Saturday, September 16, 2006
As part of my ongoing efforts to revamp this site, I’ve moved Vysnu over to a Slicehost 256slice running Gentoo Linux. Unlike previous iterations of the site, it’s a pure clean box without any junk on it. While I would’ve prefered a BSD slice and its just-works package management, Gentoo is good enough. I’ve set up a fast Wordpress install on the box. It’s Lighttpd/PHP 5/APC/MySQL 4 that now clocks in at 0.1-0.2 sec/page instead of the earlier 0.4 to 0.6. And thanks to a textdrive hack, I’ve got rewrite urls working fine.
Here’s how to adapt that hack in lighttpd.conf if you’ve got multiple sites running on your box:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "vysnu" {
server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php?error=404" }
Next up on the list: upgrade Wordpress.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (2) |
Permalink
Sunday, June 4, 2006
For a while now, I’ve thought about a Vysnu redesign. It’s way overdue. This blue baby of mine had enough zing in it to win a few notable mentions, but it’s past it’s prime: Vysnu needs to be more web-two-oh-y.
To that end, here are a few plans. I’ll try to state only those that are definite at this stage.
- Move over to the vish.in domain. It’s shorter, more direct, less clunky.
- Do a rebranding of the site. The blog would still be the highlight, but try to write clearer articles, put more thoughts into words, and have a focus: Web development is the current favorite.
Move away from the Sig9 host, find a personal one. It’s been a fun trip, but all good things must come to an end.A week’s worth of spam comments at Vysnu is around 12,000. (Not a joke). Kill spam without resorting to comment moderation or CAPTCHAs.- Serve ads. Intelligent, unobtrusive ones.
Upgrade to Wordpress 2.0
There is no timeframe for these plans. Life is too cluttered still to venture into a redesign. Suggestions, if not lost in the miasma of comment spam, will speed the process along.
Tags: design • development • vysnu.com
Comments (3) |
Permalink
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
One of the good things about CSS design is that it’s free-form. You can have div elements all over the place to structure content, and with intelligent absolute/float positioning, get them to order themselves logically on screen. An oft-forgotten advantage though about CSS design is that styling with it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) affect the semantic layout of the page. Or: rendering with/without CSS shouldn’t affect the readability of the page.
Stress test this by working with a browser like Lynx/Links, but if you’ve got Opera, the user stylesheet feature can also be set to emulate a text browser. In the absence of tables, text browsers don’t have any sort of positioning at all: your content is rendered exactly as ordered in the source. Which makes source code order important.
Who’d want to go over your sidebar before getting to the content? Go through those myriad links just to get at the real beef? Make it easier by having a “skip navigation” link as done on many sites, or better, have the sidebar load after your real content. If you’re good enough with CSS, it shouldn’t matter an iota with your layout.
The current source code order that I prefer the most is:
- The header: Title, the
<h1> tag.
- Minimal navigation: the main pages of the site, and/or a spotlight link.
- The content.
- Sidebar navigation.
- The footer.
As an added guideline, avoid repeated links on your site which merely serve decorational purposes. It’s a pain to read through in text browser mode.
You’ll notice that Vysnu follows these directives admirably. Except for the guideline above. You’ll have to wait till I get over em date boxes. Interestingly enough, Sig9 doesn’t. We’ll get to that on the next redesign, promise 
Tags: design • vysnu.com • web
Comment! |
Permalink
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
A word about the spanky new date boxes on the left… they are floated left, and created using semantic markup and valid style :-). Insert this into any Wordpress blog, and you have the barebones structure of my date box:
<?php
$date = the_date("d:m:y:Y", "", "", FALSE);
if($date) {
list($day, $month, $year, $yearlong) = split(":", $date);
?>
<div class="date">
<span class="day">
<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/<?php print $month ?>/<?php print $day ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts on this day.">
<?php print $day; ?>
</a>
</span>
<span class="month">
<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/<?php print $month ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts of this month."><?php print $month ?></a>/<a href="/log/<?php print $yearlong ?>/" title="Click here to view all posts of this year."><?php print $year ?></a>
</span>
</div>
<?php
}
?>
And of course, the style rules:
.date {
display: block;
margin: 5px;
padding: 2px;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #444;
background-color: #111;
color: #eee;
text-align: center;
}
.date span.day {
font-family: trebuchet ms, tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size: 2.2em;
display: block;
}
.date a {
font-weight: normal;
text-decoration: none;
color: #eee;
}
.date a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}
.date span.month {
font-size: 0.9em;
font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
display: block;
}
Now a few words about its features: it only appears “once per day” so the page won’t be cluttered up with date boxes. Then too, the day, the month and the year are clickable so you can directly navigate to their pages. There are still a few issues remaining regarding the style when a day has too few posts, and it also seems to mess up a few of my pages, so it needs a bit of work. But imho, it spruces up the visual appeal and the usability of the site a good bit 
Tags: development • vysnu.com • web
Comment! |
Permalink
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Following the interesting revelation by Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, et.al., that computer data needn’t be arranged like on an office desktop with directories, categories, folders, a heirarchy and so on, Vysnu has embraced tags. Rejoice!
