posts regarding technical and other matters involving the site, such as changes to design, structure, etc.
Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2010/09/01 - 4:32pm
As some of you may have noticed, the site is a shambles. Sure, it looks okay, but it's now cobbled together from a pre-existing theme, ever since my old theme wasn't going to work with the new Drupal upgrade. Since updating I've been inundated with comment spam. This is ironic, since I upgraded Drupal because I was getting comment spam.
So for the foreseeable future, I'm shutting off comments on this site. Sorry about this. I'm hopping on a plane in less than twenty-four hours and do not have the time to deal with this right now. The site itself needs a total overhaul at some point soon, but hopefully comments will be back long before then.
In the meantime, you can contact me by mail (allvishal at gmail) or on twitter.
V
Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2008/12/27 - 11:20am
I'm not an early adopter. I'm not even a late adopter. So I'm probably the last person on the entire interwub who's signed up to Twitter, but now I have!
V
Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2008/11/22 - 1:37pm
Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that I'm now using the Share With Note feature on my Google Reader Shared Items, so in addition to the widget in the sidebar providing you with the latest links on stuff I'm browsing, you can now check the blog itself (or subscribe to its own Atom feed) for little notes by me on each item (I'll try to write more than just, "Cool, lookit!" -- I swear!). I generally share things that I hope readers of this blog will like, so lots of stuff on design of all kinds, illustration, photography and of course, lots and lots of weird stuff.
You can access my Google Reader Shared Items Blog by clicking here.
V
Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2008/06/28 - 4:47am
The last time I updated the Work page was probably sometime in 2005. This was back when the site was still on free hosting and looked all grey and lime green.
Yeah, it's been a long time. Quite a bit has happened since then, not least of which is this redesign. I've always wanted to redo the work page, make it richer and more than just a bunch of images, but then I realised that while I was putting that off for the right time (it would be a good deal of work), two years had gone by.
So, I bit the bullet, sorted through my work and came up with a bunch of stuff -- some of which has been posted on the journal before -- but much of which is new. So surf on over to the work page and have a look around. There's about 30 new things in the Design and Illustration sections. I haven't added anything to photos yet, and might do so in the coming weeks.
V
Submitted by Vishal on Thu, 2008/03/20 - 11:00pm
In case you never noticed, there's a 'Recent Comments' column in the sidebar, and the more astute among you will realise that my comment has been sitting at the top of the pile for quite a while now. At first I thought it was just my readers being polite and staying silent while I ranted and raved about hot army women, haunted dream homes, and the unsexiness of the modern caveperson. But, pretty-much every reader of this blog is a blogger themselves, and we're a chatty lot. It was unusual to have no comments for weeks.
I decided to test the system out, and lo and behold, ran across a host of problems, all of which had to do with a malfunctioning captcha system (a 'captcha' is a test to find out if you're a human and not a malicious spam program, by asking you to answer a question only a human could) . Hmm, malfunctioning is not entirely right, because it seems to have been behaving a little too well.
Submitted by Vishal on Tue, 2007/09/25 - 5:32pm
I get a fair amount of spam on this site; less than most, but significant enough to be a problem. Most of it is trackback spam which, by design, isn't an easy thing to combat, but Drupal does a decent job of things.
Comment spam, on the other hand, has been giving me a headache or two, and not in the way that you think. You see, Drupal does catch most if not all of it, but it also overzealously picks up real people's comments (and as you can no doubt see, I have far too few of those as it is!), just like my last CMS, Pivot.
Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2007/08/15 - 7:42pm
After months of slacking off, I finally got round to doing something I should have done way back in March: I've redesigned the site's look!
When I switched over to Drupal I used the Minnelli template, a default template that comes with the program. Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice and functional template, but being a graphic designer and using a standard template on my own site is a bit... well, shameful.
Submitted by Vishal on Sun, 2007/04/08 - 7:48pm
The site's had no activity over the last week or two because I've been spending my time switching over to a whole new content management system, Drupal.
It took me this long to convert all the content over from my old CMS, Pivot. Drupal is a much more robust (and much more complex) system which is what I need keeping in mind what I would like this site to be over the next few years. I doubt that I will ever need to switch again.
You will also note that the blog has changed to 'journal' and that there are now RSS feeds for pretty-much everything.
Also, the biggest change (and the thing that took up most of the last two weeks' work) is the inclusion of every single blog I've had since 2001 into the journal. More on all this stuff later, because now I need to go out and buy myself a new camera.
Submitted by Vishal on Wed, 2007/03/21 - 8:37pm
Honestly, if Dan hadn't pointed it out to me, I wouldn't even know that there was anything wrong with comments. Since switching to the new version of Pivot I've been happy to have the increased spam protection. Now I don't have to spend an hour every day hunting through posts and reporting fine interwub robots who comment on my site's "nice professional design" and then try to sell me viagra. To catch the few that did still manage to squeeze through I put in a human indentifying, spambot nixing question on posts older than ten days, and that did the trick too.
Submitted by Vishal on Thu, 2007/02/15 - 9:01am
So I finally got my own domain name to go with the paid webspace.
The site now and forever onwards will be accessible from allVishal.com
Kindly update your links.
V
