escape to insanity

I’ve tweaked the code to my del.icio.us bookmarklet a bit, and thought it may be worth sharing if anyone else is interested.

The default bookmarklet is just fine as is, but many of the times I’ve saved a link, I wanted a way to auto-populate the notes field with some text from the source page, and the only way to do that was to copy and paste into the new window. This tweak lets you highlight some text on the page, and once you click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, that text will be automatically inserted in the “notes” field for del.icio.us.

It’s a very simple tweak, and I know I’m just lazy for needing or wanting it, but hey. Lifehacks are about coming up with solutions to eliminate or automate a task you do repeatedly, and this does that.

Drag this link to your bookmarks folder or toolbar: post to del.icio.us

I'm considering attempting to add some sort of tag functionality to the site. If you're not familiar with tags, go read up on them. The quick and dirty explanation is that tags are a way to classify and sort data. Journal entries are data. Tags would basically be quick keywords to identify the content of a particular entry. For example, this entry could be tagged with “php, upgrades, tags” just to name a few. The idea is that you could then search by any one of those tags to find related posts — say, any posts I've written about upgrading the site.

I don't think it'd be that hard to add tags to the entries themselves. The tricky part would be coming up with a search function to make use of the tags. I might give it a try sometime later this week when I get some free time and don't feel like doing anything else.

Since the initial launch of this site, every line of code has been painstakingly hand-written by me. Every little bit of it was hand-crafted to do more or less whatever I wanted it to do. It's evolved from a few measly lines of inefficient ASP to several thousand (in total) lines of PHP. I have a custom content management system allowing me to post entries and you to comment on them, allowing me to edit posts and comments, even allowing each new entry to update an RSS feed. I'm proud of it. It's my baby.

But it's still not all that efficient, and it's not very outsider-friendly. Any updates I make are painfully difficult to implement because I have to go through all my code and make sure everything still works. It's getting harder and harder to deal with comment spam, although I dare say I've done a decent job of it so far. So I'm considering migrating all my content to WordPress. I've got it installed already, and I've been playing around with the options. It shouldn't too difficult to switch over. Obviously it'll take me a while to get the theme of the site looking like it should, so I'll be spending some time with the CSS figuring things out. My biggest problem is going to be finding a way to move the entries from my existing database to the WordPress database, which takes an entirely different form. I'm working on that as I type — I'm taking a break from coding a conversion tool to write this.

Hopefully all this effort will be worth my time. If nothing else, it gives me something to do while I wait to hear back from my prospective employer (hopefully tomorrow morning).