Colophon

Here we are today

Re: Ferrydust rekindled.
This site was very died for a good ~five years (~2013-2017). … I’m very glad to have my online home back.

Thank you thank you

Definite thanks due to the people who helped me get this site up and running right in the first place, and who also gave me good company through the process. Thank you especially to Rob, and to Andrew, Dean, and the patient people behind Textdrive, and very very very much thanks and appreciation for all the wonderful peoples in the Textpattern forums.

Known issues

Please pardon the dust. This site will continue to undergo is still undergoing construction in some areas, and I’ll probably always be swatting bugs I’m still looking for a few bugfixes in others..

I’m told by a few people that this site (specifically the lavender box) is now rendering correctly in Safari. That’s wonderful news.. but if you come across it that it isn’t, please let me know.. even though I’m really not sure how I would fix that at this point. But advice is welcome.
Also a couple small but odd shiftings occur around the page upon various hoverings. I don’t know what to do about those anymore.

I’m keeping a very rough to do list, which has been hugely helpful to me.

Images

The illustrations on this site are homegrown, basically all extracted and inspired from a digital photograph taken in Kyoto, that wasn’t anything at all lavender to begin with. It has since been played with in Adobe Photoshop, and my first real adventure with Illustrator was to digitally adapt my signature swirlies that had have previously only been doodled on paper — now they show up a lot on Paen. There’s been some interest in these swirlies and perhaps one day I’ll post I’m considering posting a bit more about them in the future.

I’m not usually a pink person, however but I’ve become quite attached to the lavender of ferrydust (site formerly named “rasasayang”), and can’t seem to bring myself to discard it for the grey and white site plan I had initially conceptualized for ferrydust. All in good time.

Weapons of choice

• Lenovo X1 Extreme (Kame) and Lenovo W520 (Bastetbel) Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (Okani), Toshiba Satellite 5205-s703 M40 (running WinXP, for better or for worse)
• Textpattern for all content management.
• Dreamhost for very reliable hosting Textdrive hosting at server One
• Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
• Chrome Opera webbrowser. Preference moved to Firefox for a while, but I’ve pretty firmly returned to Opera, as it is considerably lighter in general (can open two dozen tabs on it without feeling much weight.. not as true with Firefox..), but for whatever reason I have found Firefox to be especially slow on my computer — not as true on other computers.. so it may not be Firefox’s fault at all. But that’s so. I also keep Maxthon around for IE-necessary uses.
• Notepad++ for ALL the things all the time Editplus text editor, but when composing sites, I tend to have at least two windows of Opera open, two windows of Editplus, and one of Crimson Editor or Ultraedit (all with several tabs open).
• WinSCP, Coreftp LE for all server interactions.

Previous incarnations:

One day I’ll properly put a little showcase together for personal tribute to past endeavorment…
Meanwhile, the brief history is:

• Omniali ~ 1999
• Aim profile site ~1999-2001
• Xanga ~2001?
• Rasasayang ~2000?
• Ferrydust 1 — fall 2004
• Ferrydust v2 — spring 2005-2012
• Ferrydust revived — 2017

Scripts and external integrations:

• Div hiding :: This one is being used for hiding/showing the lavender block and the comments form on article pages.
• Switch Content Script :: This one is used for the collapsible menus on site.
• IE7 :: Who knew there was a way to teach old IE new tricks? This is a very cool application.
• Shoutbox :: That’s the guestbox over on the right.

Textpattern plugins

Plugins make my world go round. The following Textpattern plugins employed on this site are all available at Textpattern Resources.

1) ajw_comments_feed 0.6 by Andrew Waer

Extends RSS & Atom to allow for comments feeds.

2) anc_hide 1.0 by Andy Chase

Allows you to comment out areas of a page or form opaquely; using the anc_comment tag instead of HTML comments around a block of code will hide it from the rendered output.

3) etc_cache 0.2 by

4) etc_pagination 0.4.7b by Oleg Loukianov

Google-style pagination

5) etc_query 1.3.3 by Oleg Loukianov

Query data with XPath

6) etc_search 0.9.5 by Oleg Loukianov

Search in any table(s)

7) glx_gravatar 0.1 by Johan Nilsson

Gravatar

8) htn_comment_count 0.2 by Christian Vogt

Some functions for counting your comments, articles and discussions.

9) jnm_audio 0.3 by Juanjo Navarro

Insert an mp3 audio player (flash) in your pages and articles

10) mdn_count 1.4 by Mark Norton

Provides a count of the number of live articles by section or category, or both.

11) mem_akismet 0.4 by Michael Manfre

Akismet/TypePad AntiSpam comment filtering for Textpattern

12) mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount 0.1 by Brian Warren

Mr. Warren's attempt to catch some spam.

13) mrz_lastsitemod 0.1 by Mario Parris

Shows when the site was last modified.

14) ob1_modified 0.51 by Henrik Jönsson

Outputs when the article was last modified or the author who modified it.

15) rss_auto_excerpt 0.5 by Rob Sable

Automatic article excerpts

16) rss_calendar 0.1 by Rob Sable

Monthly calendar linked to date based archives.

17) rss_linkcat_list 0.1 by Rob Sable

Displays link categories with counts.

18) rss_unlimited_categories 0.7.6.6i by Rob Sable, makss

Enable unlimited categories (tags) per article. Require Txp 4.6-dev

19) rsx_plugins_list 1.0 by Ramanan Sivaranjan

Display a list of plugins currently installed.

20) rvm_css 1.1 by Ruud van Melick

Static CSS caching

21) rvm_privileged 0.5 by Ruud van Melick

Use TXP admin user privileges on public side

22) rvm_substr 0.4 by Ruud van Melick

Cut XHTML at a specified character limit

23) sgb_url_handler 0.1.5 by sgb

support all url variations at the same time

24) smd_if 0.91 by Stef Dawson

Generic multiple if condition tests

25) smd_tags 0.51 by Stef Dawson

Unlimited tag taxonomy for articles, images, files and links

26) smd_where_used 0.1 by Stef Dawson

Find what forms/pages/articles/plugins/text have been used where in your design

27) soo_if_frontpage 0.1.9 by Jeff Soo

Check if page is a section front page

28) tru_tags 3.9 by Nathan Arthur

Article tagging

29) vdh_flickr 0.8.12 by Ralph von der Heyden

Shows your flickr.com pictures in TextPattern.

30) wet_link 0.8 by Robert Wetzlmayr

Create all kinds of links

31) wet_plugout 0.2 by Robert Wetzlmayr

One button plugin state save and restore.

Other Textpattern-ness

• Live Textile-formatted Comment Preview

• Hiding and customizing the comments form and system