All of my websites are in the process of migrating away from my homegrown blogging software - Exposition / Narrative / Rendition - in favor of the latest version of WordPress. The reason? Simply put, I am much more interested in blogging than the building of blogging software. I originally created Narrative because there wasn’t a good blogging package for ASP.NET. Now, almost 6 years later, while I still work as a .

I have not even been to my own website in over 6 months. Now that I’ve seen it, I don’t like the design anymore. I dislike the font and everything looks a little too red, white, and blue. I’m quite the patriotic dude but I don’t feel the need to splash the national colors on my website. Hence, I will be coming up with a new stylesheet soon. Apparently, the comments are not working right now, either.

I started ForkBender.com with a first post on May 27, 2003. The software I use to maintain this blog is called Exposition (which sits on a CMS I wrote called Narrative). This software dates back to February, 2003. So in the next few months, I will have had Narrative and Exposition in production for 5 years! The software now powers almost a dozen websites and contains a couple of thousand posts and images.

I put a new look and feel up over the weekend. I got rid of the three-column layout in favor of a two-column layout with a top-level menu nav. There are a number of subtle “under the covers” improvements: The Exposition (formerly Narrative) blog engine now outputs XHTML-compliant text. Previously, the parser munged the output somewhat, causing an invalid DOCTYPE tag. Google’s search bot doesn’t like invalid DOCTYPE tags and so many pages were not indexed.

A new version of Narrative is now in beta. This page was generated by the new CMS, built on Narrative, called Exposition. One big change you might notice is the new page naming convention, where the title of the article is transformed into the page name.

ForkBender.com now has a new search box! The Narrative CMS now has search capabilities and ForkBender.com is the beta test site. When you type in a word like “powerlifting” or “golf” in the search box at the top of the right-hand column and press ENTER or click “Search”, a search results page will appear. This functionality will be changing (read: improving) a lot in the next few weeks. Let me know if you run into any issues.

I am in the middle of a site redesign this week so bear with me as pages might have the occasional funny look. Also, if you have any feedback on the new look, feel free to drop me a line. Thanks!

It’s been at least 3 or 4 months since I got a new release of the Narrative CMS out there. I’m in the progress of updating it now and am still working out a few glitches. This version solves two major issues that previous versions have had. One is related to comment spam. This website gets a lot of comment spam. You don’t see it because I clean it up but I’ve gotten at least 10,000 spam comments from spam bots out there.

I claim victory over the spambot that was attacking my website. I crush it like grape between my fingers. Crush it!!! I have not received any spam now for 2 days! I designed a dynamic form generator that creates different field names for each field on the comment form every time the form is loaded. So what used to be the “Name” field on the form is now the “2348234” field.

I haven’t posted since waaaaay back in October, before I went to Istanbul to visit Ahu’s side of the family. The reason is that this website has been attacked every single day by a new breed of “spam” - the comment advertisement. About 150 or so comments have been added to various articles on this website advertising everything from online casinos to phentermine. I can’t tell if it is being done by a person or by a new spambot but its been a bit annoying.