Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

A teense faster, I hope

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In an effort to speed up the response time of my site when posting new articles, or when visitors leave comments, I’m experimenting with simplifying this page a bit. I think it’s working — things seem a teense snappier so far — but I’m still banging away at it.

Unfortunately, this means I’ve deleted the ‘Recently seen’ and ‘Recently read’ sections of my sidebar. Neither had been updated lately, so it may not be too big of a loss, but I’d still like to find a way to get them integrated back in later on if I can do so without impacting the server as much.

Geeky bits (and a question of written English usage) follow, if you’re interested.

I used to have the ‘Recent reads’ section (which listed books I was reading, along with reviews when I bothered) as a seperate blog, which I included in this page as an SSI.

(Quick unrelated question — when including acronyms in text, does one decide on using ‘a’ or ‘an’ before the acronym by the sound of the acronym, or by the sound of the meaning? Since ‘SSI’ is pronounced ‘ess ess aye’, that would call for using ‘an’, but when the meaning starts with the sibilant (Server), that would call for using ‘a’. Anyone know? I guessed and used ‘an’ on the assumption that most people would read the acronym rather than parsing the full meaning as they read, but I’m not sure if that’s correct or not. Anyway….)

The last time I redesigned The Long Letter, I incorporated the ‘Recently read’ blog into The Long Letter as a category, and added the ‘Recently seen’ category for my movie reviews. Then, in order to only display them in the sidebar and not in the main content area, I used a lot of ‘OR’ statements in my main content <MTEntries> tag, so it looked like <MTEntries category=“Books OR CSS OR DJing OR HTML OR Humor OR Internet OR Life OR Links OR Macintosh OR MovableType OR Movies OR Music OR PHP OR Politics OR Quotes OR Trek OR Website”>. The sidebar <MTEntries> tags were <MTEntries category=“BookReviews”> and <MTEntries category=“MovieReviews”>.

I’m thinking that this may have contributed to how long it took to rebuild when making changes, though. Anytime MT had to rebuild the front page — which it did both when adding new posts (obviously) and when a new comment was posted (in order to display the ‘Last 10 comments’ section of the sidebar) — it had to sort through and filter which posts were displayed according to what category they were assigned to.

So, for the moment, I’ve deleted the ‘Recently read’ and ‘Recently seen’ sidebar bits, and set the primary content area to a very simple <MTEntries>. Theoretically (in my brain, at least), this should speed things up.

As a last resort, I could take the ‘Last 10 comments’ section off, but I’d really hate to do that. It’s a really handy way for me to keep an eye on feedback on my posts, and a nice visual indicator that people are actually stopping by from time to time! So I’m hoping I don’t reach a point where I feel I have to lose that. Hopefully, simplifying the main content display will be enough to speed things up for now.

Useful bookmarklets

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A ton of useful (and fun, in an extremely geeky sort of way) bookmarklets for digging into the code of a website to figure out just how it all works: Accessibility-checking favelets. I’ve snagged the first two listed already (‘Show and label divs with ids’ and ‘Show and label divs with classes’), and will be checking out more later on.

Geek toys!

(Via Zeldman)

Peaceblogs

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Peaceblogs

I’ve just signed on with PeaceBlogs:

Peaceblogs.org is a site devoted to making connections between bloggers who oppose the impending war against Iraq. Regardless of your ideology or political affiliation, your nation of origin, or the size or scope of your site, if you oppose the war and use your weblog to express that opposition, your site is welcome among our listings.

(Via Stavros the Wonder Chicken)

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)

iPod troubles

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Well, this bites. I’m having problems with my iPod. Normally I’m pretty good with getting things fixed, but I think this is beyond my abilities. Bleah.

Problem one: every so often, when plugging in the remote to the jack on the iPod, or just bumping the connector, the iPod will “short out” and reset. It’s more or less a minor annoyance — the iPod will reboot and start right up again, and the only real lasting effect is that the date and time need to be set — but an annoyance nothenless.

Problem two: iTunes doesn’t know that my iPod exists anymore. As far as I can tell, this behavior started after I applied the Security Update 2003-03-03 system patch. The iPod mounts to the Finder just fine, but nothing I can do seems to clue iTunes into the existence of the iPod.

I’ve tried applying the 10.2.4 Combo Update (even though I’d already updated to 10.2.4 using incremental upgrades, rumor has it that using the combo updater will fix a number of issues), completely deleting and then reinstalling iTunes, and completely resetting the iPod as outlined in Apple’s iPod troubleshooting pages. Nothing’s worked.

Luckily, my iPod is still under warranty, so I went ahead and placed a service request through Apple. I’ve never had to do this before, but I’ve read good reports on Apple’s turnaround time for service, but for the moment I’m without music when I’m not at home.

For some people, this might not be that big of a deal. For me? This bites. Hard.

Especially when some of the people at work insist on listening to “smooth jazz” — one of the few genres of music that I would gladly wipe from the face of the planet. Ugh. I want my iPod back!