Breaking Windows

You may remember I had Snap Shots installed a little while ago. Well their service is a lot better now. So I am re-introducing it here today.

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Yes, I finally got sick and tired of the default MT3 theme, and more importantly, found some "free time" to modify the theme with my own graphics.  Hope you like it.

For those wondering, the red image behind the blog name is part of a piece of artwork I made some eight (!) years ago when I was creaing fine art, instead of the commercial art that I create these days.

I also added the "Social Networking" block in the right-hand column. I will be expanding that. I looked at Action Streams look really cool, they are a lot of work to setup. And while I have a couple hours to devite to changing the graphics of the skin, I don't have time to upgrade to MT4, plus right now I do not see the benefit.

I do have some more additions to make to the blog, and will post more once I have time to add them. 

If you look to the right column, right below the widget for the Multiplayer Chat radio show, you will see a new listing for Mac Headlines. I just installed these today.

Am I making any money from this? Nope, just displaying Mac headlines because I like reading Mac headlines. If you do too, then check them out!

Keen readers will notice I added the monthly archives back to the home page. Yep, I have been publishing here since January, 2003. Matt started to contribute soon after.

No joke, the first post, dated January 1, 2003, is titled "What is this blog." Wow do those early posts look bad. We sure have come a long way in five years.

What started out as an experiment of a Mac user using a Windows workstation for creative and web work (that failed) turned into a blog on technology, gaming, and, just about anything we want to rant about. It has been great fun.

This also means I have been using Movable Type for five years now, and MT has also changed quite a bit. It is pretty cool having a blog for five years.

I did some (minor) updating for the splendid occasion. "Recent Posts" now shows up on the article pages, and monthly archives is back on the home page. I said it was minor. OH! I also set it to display 15 posts on the home page, instead of 10.

I play a lot of video games. So does Matt. We obviously do not review every one. To add a bit of exclusive content back to my blog, today I am introducing Rapid Reviews. The format will consist of three paragraph: What Rocked; What Sucked; Recommendation.

Pretty simple, rapid, if you will.

Sorry it took so long for me to get the domain switched over. That little thing called work has been getting in the way lately.

At any rate, we are back at our wonderful breakingwindows.com domain. And if you did not notice when I temporarily moved the blog to spoiledlittlebitch.com, comments are again turned ON.

So comment away. You just need TypeKey. It is the only way to (try) and keep the spam comments at bay. I may look into a CAPTCHA approach, but since TypeKey is built in, it is what we will use.

The Style Sheet is not in place, and I am sure there are still some bugs, but those things can be handled later. After staying up for the Microsoft E3 keynote, editing Matt's op-ed, finishing setting up this blog on my new host, playing some Sonic the Hedgehog on XBLA, and, playing some Golden Axe on XBLA, I am quite tired.

Movable Type support (they are great) tells me that it is not an MT error, which I figured. So I have to go back to my host and see whats up. It might be a file permissions problem on PHP files. We shall see. What a pain in the ass.

This is a new one for me, and I have installed Movable Type a zillion times on many different hosts.

This will slow down moving the Breaking Windows domain a bit.

Update: Indeed, it is a permissions issue. The server, for some reason, is writing PHP files with the permissions of 666 (should be 644). Once you reload the page on the "processing this directive" error, the web server corrects the problem, setting the file to 644. Now to talk to my new host about this.

Update 2: Host Monster runs under suexec, and requires files to have 644. Movable Type, by default, writes files as 666. This is an easy fix, though.

Now I just have to back up all my files on breakingwindows.com. *yawn*

You may notice an error message:

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I am not sure what this problem is yet. I am working on the problem. All I know is if you reload the page, it loads everything just fine.

There is a comment if you view this source:

SHTML Wrapper - 500 Server Error

Great News! Comments are now enabled for every post, again. Yay!

PowerEditFeedback is a nice plug-in to allow for batch editing of the Accept Comments flag.

Hey loyal readers. We are moving hosts. I am moving this over to my new Host Monster account. It is a pain in the but, but it will be good to get the bandwidth off of my business hosting plan.

I don't know how long the site will be down (hopefully not long!) but when we come back, comments will be back too. Three cheers for that.

I would like to turn comments back on more than anyone. But until I find a way to stave off the spambots that kill my comments cgi (even with TypeKey turned on) comments are just not in the cards.

But here is an interesting bit of metrics for you: Unique eye balls per day have not fallen by the wayside since I turned comments off.

Breaking Windows is back! Did it go down? Yea, no one could post for days because my host kindly killed MT. Why? Spammers hitting the comments.cgi, even though I rename it every few weeks to something like purple.cgi, or zasdfef4423.cgi. It doesn't matter what I rename it to.

So for the time being, there will be no comments at Breaking Windows. Sorry, but when faced with the question of no blog, or no comments, I will take no comments.

As I promised in June, RSS headlines have been added to Breaking Windows. Sure, it took me two months, but these have been busy months.

