Category: Site News

Well, everyone, it’s time!! One year ago yesterday we started up our joint blog, House of Horne. It took much urging and encouragement on the part of my patient husband and webmaster but I am so glad he kept at it! This past year I’ve really appreciated the little outlet our blog offers. Friends and family literally around the world have told us they enjoy reading our little snippets and seeing the photos we post.

So I am here to say thank you to all our faithful readers. You cannot imagine what a treat it is to hear out of the blue from someone that he/she visits our blog! We always enjoy discovering a new reader or flushing out a lurker.

Given we are celebrating our first blogaversary, I have a proposal: we’d love to continue to learn who our readers are. In that spirit, would you do us a huge favor and if you aren’t too shy, hit the comment button to say hello and let us know you visit the humble House of Horne? Please don’t let the fact that you might have entered a comment or two in the past stop you. The more, the merrier!! We look forward to your feedback and thanks a bunch!!

The main purpose of this entry to explain our lapse in blogging recently. We’ve had computer troubles of varying kinds and though the end is in sight we are still without our faithful link to the outside world. I’ll allow Jay to elaborate on all this at another time. Till we are up and blogging again, hello to all our faithful readers and visitors and we look forward to talking with you again soon.

…and it’s not as though I’m feeling inspired to write anything new at this moment. I just feel we need to make some sort of explanation for our long absence from Blogdom. Life has seemed extremely busy and I guess we have felt uninspired!! We thank our faithful readers for your patience with us and apologize for the dearth of entries. Hopefully sometime soon, we will return to regular blogging. Take care…

As it turns out, one of the challenges of a shared blog/homepage is the potential for divergent ideas regarding the look and feel. I’ve therefore added a bit of functionality to allow each user to choose from a variety of styles for the site. Just select a style from the list at the top of the navigation column to the right, and as long as you allow cookies, the style will stay with you throughout the site. Though the list of supported styles equals 2 right now, keep a close watch because “Blue & Green” will be released shortly.

You may have thought Movable Type had shut down my blog… actually, I’ve been working away at porting Theologia to MT. I decided to take the opportunity to finally learn CSS. Which of course made the whole porting activity about 10 times more challenging.

But it’s done now. Let me know if your browser goofs up the new layout.

I’ve decided to port to Movable Type given it’s ongoing support and recent addition of categories. It doesn’t matter all that much for cogito ergo blog, but my cms is quite central to Theologia and other work I may do. Thus, I’m using my blog as a means of cutting my teeth on MT.

I’ve still got a ways to go on the format, etc. I decided to do this initial port using a default template.

It looks like the craziness that resulted from the network upgrade has finally come to an end. I’ve got Theologia patched back up, everything’s running smoothly, life is good.

I host hornes.org on Jumpline.com, who recently did a massive upgrade across their entire system. New mail services, new account management, new backbone connectivity, new servers, etc. They did not send out any advance warning… they just did it. The first sign of trouble was when they restored a two-week old view of our content after the upgrade. Then the email woes began, followed by the disk allocation problems, followed by multiple restorations of the site content to various backups, each time wiping out any new content posted.

It has not been pleasant. However, the new services are excellent, and the servers run significantly faster, and the price remains terrific. I have been holding off on any new blog posts since it was likely that they would be wiped out anyway. Hopefully, the pain is behind us.

Theologia has been ported to Greymatter. I used the opportunity to upgrade the navigation system and make a few changes here and there, but it is largely the same site. The only real change from the normal Greymatter blog was the incorporation of categories with alphabetized listings… I sort of kludged it together with a rather short Perl script and the use of the Extended Text field in the Greymatter entry template.

The upside of all this is that our regular posters (mainly my brother, Mark) can submit their own material. All I have to do is run a script and it’s all there. The next and final step will be to call my script from within the Greymatter code. So hopefully you will start to see more consistent posting of content once everyone gets the hang of it.

For those who care, I am currently in the process of porting Theologia to Greymatter. Why does this (grey)matter? Well, though there are numerous content management systems out there, Greymatter is well supported and, more importantly, my brother and I are both using it already. And it’s free. And it’s Perl. Though I am one of those worthless manager types now, I used to do real work and at one point was fairly proficient at Perl (I even have the clipping from PC Magazine on a short write-up that mentioned a site for which I had written a 10k line Perl engine… not that we went anywhere with it). I can still hack out some Perl if needed, so I prefer my freeware coded in Perl than, say, Python.

Anyway, the benefit to the consumer will hopefully be much more frequent updates to the content. I’m writing a script right now that will present the content alphabetized by title and organized by category. Then I’ll have to go crazy on the templates. And then we launch with a platform that is no longer dependent on me loading my brother’s pre-coded papers, updating each index, and then publishing the changes.