Distant scufflings Posted by Patrick at 07:46 PM * 0 comments

We’re working on bringing this place back. We miss the fluorosphere, and many of its regulars have emphatically said the same to us.

For most of the last couple of years Making Light has existed in a dimly lit half-life. The CSS didn’t load, and the front page didn’t load, but if you happened to know the specific URL of a particular old post, you could view a text-only version of it and its comments. Occasionally someone commented — most recently, Tom Whitmore on 28 Dec 2021. Making Light’s problems are probably due to the many incompatibilities between a 14-year-old version of Movable Type and the default configurations of a modern web server, but not being that technical, I was reluctant to personally get into water that deep.

Right now I’m working on fixing some of the big obvious stuff. The right-hand sidebar is a historical museum; we’ll deal with that eventually. Today I figured out how to fix the “include” statements on our front-page template, thus bringing back to life the sideblog links, the archive links, and the commonplaces. The type-size selector still doesn’t work. And God only knows what bugs lurk in the comment system or the RSS feed. Ultimately, the real solution is almost certainly going to include hiring a technically-competent person or persons to move the whole thing into a modern CMS, like WordPress or something similar. Ideally this will include such distinctively Making Light-ish features as the long-broken and much-missed “View All By.”

Currently unsolved: None of our old site URLs work, including the monthly archives, the individual archives, and the root URL of “nielsenhayden.com/makinglight”, unless you append “/index.html”. Yes, we’ve tried the solution you’re about to suggest. The struggle continues.

And while all this renovation is going on, we’re thinking of starting a fluorospheric Discord…