The blog is thirteen years old this year. It has gone on for far longer than I could have imagined back then, with now over a thousand entries. I selected the CMS formerly known as Pivot to build my blog back in 2005. Two years ago I replaced old, vapourware Pivot with PivotX, its successor. Little did I know that the PivotX was already also vapourware by that time. Welcome to the Hishgraphics WordPress Blog! For the time being the old blog still exists at its original URL here, but I have decided to install WordPress into the root folder of the web server and eventually use WordPress for everything. I decided on WordPress because it is currently actively supported by developers. Meanwhile PivotX will slowly continue to fail as old PHP functions are depreciated over time. Over the previous weekend (and after two weeks of experimenting on a test […]
Continue readingTag Archives: Pivot CMS
Three Structures
It appears that I have upgraded the blog from Pivot 1.4 to PivotX 2.3.11 after many months – no, years – of fretting if the CMS which has been vaporware for quite some time would die on us without warning. It was either get left behind by technology, or to upgrade. Upgrading runs the risk of causing irreparable damage. Especially to the ones and zeros that made up this weblog’s flat file database. Last weekend, I made the plunge. It took me seven hours plus change just to import the old database to the new and there are still issues to be resolved. For example, the URL of each entry used to be ^blog/pivot/index.php?id=(number). Now their URLs end with ^blog?e=(number). I need to read up on htaccess code to allow all the multitude of links I have dropped all over the internet over the years to be redirected to their […]
Continue reading
Tagging The Entire Weblog
I seem to be on a roll this weekend. Yesterday, I spent some hours trying to fix the layout in Internet Explorer, as noted by Sila in the previous article’s comments. This morning I’ve started to activate the Pivot weblog‘s Tag feature. This should help further categorising the articles herein, and to search them based on the Tags. I find that its more versatile and faster to implement than the Categories feature. I will leave the Categories feature on the left column for the time being. If it still feels redundant to have it on after some time, I will remove the Categories block. After tagging the last 80 entries, I have discovered that the tag cloud looks like this:
Continue reading
The Layout Goes South
I’ve been trying to code the CSS file for the weblog all morning. I woke up and thought, how nice it would be if the site was optimised to a width of 1024 pixels. So I tinkered. And after altering and jury-rigging a bit of code here and a snippet of script there in the CSS file, I have arrived at a temporary solution before I needed to stop working on it. Here’s how it looks like using three different browser types on a 1200px by 800px screen: The left column is still there. It’s just overlaid by the centre column. I shall return to fix this for IE users.
Continue reading
Dreadwind Rising: A Blog Upgrade
Many, many months after the latest version of Pivot had been released, and remember that this weblog uses the Pivot content management system to… manage its content, Hishgraphics blog has finally been upgraded. It was for a very long time running on version 1.30 codenamed “Arcee”. As of yesterday, this blog has been upgraded to version 1.40.5 codenamed “Dreadwind”. It feels great performing the upgrade manually – uploading files individually and rebuilding everything – instead of using some automatic upgrade application. After about 4 man hours or so, it’s back in business. Not that it really matters for the regular visitors of the blog, but there you go. As a behind-the-scenes bonus, here are some pop-up images of the administration interface:
Continue reading
Blog Upgraded
This is the first entry using the new version of the content management system Pivot 1.30 RC2, as opposed to the pre-upgraded 1.24 version of old. So I might as well say something meaningful. I can’t think of anything at almost 1 am. So I think I’ll put up an image for your viewing pleasure.
Continue reading
HaXX0rzed!!!
This is the first entry after the site was hacked and evil and vile javascript and php codes were written into the blog’s templates and database files. Many thanks to Fairiz Jafar of EasyNet Interactive, our webhoster, for noticing and monitoring the trouble almost a full day before I contacted him for help. His help on a Sunday was very much appreciated, getting the site back up. Two of the most recent entries were lost, but it’s no big deal. The Hishgraphics web journal is back online. Click here to read a description of what happened in the Pivot Support Forums. It was a long weekend, needless to say. But I said it anyway. *sigh*
Continue reading
Random Banner Images
Now thanks to Pivot’s Rotator v1.0 extension, the weblog’s banner up at the top of the page randomly rotates through a bunch of images I made up just for the occasion. More images will be uploaded for quantity’s sake. Refresh the page, or just read the entries to see it in action.