This was also due to finding the scripts to add the Blogcritics headlines to the site (not to mention finding ones that were not a chore to use). I was about to ask Sussman, as he lists his BC headlines on Futon Report, but along came across a nice piece of software for Dreamweaver called RSS Replay by RNSoft.

We cannot tell you how nice it is not to wade through comment spam. Sure the quantity of comments are down, but the quality will always rise to the top.

We should have turned off anonymous comments ages ago.

Thanks to the regulars who continue to post comments. It lets me know there is a small group of people who read the site regularly. And that is what matters to us.

I don't miss the comments from the drive-by-Google crowd one bit.

Today was the last straw. I was thinking of still double posting, but today I have had it.

I had to make an edit, thanks to the eagle eye of Jordan (thanks) on the BW version and the yet-to-be published BC version of my latest entry in the discussion between Matt and myself on Xbox 360 BC.

Movable Type 3.2 was installed successfully. Their upgrade process is getting better and better. Rebuilding the site takes much less time, so they worked on that for this update.

TypeKey authentication has been turned on. This means you cannot comment on Breaking Windows without first logging in. If this does not stop the comment spam, then I will have to get creative.

I have a question for the regular readers of this site, all three of you. Actually BW averages between 2000 and 4000 unique visits a day, with anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 page views. Why? I have no clue. But I do know that the majority is coming from search engines (Google) and not from regular readers. This is a question for those regular readers.

Yes, I know - it's a cheesy headline. I could not resist. :)

The other day I actually took some time to tend to this site. Imagine that! You can continue reading if you really care about the new super cool changes.

Wow. I was just looking through the December 2005 site statistics. There is a lot that will not be said in this post, because I do not need this post turning up as #1 for bandwidth on said subjects. What I will say, and gets a wow times five, is the #1 day for traffic in December. Take a guess. Breaking Windows hovers around 2000 unique visits a day. I am very happy with that, as my pocketbook is also very happy with that. December 25th saw 3,402 unique eye balls, 9,827 pages, 24,278 hits and used up 312.91 MB of bandwidth - all on Christmas! Hello? That gets a WTF award for sure.

Is that a social commentary on America? I think it is.

What the hell are all you people doing at my blog on Christmas day? Even I, one of the most connected-via-T1-to-Internet people I know was not on the computer on Christmas for more then 10 minutes, and I was not even reading blogs - I was deleting SPAM!

In other news: Top 5 keywords searched -- "PSP," "iPod," "Windows," with "WEP," "error," and "Mac" rounding out the list. Nevermind this is a decidedly Mac-friendly, dare I say evangelistic, site. But I understand, I do not have as much time to write about the Mac as I would like.

But that many unique visits on Christmas Day?

*shakes head*

This past weekend Breaking Windows was down. Actually, all the sites on the server I am hosted on was down. It was found that the temp phpBB message board that I had installed for Blogcritics got hacked. It took some talking for them to bring by blog back online after that.

It is not as if phpBB is more hacker prone then any of the others, it is just that there are a lot of assholes out there that have nothing better to do then fuck with people's web sites. Message boards just seem to be the easiest target. DP just got hit once in a while, this latest being pretty bad. There is never any reason why. It is just because they can.

So no message forum for Blogcritics, at least not from me. This is what I get for trying to make things better.

I am just glad I got my blog back. For a little while there it looked like my host would no longer be hosting this blog. Not fun at all.

Did you know there was a Gaming section at Blogcritics? It is there, you just have to dig to find it. It was buried under Culture.

Not any more! Recently launched is the new Gaming Section! Yes, we finally have out day. Our Word in big letters. Or something like that.

A new section means a new section editor. And guess who is the new Gaming Editor for Blogcrtitics? Me. Yep, no joke. I still don't know how I fooled them. Heh.

I have been neglecting Breaking Windows lately for another blog. For that I apologize. I hope to have more regular posts here soon. But I have been doing a bunch of hard work behind the scenes (and more needs done). You will see. The Blogcritics Gaming section is gonna be huge! Or slightly larger then normal. No, huge! Just wait.

I am honored and privileged to be a member of Blogcritics. After a little over two years I have made it to the top! OK, really, Matt had too many other responsibilities at Digital Press.

But I have contacts. And it is who you know and not what you know. Right?

If you notice some of my writing showing up on Blogcritics before it gets posted here, that is entirely unintentional. While I have no plans of paring down Breaking Windows, I do have a certain amount of responsibility to Blogcritics now.

In recent months Breaking Windows has added a couple writers, and I would like to formally welcome them to our growing family.You may have already read their bylines by now (this is a late introduction).

Jordan Fouts graduated BGSU and is now going to college in Canada for Russian. Makes as much sense as a screen door on a submarine I know. He has a passion for pirate games, and helps with the mod community and helps with the conversion of Russian games.

Tyler Willis is the first at Breaking Windows to not have dropped out or graduated from BGSU. Tyler graduated from Baylor. I learned about Tyler from Matt. Other then that, I just know he likes video games, but that's enough for me.