The 404 page has also been restored and improved. A test.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
You’d have seen the inline kewl links. Got the idea first from Photo Matt, but it’s been made really easy for Wordpress because of a plugin by Morgan.
You can now comment on, and permalink to the kewl links just like you’d do to any other post, and your feed reader will also alert you when I post kewl stuff
I had to ditch the old archive, but having it inline makes more sense, and you’d have a linear read right through, or at your option, skip those links.
You can also access the new archive.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (1) |
Permalink
Monday, February 28, 2005
The last post was an experiment in posting to the blog through Flickr, just about the best online hosting resource for photos. Now, I have created a page over there, clicky clicky!
A word about the advantages of using an offline hosting resource: one, you save space. Two, you get unique features (click on vai and gau) that aren’t available in any hosted solution. And three, having it offline means that you can manipulate it in other ways too… it isn’t blog specific. For the disadvantages, there’s the fact that your files aren’t under your personal control, and also the ever present danger that the service might fold down.
However, Vysnu is going to move to such a model… integrating Flickr, Del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler, and perhaps even Amazon into this site.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Vysnu is now running on Wordpress 1.5. My initial impressions about the upgrade is that it deserves the accolade it’s receiving. The ability to create new pages, like this one, for example, is very useful. The entire UI overhaul also breathes refinement, something many other CMSs (for Wordpress is now a mile above a blog) doesn’t have.
It also remains the most user-friendly CMS out there… it’s simple to set up and get it working the way you want it. Even the upgrade process took only about 30 minutes if I exclude the time it took to backup everything.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Just a note to let you know that Vysnu, Sig9 and all related sites are now hosted on a faster and better server. We had grown too large to be accomodated on the older Neureal host, and had to switch.
Asmallorange is the first thing that came to mind (It includes PHP, Python, et.al and to add to it, is cluetrainish) and I’d recommend it to anyone pursuing a host.
As far as I know, the upgrade has gone off without a glitch, however, anyone experiencing slight glitches either over here or at Sig9… you now know the reason.
(Update): Because I’m upgrading to the latest and greatest, this site may not behave as it is supposed to for a few hours.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (1) |
Permalink
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
I am undecided at present about what the future holds for Vysnu. Here are three divergent forks I’ll present to you.
-
Vysnu will stay with the Wordpress CMS codebase, and as it matures, Wordpress will provide a flexible enough scheme for content generation and management. The latest alphas incorporate basic dynamic page generation, better cruft-free urls, and a leaner (presumably faster) codebase. One of the best things about Wordpress is that it is geniunely easy to use, and matched only by e107 in its friendly interface.
-
Vysnu can move to the drupal platform. Drupal offers flexibility unmatched by other popular CMSs. I can explore newer ways of blogging, newer ways of expressing myself. Drupal’s codebase is also very enticing, and over the last few weeks, I’ve become very familiar with it. One of the things that I like about Drupal is that the possibilities offered by it doesn’t seem to end. Why should I be limited to one linear blog? Why not two or three distinct, yet cohesive blogs on one page? Why can’t I find newer ways to extend the blogging sphere, why should I stick to the same rote that Wordpress enforces? To break away, I must embrace Drupal, or…
-
…I should develop my own CMS. What about one written ground up in PHP 5, building on OOP? In fact, the backend to Koal is a very primitive implementation of my perfect CMS, one without constraints
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (3) |
Permalink
Sunday, October 3, 2004
Sleeker buttons are me. It looks cooler, and pages should load a bit faster
Also pretty please, note the new button in the list. I’m now a Nanowrimo participant: Nanowrimo (For National Novel Writing Month) is a unique effort to write a novel of 50,000 words through the month of November. It’s an amazingly active community and from the time I heard of it, I wanted to pitch in and do my stuff :-). Budding writers, do take part, it promises to be unique.
