Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

December 30, 2006

Web related notes

Filed under: Personal,Technical — cec @ 10:19 pm

Two web-related notes:

  1. I’ve just migrated the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s website from a bunch of php webpages (the only reason for the php was to include the template) to the Drupal content management system. I’ve also added in the Coppermine photo gallery to keep our pictures. I would have used gallery2, but it kept dying due to memory errors with the database.  I’m guessing our ISP has the ulimit set to small.  Overall, the updates went pretty well, the biggest headaches were taking us out of a table based layout into the (more) modern world of CSS. I kept the current look and feel, but the CMS should make it easier to change in the future. But for now, at least I can distribute the web updating responsibilities to others 🙂
  2. Does anyone know how to get WordPress to do better detection/blocking of comment spam? It’s killing me. Fine, I’ll go google for it.

From the department of “the more things change, the more they stay the same”

Filed under: Social — cec @ 9:57 pm

I’m reading the collected writings of Ben Franklin from the Library of America (yes, all 1600 or so pages of it), and I ran across the following passage:

It is remarkable that soldiers by profession, men truly and unquestionably brave, seldom advise war but in cases of extream [sic] necessity.  While mere rhetoricians, tongue-pads and scribes, timid by nature, or from their little bodily exercise deficient in those spirits that give real courage, are ever bawling for war on the most trifling occasions, and seem the most blood-thirsty of mankind.

That was written almost 240 years ago and yet is a perfect description of the op-ed writers in today’s papers (e.g., George Will, Charles Krauthammer, etc.).  I would say that Franklin’s prescient, but since people don’t ever change, I’ll settle for ‘keen observer.’

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