Its always nice adding friends to the site. Its a shame not all of them write. So far Jordan and Tyler have been contributing reviews and commentary. I hope they continue. They make this site more diverse, and Breaking Windows is better for it.

Thanks fellas.

* Plug: If you want to write for Breaking Windows, you can contact me, ken (at) meancode (dot) com.

In case you forgot, this is still my site (Matt is a pretty good fill in, though). I have not gone on vacation. No, I have been working on two projects right now: Photochemical Sciences Outreach and BG News Alumni Society web sites. Then of course there is the usual Student Publications work.

Oh, and I picked up Forza Motorsport for Xbox. I am going to have to stop playing it long enough to write a review.

I will try and post things this weekend, but no promises. Life has gotten too busy to blog lately. And I don't get paid to write.

Dear readers,

It has come to our attention that some of you may feel we are Sony PSP fan boys due to the amount of postings on the topic. This is simply not true (*1). We love our Nintendo DS (*2). We still love playing quality titles like "Pokemon Dash" and touching that screen (*3). "Ridge Racer" on the DS is just as enjoyable as it is on the PSP (*4). Both systems have a plethora of enjoyable titles that never cease to amaze us (*5). We will resume out regular unbiased coverage of all the systems soon (*6). Until then, please know that we give no favoritism to any systems (*7).

Thank you,

Breaking Windows Inc.

I know at least two of you have wanted this back, as I have gotten emails about it, so the Bloglet form is back. You can use Bloglet to subscribe (or unsubscribe) to my blog. You get a daily email of updates. You will find this form on the About Us page now. I will add a link to the sidebar sometime soon.

But for now just go to the About Us portion of this site.

By Ken Edwards

Can you believe it? I have been blogging for 2 years now. I must say that the blogging community is a great place to be part of, I have met really great people just through blogging.

So much for this site being about "A Mac User in a Windows World!" From here on we are "Rants & Raves by Ken Edwards & Matt Paprocki." Since rantsandravesbykenandmatt.com is a rather long URL, we will keep this domain, its catchy, and its been here for 2 yrs!

Hey its the last week of classes! I have a quiz in art history on Wednesday that I am very ready for. I could have taken in last Friday. Its just a little odd for me to be ready and waiting for these quizzes and exams. Its a good feeling.

Anywho I have been freakishly busy lately with a number of things, and have let Matt take over the site recently. He has done a great job with the DVD and video game reviews, as usual.

Matt Just got a story printed in the Toledo City Paper, be sure to check out the web site (it has not gone to press yet).

UPDATE: Unless you were vistiting between 1 AM and 4 AM you noticed this site looked pretty messed up. I got all the posts back, and all of the comments up until November 11, 2004. Sorry Mike, Matt, and Chris. Our very colorful conversations about Halo 2 are lost forever. The GTA ones are still there though!

For those who are saying "What?" Here is the answer: I really made a big mistake. It was a stupid mistake, it is a mistake I have made in the past, twice I think. The previous times were not as devastating though.

I made a backup of my DB on November 11th, and thank the Lord that I use ecto to post and had the posts from the 11th to today on my HD. Otherwise this blog would have started over from scratch today, November 21st, 2004. My host does weekly backups but the cron job apparently did not work correctly so they were of no help. I am just glad I made a backup of the DB on the 11th. I should have done it Friday too, I let it go.

I'll get into my stupidity after I have had some sleep. Yes I said I will explain my stupidity. Two reasons here: Poor UI design by Six Apart on the MT Search page, and as a learning lesson for all you people out there in bloggin' land.

Now, as I just avoided a major catastrophe of Breaking Windows, I need sleep.

I will try and bring everything back, but I cannot promise everything

:(

A lot of time I do not review things because I do not have a lot of time to write a full review. I don't like that. This is the answer, Quickie Reviews. There is now a home for these small bytes of blogging banter.

Its like when the electricity goes out, there is nothing to do. Not that fun especially as I had a number of web sites to update! Oh well. It took Time Warner Cable over 24 hrs. to restore both Cable Internet and TV. I could not get online for two days as I don't start using my connection until after 5 PM. But I know it was down at least 24 hrs. I have never had an outage like that before.

Yes, I know, 2.0 is so very original. But then so is this template. I was getting tired with a lot of things about my old site template, but I will be bringing parts of it back, don't you worry. I updated to MT 3.11 on my 5 blogs and did not have a hiccup on any of them but the one I have customized the most - Breaking Windows.

Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770.

That is the error I get when trying to rebuild. I spend a day trying to figure it out, and MT support, although very responsive, have not been able to give me an answer.

The easiest way is to start over. After all I now have TypeKey on my templates, and I didn't have to do a thing!

I will make small changes here and there, until then the site will be in a little bit of disarray. It is still readable, and everything is here. I imported everything.

ERROR: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.

'String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.' error for certain RSS feeds Bloglet is rejecting RSS feeds with dates in the following format: "Tue, 21 Oct 2003 24:56:21 -0500". Its probably a good idea to change your date to adhere to the XML-RPC spec, found here: http://www.xml-rpc.com/spec