« Articles / A Few Little Updates

2026.08.23

There have been a few updates around the site...
The comments system has been improved to wrap long lines wherever people had provided URLs in their comments, and the layout has been tweaked.

The Images part of the Media system was made a while ago to only display the filename of an image by default when the mouse rolls over it to make the output cleaner and less busy-looking.
The rollover background is now semi-transparent with a blur effect in CSS and even rounded corners.

I applied a little blur to the site's semi-transparent background to give it a little bit of the Windows 7 frosted glass look that is nice to see making its way back in places.
The main menu has been tweaked a bit behind the scenes.

The last lingering issue I was having that arose from switching over to the high seas of self hosting was setting Sphider search away indexing on a scheduled basis.
On shared hosting, it was done via a small bash script that sets the path to sphider as the working directory and then kicks off the spider indexer script in PHP from the server command line.
With Windows, the solution was just as simple, but done using a batch file triggered off by Task Scheduler.

Task Scheduler is actually better in a lot of ways, because it gives you control over how long a process is allowed to run for and what happens if that task is still running at when the time when it's scheduled to start again.

With that, we can be sure that search results on the site originate from a recent indexing operation, I can uninstall gitbash from my Windows box and I can re-disable the Linux Subsytem for Windows and do away with that stupid little penguin in Windows Explorer.

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