Looks like the spammers are breaking through Askimet on a regular basis now, making me have to not be so lazy and manually dealing with them. Might have to look for some stronger spam repellant...

Hopefully, I'll be able to get some thoughts up on ef - a tale of memories, Kaiba, Ghost Hound, Allison & Lillia, Mnemosyne, and Megas XLR some point soon.

For some reason, the YouTube tags I've been using were only working for me when I was logged into the site as an administrator. That should be fixed.

Should teach me to check this site logged out more often. I wonder when the hell that setting had changed?

Since I was taking the day off from work, I decided to upgrade the site software to Drupal 5.2. Unfortunately, my modified version of the Meta Theme is not available in this version of Drupal, but I guess a theme update won't be a bad thing (I've had the old one since November last year). I still have a few more things to fix, like how some of the images aren't working well. I'll also be experimenting with the theme for a bit.

UPDATE: Fixed the image problem! Apparently, there're some extra steps needed to use Imagemagick with the image module...

... I'll just say it was a pure PEBKAC error. Since I'm the one administrating the server, I should looking into debugging that soon. But all is well at the moment.

Actually, in future plan news, I am looking into upgrading this blog to Drupal 5.1, hopefully this weekend.  It's not that there's anything wrong with Drupal 4.7, but there's features and updates to version 5.1 that I really want to take advantage of.  Too bad that this theme will be lost, but it's a good excuse to start looking into making a custom theme myself.

I'll be updating Drupal to 4.7.6 sometime today. I've actually already setup the new version, but I wanted to create a backup of the current configuration before pushing through the update. Can't be too careful.

Update: Done!

I've went through the images I had for Shinkai's The Place Promised in Our Early Days and created about 60 more masthead images to rotate through. I may add more, but those 60 were still quite a bit of work to go through.

I do know that several of those images have white areas on the bottom-left that interfere with the white site-name text. I can modify those images to add a bit of tinting to the bottom of them (and clouding the gorgeousness of Shinkai's animation), create a PNG or GIF image of the site-title text so I can make a bordered text that will show regardless of the background, or not bother. I think I'm going with the latter. Sorry, I'm lazy. Not like the name of this site is that much of a mystery, no?

I've went ahead and updated the back-end software (Drupal) to a later version (4.7.5). If there's any problems, please let me know by either commenting here, using my contact page, or emailing me at: email [at] nickistre [dot] net

Thanks.

Well, the image-based captcha is quite problematic. My tests show that I'm only successful 10% of the time. Either I can't read (derr...), or something is quite wrong here. So, I figure switching to the math-based captcha would work in the interim until I can get the image one working more reliably. Heck, I'm very tempted to turn off the captcha and see how good the Bayesian spam-routines are... I might just do that.

I've changed the URL to the site to http://anime.nickistre.net as I wish to maintain http://www.nickistre.net for a personal site some time later (which might be months years whenever.). The www subdomain should be automatically forwarding to the anime subdomain in the meantime.  Please update your links.

I went ahead and turned off server side caching in Drupal. It seemed to be causing problems by caching the captcha output, resulting in a few problems for anonymous users.