When I launched this site in early 2021, I knew that I would consider it “under construction” until I had implemented proper/modern photo galleries. I finally got that work done this past week, so the museyroom has finally reopened, with an exhibition of galleries from the old site. This site is now capable of sharing just about anything I might want to share online, so I’ve cleaned up the home page and taken the construction sign down. It feels great to finally have the whole place built out.
Today’s rainy afternoon project: kicking Google Analytics to the curb, and replacing it with GoatCounter for privacy-friendly analytics on this site. The service is free for non-commercial use and its author says he wants to “de-Google-fi the internet a bit, and make pervasive tracking less common.” I am extremely impressed with his creation so far!
So I’ve been a lot quieter here than I expected to be this year, but a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes lately. Here’s the first new thing new to share: You can now sign up to be notified by email when there’s a new post here. This option is also available in the blog’s sidebar (or at the bottom of the page if you’re reading on a mobile device). More soon, people! More soon.
Belated thanks to everyone who left a comment during the site’s early days in January. It turns out that I wasn’t being notified of those, so I never knew about them, and therefore never allowed them to go live — until now. Everything’s fixed. Thanks again, friends.
466 posts from mahnamahna.net 1.0, written between 2003 and 2010, are now housed here on the new site.
In the extremely unlikely case that anyone out there on the interwebs is interested in how to import content from an ancient Blosxom blog into Wagtail, you can check out the custom code I wrote to make it happen.
Of course I noticed a rather complicated bug on this site the day after it launched. And of course it has to do with caching. Luckily it’s the sort of thing that only other web developers are likely to notice (and not even all of them).
No website is ever finished. Ever. Poor old mahnamahna.net 1.0, when it got frozen in carbonite in 2010, sported a label of “96% feature complete” on its home page because there were a few more niceties I fully intended to implement. Never got around to them. And sometimes things that are finished get unfinished by time. A couple of years back, the oldschool shared hosting that powers the old site imposed a PHP update that broke all the photo galleries in the museyroom. I never had time to sort that out. It is all decrepit, long-abandoned code anyhow, complete garbage by modern standards. A nightmare to even attempt to fix.
Very nearly eighteen years ago, I launched mahnamahna.net 1.0. That website was my personal online playspace until 2010. It was the place I expressed myself on what we (back then) still sometimes called the World Wide Web. No one calls it that anymore. I think that’s a loss, and there’s probably a whole ’nother post in me about why. But it’s a small loss compared to what so many of us lost when we abandoned our wacky personal playspaces and gravitated to Big Social Media. Hey, I’m not pointing fingers; I did it, too. I fell into Facebook, and less so, later, into Instagram. (Never took to Twitter much. Only a few dozen tweets — mostly retweets — over the years. That’s gonna change, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
I’ve been mostly absent on social media for a few years now, and you know why. It’s fucking toxic, that’s why. Yes, I still keep track of people who are dear …
…and our hair’s all grey.”
Now on display in the museyroom: almost 200 snapshots from my seventh consecutive visit to Black Rock City, Nevada — otherwise known as Burning Man. Visit the index or begin with the first “slide”.
It takes a long time to cull through hundreds of pictures, sort ’em, caption ’em, and upload them over a shitty DSL connection, but it’s finally all done, and I now present (over in the museyroom) photographic proof that I finally made my way to and across the Indian subcontinent! Visit the index or begin with the first shot.
The 2009 edition of my annual Burning Man slideshow, complete with the requisite annotations, is now open in the museyroom: Visit the index or begin with the first shot.
It has now been two weeks since I returned from Burning Man 2007 in Black Rock City, Nevada, and the experience is still reverberating within.
T.S. Eliot etched the phrase “unreal city” into my head a long time ago, but ever since my first trip to the playa, I’ve used those words pretty much exclusively to describe Black Rock City. They dance in my head when I daydream of being there; they echo unceasingly as I wander the city during the one magical week it arises each year.
Has there ever been a place more deserving of the tag “unreal”? My yearly slideshow only scratches the very surface, really, but perhaps one or two of these images will convince you that Black Rock City is a place like no other…
Hello, everyone. After a coupla months spent out of gas, I think the engine’s fired up once again here at mahnamahna.net. I’ve been busy with a few things while I’ve been silent. In fact, check this out: I HASWRITED A SOFTWARE!!1
Devidify is a humble little hack for extracting audio tracks from DVDs.
Devidify has its own exhibit over in the newly-renovated mahnamahna.net museyroom.
More fun stuff on the way, I think. There’s gas again now.
I am following in the footsteps of HairyAlien and Majordojo and committing to NaBloPoMo, which means I’ll be posting to this blog every day in November. The idea is kind of an intentional reboot. (And besides, I’ve always been too chickenshit to try NaNoWriMo.)
As happened last year, it has taken me an embarassingly long time to get my Burning Man pictures up. But here they are, at long last.
The word I’ve been using to describe my third Burn is “transcendent.” I am still feeling the playa’s effects; I am still discerning the meaning of all I encountered and experienced; I am still in a state of flux. It is mostly a happy, happy feeling.
Thanks in no small part to a wee bit of Perl coding by Majordojo, I have at long last launched a new comments system here. All old comments have been carried over, and hundreds and hundreds of spam comments have been removed. Let’s see how this goes.
It’s been a while since this blog last completely stalled, but that’s what’s happened again of late. (There were zero posts in April.) What’s up? Truth be told, I am sick of mahnamahna.net’s look, which has largely remained the same since the site’s inception in 2002. I am also sick of comment spam, and defeating it means getting my hands dirty with some serious hacking on the comments system I’ve got in place around here. And lastly, I want to implement modern, whiz-bang templates on my photo galleries, and again, that’s going to be somewhat of an undertaking, as the scripts I use to drive those are not very amenable to different looks and feels. So the upshot is this: Posts are likely to remain infrequent until I get this place whipped into shape. And that could take some time.
At long last, I got off my ass and culled through all the pics I took at Burning Man this year, and put the best ones up in a gallery over in the museyroom.
My second Burn was different in many, many ways from my first, but it was nevertheless a fantastic experience. There were highlights I wouldn’t dare talk about here, and low points that only make sense if you’ve been inside my head. There was growth. There were journeys, each and every day. I spent much of the week with a couple of friends whom I rarely see and who are as dear to me as anyone. And I came back to the default world feeling about fifteen degrees out of kilter, like I was looking at everything freshly, from a new angle. And that, in one sense, is what the Burn is all about.
My home-grown, bare-bones comments system here on the mahna mahblog has long remained esoteric enough to be untouched by comment-spam bots.
Sadly, it’s no longer true. There’s been a shipload of comment spam around here lately. I’ve cleaned up most of it, and, sadly, destroyed a few legit comments along the way. I’ve also made some changes to the site code so as to perhaps hide myself from these evil bastards once again. We shall see.
