Somehow, practically every band I'm into is playing Chicago this month. It started friday, with Ghostland Observatory at the Metro, in an overdose of fog, lazers and white sportcoats. It was hysterical to have a house DJ as an opening act, which absolutely no one danced to. Reminds me why I never go to clubs. From there, we went directly to looptopia. The next afternoon, we caught the Woodknots at the Empty Bottle, for an art show.
Last night was the Chicago stop for Gigantour, which is probably the highest production show I've seen since Van Halen, since I mostly go to small independent shows. I didn't realize that the show started at 4:30, so I missed High on Fire before I'd even left work. We got there in the midst of Children Of Bodom, who put on a hell of a show , just all out metal. In Flames set was rather lackluster, save for "Only For The Weak".
Megadeth was in another gear entirely. I was really into them in junior high, so it seemed kind of weird to be just seeing them for the first time at 28. Nothing else mattered when they launched their set, though. I was immediately in a state of childlike glee, as they ripped into "Sleepwalker" and "Wake Up Dead". It's like this:
- Megadeth's new stuff is cut from the same cloth as their old stuff. The same can't be said for most metal bands *cough*InFlames*cough*
- Their set heavily favors the songs that made them great (still looking at you, IF).
- When Dave wears tight black pants, he looks like the old school metal god he is. When Anders wears them, he looks like a scene kid.
- For all of COB's technical, precise speed and fun-loving songs, Megadeth still has better songs, better groove, and a ton more energy.
Fuck the haters, Megadeth isn't a 2nd tier thrash band, they're a 1st rate band who plays thrash. Their songs exist outside of metal-for-metalheads. For all that guitar hero has brought metal back, few, if any, bands in this decade have superceded the genre. Going into the show, I expected to enjoy COB and IF, and maybe stick around for Megadeth. COB delivered on my expectations, but Megadeth blew me away.
Made In Tokyo has a great collection of photomanipulations of fanciful cities where nature has overscaled the city:
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Torrent Freak: The Pirate Bay launches an Uncensored Blogging Service. This is great news. after the many altercations whereby wordpress.com has broken and muted both the voices of those it finds distasteful, and those who disagree with their policies, it's great to see someone stepping up. Well, I'd be remiss not mention tumblr's clearly written and transparent content policy, but choice is always better. The Pirate Bay has a history of fighting hard for even the edge cases of freedom of speech, so the service will be interesting to watch. via Violet Blue.
When you develop a site on a test server, it's tricky to make sure that none of the old links get carried over to the live site. This tutorial also works if you're moving to a new domain. While using a WordPress export is easier, this method catches everything, which can be important if your theme links to specific pages, since WordPress exports don't preserve post ID's
- Download the exisitng
/wp-content/ directory (all of it ( some plugins (cforms, wp-eCommerce) contain modified or uploaded files)).
- Install wordpress on the new domain. Very few of the settings matter, because they're all going to be overwritten. Nonetheless, it's easiest to use fantastico or Simplescripts to set up the database, and create the basic file structure.
- Delete the new
/wp-content/ folder, and upload the existing /wp-content/ folder. This step may take a long time, so you can do the next few steps while it's uploading.
- Export the old database, using PHPMyAdmin:
- Open the exported
*.SQL file, using a code editor (Eclipse/Aptana, Notepad++, or (god forbid) Dreamweaver), and find and replace the old domain name with the new one.
- After step 4 has completely finished (so that all of the plugins and themes exist before WordPress attempts to use them), use PHPMyAdmin on the new host to delete the newly created database tables
- ... and import the new ones.
- On the existing install, set the blog address to the new URL. this ensures that any google juice that the development server may have picked up will be transfered to the new domain (this isn't necessary if the development server doesn't face the internet).
Wordpress 2.5's new image uploader solves the longstanding bug of using deprecated XHTML attributes to float images (align="left", etc.), rather than it being done in CSS. This is handled by applying classes to the image when it's inserted into the post, rather than via inline CSS. This is good, in terms of semantics, clean markup, and separating presentation from content. It's something that Scott suggested a while back, that I've been building into my themes and designs since.
This places the responsibility on theme authors to support the new classes. They are:
alignleftalignrightaligncenter
I'm not convinced of the need for the align prefix, but it's great progress nonetheless. If your theme doesn't support those classes, here's the code you can insert at the end to handle them:
.alignleft,.left {
float:left;
margin: 0.5em;
}
.alignright,.right {
float:right;
margin: 0.5em;
}
.aligncenter, .center {
display: block;
text-align: center;
margin: 0 auto;
}