Continue reading
New Blockquote CSS
I noticed that like the old comments style, the blockquote style for this website is just a bunch of indented paragraphs. So, to ensure the blockquotes are easily seen, I’ve added a bunch of lines to the css file, causing anything in blockquotes to resemble: Click here to watch the Robot Chicken representation of how Palpatine reacted to Vader after the first Death Star blew up. Hilarious. A quote from my recent post from this thread in the Holonet Forums.
Continue reading
Browse by Categories
After a long time I finally got around to reading up and writing a “Categories” block for the weblog. Now, you can check out the last 15 posts (or less, if the count is less than 15) what Sila and I have written in whichever categories it’s listed under. See? Over there. It’s in the left column, just under the “About” block. Second block from the top. See? Neat, eh? Oh, and I still haven’t gotten around to trying to fix the missing pajeri terong post. Stay tuned for more reports of my failure to restore the entry. Edit: Rejoice! For the Pajeri Terong entry is back on the weblog! Many thanks to hansfn and Bob from the Pivot Support Forum for their suggestions.
Continue reading
Holy Crap… I Broke Something!
Specifically, by altering some php code manually on the file, I seem to have caused Sila’s Pajeri Terong entry to disappear, or perhaps eaten by cacodemons at the very least. The PHP file is still there in the database directory, but somehow I can’t get it to be published on the weblog. Damage control is currently being carried out. Hopefully we get to see the pajeri again in the near future. God knows we need more images of pajeri (aubergines or pineapple) on the net.
Continue reading
Blog Glitch Fixed
The entire week was crazy as far as this blog was concerned. First I couldn’t log onto the backend admin section with my correct password. (Even Sila couldn’t do it with her user account.) And after 10 tries my own blog banned my IP. Brilliant, eh? I went to the Pivot Support Forums for help. Griswald there, told me to download the pv_cfg_settings.php file from the server, remove the 2 IP addresses in the php code and change the installed variable to “0”. That done, I had to register myself as the Superadmin first, then try to sort out the rest later. Later, it seemed that the database files of each blog entries weren’t being detected by the index.php file. The center column was empty. The Recent Entries block was empty. The Last Comments block was empty. What was wrong? Checking the admin section, I found out that the Categories […]
Continue reading
Pivot-Blacklist: Now Installed
Once in a while I’ve had spammers cluttering up the comments in the blog. Usually they get deleted whenever I log on and check on the site. Now I’ve gone and installed Pivot-Blacklist, a fantastic spamkilling extension for the Pivot CMS. For now, all comments are enabled with an anti-bot question field. The question might look idiotically simple to you (and would be changed periodically), but all automatic blog comment spamming bots wont be able to answer it. There are other features to Blacklist which I will experiment (and have fun with) with later. Here’s to a spam free blog in the future.
Continue reading
The Blog’s New CSS Layout
So now our blog is mostly dark blue and greens with dark red links. I thought we needed some sort of a change, and I thought I’d have a go with the css and the Pivot templates. I also put one of the nifty non-IE codes that gives a small radius to the corners of the blocks on the right and left columns. So if you’re on IE, you’ll only see the normal sharp corners. I’ve also tried my best to format the pages so that anyone with 800×600 screen resolution would have no problem with the frontpage. But although it works with Firefox, IE seems to make the right column overlap with the centre column a bit. Also, I’ve reduced the number of entries on the centre column to 10 and provided 20 most recent entries on the block at the right column. And finally, each entrypage is given […]
Continue readingPivot 1.0..
If you can read this, Pivot is working.. Yay! Addendum July 6 2008. This seems to be lifetimes ago. Addendum September 20 2018. This seems a thousand lifetimes ago. (We’re now migrated from Pivot to WordPress.)
Continue reading