Validating the feed.
22:12

I noticed today that my feed didn't validate. So I updated the format to RSS 2.0 and added a new plugin to correctly set the <category> element from the directory path before the post name. Then I took the named anchors out of the HTML story template (I don't think I ever used those) - so the RSS and HTML pages each validate now. Woo for syntactic correctness!

Then I fixed the warning about HTML in title tags (ugh, v2.0 of RSS is really underspecified) and about the relative URL I used for an image link, which fixed the feed validator's interoperability complaints.

Pizza wheel marks...
20:45

Nope. Shimming didn't help: No marks, but the last few inches of the print are ruined.

Wonder how people do this and still print close to the edge of the paper.

Another note on settings:
20:28

For Hahnemühle Glossy FineArt Photo Rag© Pearl, use the Ilford profile.

Looks like my printhead is busted; other people's alignment sheets don't have that pale line with the black line right below it. So another is in order... However first I'm trying to solve my pizzawheel problems by shimming the wheels up a bit. That worked with Epson's ultra glossy SCSI-3 with sprinkles but seems to have failed with aforementioned HPR... I will try again and pay slightly closer attention this time.

I never write the settings down.
00:32

So this time I am.

I've gotten decent results printing on Harman's Gloss FB Al wth UT14. I'm pretty sure I just used the Ilford Gold settings: The n-1-nca profile and driver settings for gloss papers (ultra premium presentation matte, ICM [that is, ColorSync in MacSpeak], and no color adjustments). But maybe this will result in a horrible mess of ink drying on the paper surface as I've seen a couple of times on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Pearl.

And why do I always print at midnight? Jeez.

Anyway, with the print half-out of the printer, it looks like that was the right choice.

More about the gamut warning.
01:52

So I've been working on smoothing the haze in the sky above the city. The first thing I did was go back to Lightroom for a version of the photo that had not been autotoned - pushing the exposure up and then dragging it back down worsened the banding considerably. But the sky and water were too dark, so I wanted to drop them closer to black. I added another curves adjustment layer, magic-wanded the haze, and applied a gradient to it in the layer mask - and it looks pretty good.

So I went ahead and printed a strip, which is good. Then I toggled the gamut warning and noticed that the curve had taken most of the bridge tower out of gamut. But the printout looked fine, even compared to other prints which I know are in gamut. So what the heck?

Andrew Rodney says that these days the gamut warning is pretty useless, so I will probably not use it anymore.

A word on getting back into gamut.
00:42

A friend of mine asked for a print of the GGB tower:

So I've been working on one. One thing I tried when dealing with getting this image into gamut was using Photoshop's select by color range to select out-of-gamut colors. But after making a proof print last night, I found a lot of areas that looked like crap because the selection hadn't been feathered at all, resulting in lots of ugly gnarly edges.

Sharpening's kind of proving to be a hassle, too - ugly artifacts in both some of the fine detail and the smooth tones in this image. Trying to fix that noise is leading to some posterization, too. So, yet more work ahead.

RSS feed, take four.
01:59

The real bug: escaping $url multiple times. The leading tilde in "/~mike/blog" was first escaped into %7E, and then into %257E, and then into %25257E... Etc. Adding a new post prepended another %25 to all the old posts' URLs, so the readers considered them new.

So I moved the entity encoding regular expressions and encoding of $url to before the foreach my $entry loop. That seemed to fix it... Except it didn't work in FireFox, because FireFox fetched the blog as "/%7Emike", which is correct according to the standard, but of course loathsxome escaped the leading percent, and everything was "/%257Emike/". So setting my $url explicitly was part two of that fix.

RSS feed, take three.
01:37

Or... maybe not?

RSS feed, take two.
01:06

Yeah. That seemed to fix it.

RSS feed.
01:05

Each new blog post was causing all the previous posts to appear as new in Google Reader and in Vienna. Looking into it, I found that the pubDate elements were all just ":00", because loathsxome wasn't setting the variables the RSS template uses. So I added them to my customized fulldate plugin.

Notably, ams's blog doesn't have this problem. I assume he's using the default template, which doesn't include pubDate at all, and thus sidesteps the problem - so maybe I should just rip it out.