Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Blogroll updated

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I spent a little time tonight updating my blogroll (on the right, just underneath the WudiVisions icon) to more accurately reflect the sites that I check on a daily basis. It automatically sorts by how recently they’ve been updated, so the most recent bits will always be towards the top, with sites that have been updated within the last six hours bracketed by hyphens. Lots of new reading there — enjoy!

Random downtime fixed

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At least, I hope it’s fixed.

I’ve had a recurring problem for a while now, where at seemingly random times, I’d lose my connection to the ‘net. It seems that this is some sort of odd problem with my Linksys router. Since I host this domain (and three others) off of one of my computers here in my apartment, I’ve had my LAN isolated behind the Linksys router (as seen in this diagram).

Unfortunately, for some reason, every so often when I’m browsing my own website from any machine on my LAN, the Linksys router will freeze up. Since it sat between my computers and the outside world, this effectively killed my network connection. I’d recently upgraded the firmware of the router to the latest version, hoping that it would fix the problem — unfortunately, that seemed rather to exacerbate the difficulties, where the Linksys proceeded to randomly freeze while browsing my website even if I was using a computer outside my LAN.

Needless to say, this is quite annoying. Especially on days like today, when it froze at five in the afternoon, and I wasn’t able to come home and restarted until after I got off work at 9pm.

However, my account with Speakeasy allows me two static IP addresses. I got ahold of them, got my second IP address configured, and rewired my network (here’s the new diagram) to take the Linksys out from between the webserver and the world.

Technically, this is a little less secure, as there is now a direct line between my webserver and the world, with no intervening firewall for protection, but OS X is fairly secure, and I’m willing to take that slight risk if it allows my sites to have better uptime. The Linksys does still protect the PC, however. Somehow I just can’t justify leaving a Windows box open to the world, even if I think I’ve got it locked down. So much for ‘trusted computing‘.

Beginning blogging

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Eric Barzeski over at NSLog(); has an excellent list of tips for anyone just getting started in the weblogging world. I’ve discovered all of these at one point or another over the years, but things definitely might have been simpler if I’d had this available back when I started. Of course, back when I started (further back than my archives go, unfortunately), we didn’t have things like MovableType to help us out…

(Via Jeremy Hedley)

Do you blog? Why?

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My thesis is an attempt to fill in the void in academic work about blogs. Previously in articles and commercial books published about blogs (Rebecca Blood’s books and the O’Reilly book, for example), why we blog has been researched using personal experience, with a few indepth interviews, or by analyzing websites. None of these three ways can come close to providing as accurate a depiction of the blogging population — who we all really are, why we blog, and how we’re using our blogs — as a survey.

(Via Wil)

Search improvements

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I spent some time last night working with the search software I have installed on djwudi.com, tweaking and improving it so that it gives much more useable results.

While MovableType does include its own search function, I’ve chosen not to use it for djwudi.com because I have a number of pages that live outside of my weblog, which MT would not be able to search. However, I’d run into a bit of a problem with the search engine I am using, and I think I’ve finally got it solved.

The issue that came up was simply that because the search software had indexed the text of every page on the site, there were certain words that were essentially useless to try to search for, because they’re repeated on so many pages. For instance, I was trying to find a page where I’d written up a short description of the MT TrackBack functionality — unfortunately, a search for ‘TrackBack’ returned hits for every single page on my weblog, because they all had the word ‘TrackBack’ on the page.

Digging through the documentation for the search software yesterday (yes, I know, actually reading the instructions is so uncool, but it really does help sometimes…), I discovered that there is a very simple way to tell the search software to ignore certain areas of a webpage. So, some tweaks to my templates to ensure that the software only pays attention to the actual content of each page, and ignores all the navigational or presentational mumbo-jumbo, and I’ve got a far more useable search feature than I did previously. Woohoo!

No jive talkin'

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That was a test, and that was only a test. Hopefully it was at least an amusing test — I was playing with the MovableJive text formatting plugin for MovableType 2.6. I probably won’t use it very often, but it could be fun from time to time.

Unfortunately, at this point, the plugin mangles URL’s (see the comments to the previous post) so I can’t use it to post and link anywhere. With any luck that will be corrected at some later point, though…

Jive talkin'

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This is a test, and this is only a test. Hopefully it will at least be an amusing test — I’m playing with the MovableJive text formatting plugin for MovableType 2.6. I probably won’t use this very often, but it could be fun from time to time. Included filters are Jive, Texas Drawl, Cockney, Swedish Chef, Valley Girl, German Accent, and Hunting Wabbits.

(Via the MT Plugin Directory via Mark Pilgrim)

Upgrades galore

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Two important (in my world) software upgrades hit the ‘net today: Mac OS X was upgraded to version 10.2.4, and MovableType was upgraded to version 2.6. Both are installed, and both are working like a charm.

This is complete geek-speak, but my favorite change in MT v2.6:

MT::Util::html_text_transform (the default “convert line breaks” code) will no longer add <p> tags around paragraphs that start with certain HTML tags (pre, table, ol, ul, pre, select, form, and blockquote). (Phil Ringnalda)

Since I use <blockquote> a lot when I’m posting links to other sites, this will save me some headaches.

Cookies finally fixed!

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Thanks to a comment answering a question of Jonathon’s, I’m about 95% sure that the cookies for djwudi.com are finally being set correctly, so that the comment forms will actually remember your information, instead of just teasing you with the possibility that they might remember one day if they feel like it.

Turns out it was just six characters I needed to add to the JavaScript code in the template. Sheez.

In Scott’s words from his post on Jonathon’s page (emphasis mine):

The cookie code does not pass a path, so the browser by default make the path that of the calling page.

In other words, the code really was setting the cookies — but only for one page at a time. This led to some of the confusion, where both Dyanna and I thought it was working at first, then it wasn’t working again. We’d leave a comment and the cookie would get set for that page, so when the page reloaded, our info was there, and it looked like it worked. But then, as soon as we went to another page, the info was lost again.

Luckily, the fix is easy enough:

If you want the cookies to apply to the entire site, you can adjust the code to pass the path ‘/’ as a parameter…

function rememberMe (f) {
var now = new Date();
fixDate(now);
now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST, '');
}

function forgetMe (f) {
deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
deleteCookie('mtcmthome', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', <strong>'/'</strong>, HOST);
f.email.value = '';
f.author.value = '';
f.url.value = '';
}

The bolded bits in the above code were the only parts of my individual entry template I had to change — once those were fixed, I rebuilt my site, and things actually seem to be working now!

The reason that this problem doesn’t affect most people is that by default, MT stores all archives in a single directory. Since every archive page is pulled from the directory the cookie is set for, it works fine.

I’ve adjusted my archives to fall into directories based upon when they are posted — for instance, this entry will end up in the /archives/2003/02/10/ directory. So, when the cookies are only set for one directory at a time, it causes problems. By adding the slash to the above lines of JavaScript, the cookie is set for the entire site, and will be read for every page, no matter which directory it lives in.

Much better.

MT: SimpleComments

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Thanks to a clever little hack by Adam Kalsey, all comments and TrackBack pings that I receive are displayed as a single list on each entry’s page, sorted by the time they were received. Much nicer visually than having two seperate listings of responses to one of my posts.

(Via Phil R. and Phil U.)