Tech

Oops — I just upgraded my blog software to the newest version, and in the process nuked the hack I had that inserted smileys into posts. Hence, my Spider-Man post isn’t displaying the stars at the moment. Grr. I’ll fix it tomorrow….

I’ve added a few features to the site — one a couple weeks ago, and two just a few minutes ago — and I figured I’d babble for a moment about them.

In brief — the first is a list of books I’ve read recently, found in the right sidebar just underneath the search box. As I start reading a book I’ll put it in, and it will appear at the top of the list. Once I’m done with a book I’ll babble about it, and a ‘Comments…’ link will appear after the book title — click on that to read what I have to say. Simple, sweet, works.

The second — well, the second is a blatant plea for money and support. :D Up until now I’d avoided doing anything like this, but as my finances aren’t what they used to be, I figured it was worth a shot. Via a program that Amazon offers, there’s now a voluntary paybox towards the bottom of the righthand sidebar (at least I didn’t put it right at the top…if I’m going to beg, I’ll make it as subtle as possible). Should you feel like it, click on that, and you’ll be able to donate money to me to help me keep things afloat. I’m not expecting much (if anything) from it, but I figured it was worth a shot. The worst anyone can do is ignore it, right?

The third is also a potential way for me to make the occasional buck or two off the site. Another Amazon program allows me to set links for books, movies and the like to point to their site — then, should somone click through the link to buy something, I get a small percentage of the purchase price. As with the others, it probably won’t add up to much, but every little bet helps.

Technical details follow below.

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Back in March I found out that I could apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for my blog, legitimatizing it as a serial publication in the eyes of the U.S. Government. I figured what the hey, I might as well, applied — and just got the noticed that I’m registered!

This doesn’t really have any truly major benefits or consequences for me, other than the fact that librarians everywhere can now look me up in the ISSN database, but what they hey — I’m official. Why not?

It took a while, and I had to reset my server logs to do it, but the site statistics page is live again.

Getting it running was a bit of an adventure, that’s for sure. It’s something of a geek milestone for me, however — in the process of getting Analog up and running, I ended up doing my first compile of a *nix command-line program from source code!

A bit of background…

I generally like to have Analog set to run daily at midnight on an automatic schedule, so that my statistics page is automatically generated every day, and I’ve always got the most recent statistics available to me (or anyone else, if they’re that bored). However, until now the only version of Analog I’d had was the Mac port, where it had been given a (minimal) user interface. Nothing really wrong with that, and it is more familiar to long-time Mac users, but it meant that for me to run it, I had to leave my webserver logged in under my username, as the Mac port wouldn’t launch while the machine was sitting at the login prompt. It was only a minor security risk, sure, as the webserver itself resides in my apartment, but hey…I wanted to “do it right,” so to speak.

I knew that the original version of Analog ran from the command line, and that I’d be able to have it run in the background no matter what state my server was in…but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it running. There was a pre-compiled command line version for OS X, but when I first started looking at this there was a typo on the page and I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I e-mailed the guy behind the pre-compiled OS X version to ask (and he’s since fixed the typo that had me confused), but in our correspondence he recommended that I go ahead and give compiling Analog myself a try. Well, heck, why not? Ya gotta learn sometime, right?

So, yesterday evening, I spent a few hours installing the developer tools onto my server (necessary to compile software under OS X), downloading the Analog source code, mucking about with configuration and make files…and ended up with a working version of Analog that I built myself! Sure, by many geek’s views this is simple, entry-level stuff…but I hadn’t made that entry yet, so I’m pretty happy that I managed to get it all working.

I did end up nuking the Apache log files in the process of this (quite intentionally), so at the moment, the statistics page looks pretty empty, but it’ll become more useful over time.

So…that’s my latest excursion into geekdom, and my initation into compiling source code. Fascinating, I’m sure….

Update: The site statistics discussed here were for my old webserver. While it’s still up and running, they no longer have any real sigificance to this weblog. So it goes….