Tags: chaff • vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Saturday, October 2, 2004
Vysnu has caught up with Sig9 in terms of number of unique people visiting the site every day (more than 170, average). In terms of bandwidth usage, this blog consumes more than 12 MB a day, to Sig9’s 9 MB. Vysnu seems to have a greater number of broken links resulting in about 4200 404 errors last month to Sig9’s 3000 [many of these are mis-typed urls or some other user-error so it may not be accurate].
Another interesting tidbit… The most visited page on the site is not the home page, but a koal story: The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane, with more than 2300 clicks coming by lieu of Google Searches and external/internal referers. That’s how popular erotica is on the internet ;-). 40% of these users refer back to the home page, or to other pages inside the site, which means that it was not a bad marketing ploy… guess you have one of the answers on how to make your website more popular 
I’m also pretty proud of what Sig9 has achieved in the 10 months it has been online: many of the google searches that I do now frequently turn up Sig9 results, and the amount of specific and diverse content available on the site (mostly courtesy Vivek and Anoop) is amazing. A pat on the back is always nice, especially when you have to twist your arm to do it
Tags: me outside • vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Saturday, May 8, 2004
I’ve upgraded to the Wordpress beta and added back in most of my tweaks. It seems to have made my site significantly faster. And the new admin interface I love! *Smooch*
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Thursday, May 6, 2004
Strike off point 3, please. Vysnu now has a Kewl Archive! Wohoo!
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Sunday, April 18, 2004
They are many things about this site I’m not happy with:
- The design is almost patently inacessible, though I’ve tried my best.
- My writing here is definitely second-grade. In fact, my writing everywhere is. I don’t spent enough time to clean up after me. That will be rectified very soon. Less is definitely more.
- The Kewl links in the sidebar don’t have an archive. Some people have complained that they whir by too fast sometimes.
- When you click the comments link you get a dirty popup comments page. Even I go “Yucky!” when I try to post here. Besides, popups aren’t cool. This, like the problem above is on the todo list.
- Titles are unnecessary. That would result in permalinks breaking which is the reason I haven’t changed it… yet.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Monday, February 23, 2004
I’m in a bit of a spot lately regarding this blog. As you probably have experienced, this page takes around ten seconds (average, on my less than 10KB/s connection) to load. Sig9, which is hosted on the same server, manages to chunk out a page in under two seconds. While the Sig9 main page is focused, small and sweet (largely due to Vivek), Vysnu looks and acts like a pig bladder - bloated out of proportion.
So why do I persist with this design? One of the major reasons is that Vysnu is blue. While many other people have white blogs, Vysnu embraces the Grecian Jug, at first mostly because I was so fed up of black on white. But every design also takes a cost in usability and I fear this is getting too unwieldy.
For a few days, I’ve been playing with an alternate, much lighter layout. As you can see, it’s black on white (though it has a few nifty tricks). But I’m stuck between worlds here because I really like the current layout too and it would have been a non-issue had page-load speeds been faster.
So I’m turning to you people, what do you think? Do you think the page-load speeds are bearable? What parts of the site do you rarely use (the kewl links, the categories, the outside links, the archives), what things should I scrap? Should I start over with a newer, faster layout? Tell me any suggestions you have and since I’m going to work on this site anyway, tell me anything that you want added to this site.
I’m also pursuing other methods to speed up this site, so if you think something has blazed up suddenly, it isn’t you =)
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (4) |
Permalink
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Take a look at Vysnu’s 404 page, inspired by an article in A List Apart: The Perfect 404. My solution is simpler and does not handle as many scenarios as the article describes mostly because Vysnu is too small to warrant more complex solutions =)
Tags: development • vysnu.com
Comments (1) |
Permalink
Sunday, January 11, 2004
The things that power Vysnu are having its bowels re-ordered. Please wait while service resumes.
Edit: The rest of the upgrades will now be in-situ, the different sections like writing and reading will come up in a few days, and you’ll see a few other entry points as well. Meanwhile, the normal diatribe on life will continue. God save the site!
