least direct it productively, before I become the kind of old bastard I’ve always hated. I have no choice about getting old, but I do have a choice about what kind of old man I become.
Ain’t makin’ no promises, mind you. But maybe it’s time to write some stuff again, and widen that circle out, again, a little.
‘Cause what the world needs now is another active blogger. Like I need a hole in my head.

Emptybottle Version 4.0

Well, I’ve rolled out the new design to the front page (as you can see if you’re not reading this in a feedreader). I’m pretty happy with it — it’s still a bit crufty, but I get excited about this stuff, and always end up jumpin the gun.
The main idea was to surface as much of the old content as possible to the front page, since I’ve been writing so infrequently lately — there’s some pretty good stuff back there, littered through the chaff. It’s evolutionary rather than a complete reboot, and it’s still boring, easy old blue and grey, and OMG WEB 2.0 GRADIENTS LOL, but it’ll doooooo.
Archive pages are still sporting the old (and kind of broken) styles, but I’m hard at work eventually going to end up updating those too, and eventually some variation on the front page styling will migrate throughout the site.
The new Movable Type 4 templating, with its includes including includes which in turn include other stuff has pretty much broken my brain — I’m not sure what they’ve done is entirely sensible from a usability point of view. Certainly it makes sense from the coder perspective — best practices, all that modularization and refactoring — but it’s a freaking nightmare to develop your own templates. Still, though, just ripping the guts out of my old templates and wrapping the new design around them just worked, so that’s good.
Anyway, I hope you like the new design. It looks right in all the browsers I’ve tested on WIndows — IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari — but if you find any glaring problems, please drop a comment and let me know!
Update: I just noticed that the 6th Anniversary of the site (well, it was on Blogger for the first year or so, but still) was 10 days ago. Holy crap! That’s about 11 minutes in Chicken Years!

SNAFU

Well, I’ve upgraded to MT4, and it was relatively painless, once I paid attention to what I was doing. I’ve somehow lost a lot of styling from my arcane crufty old mix of inter-connected stylesheets, all scotch-taped and chewing-gummed together, but everything’s more or less there, so I’ll mark it down as a qualified success. Functional, if not precisely the way I want it to look.
A semi-major style reset is coming soonish, so I’m not going to spend too much time cleaning things up. As wee Derek’s dad used to say in his amusingly authentic Scots brogue: it’ll dooooo, lad.

Installing Movable Type 4 with XAMPP (on Windows XP)

I’m working on a design update for the old ‘bottle, and I’m going to do it on Movable Type 4, which is now on Release Candidate 4 as I write this, and looking good.
I’ve decided to use XAMPP, an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl, which just works, basically, on Windows, no tweaking necessary (I’m still on XP2 SP2, despite being an early adopter of all Microsoft’s previous OS’s, which is a whole different story.) By exporting the data from this site using the old MT 3.3 export tool, importing it to a local copy of MT running on my machine here at home, I can develop and tweak everything a lot more quickly, and there’s no risk of borking the actual site while I work out the kinks with the new design and the new template structure in MT4, which I’m excited (yes, I’m a geek) to fiddle with.
There are a couple of tutorials out there for getting MT working locally, but none of them actually worked for me by following their instructions, so after hours of fiddling, now that I’ve got it working, I thought I’d share The Secrets. Well secret if the ways of webservers are as arcane to you as they are to me.
The first few steps are easy.
1) Download XAMPP and install it. I installed it to c:\xampp\ to avoid funkiness with long filenames with spaces in them. [Update: word on the streets is that MT will crap itself if you try use to use a path with spaces in it, so c:\Program Files\ is probably a bad idea. Best to stick to c:\xampp\, unless, like me, you're a little compulsive about a clean root directory.]
Choose “No” (you can change this later) when asked to install as a service and “No” when asked to start the Control Panel.
2) Download the PERL 5.8.8-2.2.4 Add-on and install it. (This was the step that was missing from all the other tutorials I saw, and cost me hours of hair-pulling).
Double click the desktop icon and hit the appropriate buttons to start Apache and MySQL. Go to http://localhost in your favorite browser to see if everything’s working. It should be fine. If you see the friendly orange XAMPP home page, you’ve got a working local web server.
2) Download the latest release of Movable Type and unzip it somewhere temporary.
3) Make a folder called ‘mt’ (no quotes) in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\ folder (if you installed to the same location as I did (I’ll assume henceforward that you did)).
4) Copy all of the Movable Type files (except the folder called ‘mt-static’) to that new location (ie c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\). Copy the ‘mt-static’ folder to c:\xampp\htdocs\ instead.
5) Edit the mt-config-original.cgi with Notepad or your favorite text editor. Mine looks like this:

mt-config.cgi

CGIPath    http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt/
StaticWebPath    http://localhost/mt-static
##### MYSQL #####
ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database mt
DBUser root
DBPassword
DBHost localhost

I’ve deleted the alternate database lines after what you see here. You can do the same, or comment out the lines with ‘#’. Save the file as mt-config.cgi (omitting the ‘original’ part).
6) Edit all of the rest of the .cgi files (other than the one you just edited) that are sitting in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\ folder. These are mt.cgi, mt-add-notify.cgi, mt-atom.cgi, mt-check.cgi and so on.
The first lines of each file will read

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

. Change them to (again, if you’re using the same install path as me)

#!C:/xampp/perl/bin/perl -w

in each case and save the files.
7) Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi in your browser. If all is well, it’ll run some tests, and come back to tell you all is well to proceed. Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt.cgi and fill in the forms with a username and password and so on. Note: if the forms are unstyled, you’ll need to check that your path in mt-config.cgi is pointing correctly to your mt-static folder.
9) A few seconds later, you should be up and running in MT4 on your local machine. Yay!