Meanwhile, some highlights:
- User-friendly URLs
- Resizable layout. Hint: Internet Explorer users, try setting your text size (View > Text Size) to something other than ‘medium’; Mozilla users press Ctrl + and Ctrl - to see the magic.
- Multiple categories
Tags: chaff • vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Monday, December 15, 2003
Vysnu is now an X-Phile. Thanks to Evan Goer who manages the list and runs that site, he was extremely helpful in helping me make the grade.
For people who have difficulty satisfying the third criteria to make the list, which is: The MIME-Type Test (sends application/xhtml+xml to conforming user agents, i.e. Mozilla)
, I have a link from Evan to help you along:
Mark Pilgrim’s Article on XML.com.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Well, as promised, Vysnu has a new site style. I call this harmless green. It’s meant to be easy on the eyes, and it’s best that you switch to that before you read my writing. Harmless green isn’t complete yet, but one of the nice things about the style switcher is that I can explore my design itch in-situ; by the time it’s finished, harmless green would be a completely slick beast, just like tiny blue dot. Enjoy!
Pulled down for further repair.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Monday, December 8, 2003
Just completed a minor redesign. Not a redesign as such, restructuring would be more precise. Things I did:
- Removed the junk that was left over when I converted from B2 to Wordpress
- Cleaned up index page, made it semantic; expect more themes soon - this one is called “tiny blue dot”
- Restructured directory structure - this affects images and other site includes
- /writing is broken. Will fix this soon. Fixed.
- Learnt a few new tags (<dl> <dt> <dd> <code> <em> <samp> <var> <cite>) and promptly forgot one of them ( <strike>) so that this site is XHTML 1.1 valid!
- Removed references to All Consuming, Vysnu now uses a Wordpress hack to achieve a better effect. See Reading.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Updated the site to use Wordpress. It’s advertised as a better alternative to B2, and it works as such. There were a few upgrade hitches, but everything worked after a few hours of tweaking. What I like most about it though, is the Links Manager. I didn’t like depending on Blogroll that much, though I’ve left the link in (in the sidebar) for people who do use it. The Link Manager available with Wordpress is a first-class utility (it even includes a Link This! javascript link that I can drag to the Firebird toolbar and click on when I visit an interesting site) and I’ll recommend an update to all B2 users out there just for this feature. Aside from that, I popped in the calendar and the feeds, rearranged some links and viola, I like the Vysnu that I created.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comment! |
Permalink
Sunday, October 12, 2003
And so, just like that, Unchecked Ramblings gets into another munchy avatar. Permit me some nostalgia: UR One was born early in my days of web logging - early in the days of web logging when it hadn’t grown to quite the fad it is now, but then I was four or five years younger. It was all grey and white and with a cover page I believe (and it was all tables,) but it was still the UR that gave birth to Two and Three - swankier, better versions where I learned a bit more about funny things like HTML, Javascript and CSS.
It got a bit funnier in Four and Five since I learnt things like prefixing X to things (XHTML) and lengthening and confusing the expansions of some others (ECMAScript) and of course, my dear sweet PHP, and sweeter CSS2 and swankier tableless layouts which Tresni first introduced me to. Some might say that Four and Five are retarded brothers of their predecessors - they are right in some ways, but I tend to now think that Less is More.
Clean shiny layouts don’t break under stress. Fast Forwarding from Four, UR stagnated for a while, till I found Koal (which is a CMS I’m still developing) and then it got an XML frontend. Of course, Real Life changed many things. I met some new friends, made a new site, a new log, and then I even bought myself a new domain.
Not forgetting lesser cousins, this is Avatar Seven of Unchecked Ramblings, and sadly I’ll let the name slide. Welcome Vysnu into your midst.
What can you expect?
Daily updates for one. I’ve no excuse now and that’ll help me a lot<g> Vysnu is powered by B2 and that makes for damn easy post composition in a very sleek interface. I sort of really like it. Till I can get Koal up and running the way I want to, I’ll hack the B2 code to get things done. Aside from that, some more content. I know I’ve dropped some hints around here that I write a bit. I do, and I’ll post some of my stuff here, soon. Those stories would probably make me still weirder, but what the hell, I’m too happy about this to care.
Tags: vysnu.com
Comments (3) |
Permalink
