website

Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.

Comments working again

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It appears that last night when I was adding the latest batch of spam URLs to MT-Blacklist’s blacklist, I inadvertently added one entry that was just the string “tp:“. Now, I have no idea what that string is, or where it pops up in adding comments, but apparently Because that string pops up in any URL (http://…) that ended up blocking all comments that included a URL, including in the author info fields, across all of the sites on my server.

Oops.

This has been corrected, and comments now appear to be functioning correctly again. Thanks to Kirsten for pointing this out when she mentioned that comments with curse words were being blocked.

Curse words?

My goodness — just what kind of foul-mouthed people do I associate with, anyway? Shocking, I tell you!

Little fuckers.

;)

iTunes “Chao-wera” by ¡TchKunG! from the album Post World Handbook (1996, 12:03).

About the server switch

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Okay, so what’s up with switching servers? Those of you who are regulars have probably seen me mention that I was considering doing this a time or two in the past, and now I’ve just gone and done it.

Well, really, the primary motivation is very simple — my finances, as always, are somewhat tight, and as much as I liked having TypePad take care of all the nuts-and-bolts of my hosting, as long as I have a working webserver sitting in my apartment, I just couldn’t justify paying for another year of off-site hosting. I’ve been very happy with TypePad during my year and a half or so with them — and I’m extremely thankful that they were as accommodating as they were when I got Slashdotted — but the time came to let my pocketbook take precedence over my laziness (and ineptness) as a sysadmin and “move back home”, so to speak.

So here we are. There are both pros and cons to the move, as often happens with things like this.

First off, the cons — or ‘con’ (singular), really: things may not be quite as snappy around here as they were when I was on TypePad’s servers. I have neither the high-end hardware nor the high-bandwidth connection to the ‘net that TypePad does. Still, I’m doing everything I can to keep things reasonable, from my usual anal-retentive obsession with simple, clean HTML code to working with MovableType 3’s dynamic rendering and page caching. Hopefully it won’t be too terribly bad (but if it is, feel free to stop by my about page and drop a few dollars in my PayPal tip jar to go towards a processor upgrade for my server!). ;)

Oh — and there will be broken image links on older posts as I go through and move the image files from TypePad onto my own server (moving the actual entries is a simple export/import process…unfortunately, images need to be moved manually).

Now, on to the pros.

No broken links: thanks to the common codebase of TypePad and MovableType, I was able to move everything over and keep all of my permalinks the same, so there should be no need to worry about changing your bookmarks or updating any old links to one of my posts that might be lying around out on the ‘net somewhere (plus, it’s good for the Googlejuice).

Site search: there’s now a search field at the top of the sidebar. If you’ve come here looking for anything in particular other than the daily babble, that should make it a bit easier to track things down. In theory, at least.

Comment moderation/TypeKey/MT-Blacklist: Due to the ever-annoying prevalence of comment spammers, I’ve enabled comment moderation MT-Blacklist for the site. Here’s the rundown on how it works:

The first time you comment here, rather than showing up on the site immediately, your comment will go into a ‘moderation’ queue, waiting for me to approve it. Once I check it and verify that it’s a real comment, I’ll approve it, and it will appear on the page. I’ll try to keep up with comments as best I can, though there may be a delay of anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how close I am to a computer to check in.

As long as you have cookies enabled in your browser and log in from a consistent IP address, the next time you leave a comment, it should appear on the site right away, without needing to go through the moderation process. At least, I think that that’s how it works…it’s all a bit new to me, so if there are growing pains, just bear with me. ;)

The anti-spam plugin MT-Blacklist is being used to watch for comment spam. It should catch and deny any comment spam that hits the website. It will also automatically flag questionable comments and require that I approve them before they go to the site — this includes new comments on posts that are over two weeks old, and comments that have more than five URLs embedded in them.

Now, if you have a TypeKey identity, then there is no moderation process to worry about — as soon as your comment is posted, it will appear on the site MT-Blacklist gives you a ‘free pass’, and will not scan your comments when they are posted. As that’s the quickest, easiest way to go about it, I’d recommend going that route (unless you have some other issue with TypeKey and would prefer not to use it, which is fine, too) — and if you don’t have a TypeKey identity yet, why not go ahead and sign up (it’s free)?

Syndication: I’ve set up all of my syndication feeds to go through FeedBurner. I’m in the process of attempting to set up automatic redirects in Apache so that those of you reading me via a newsreader won’t have to worry about re-subscribing, but that’s proving rather stubborn (odd, since it’s a pretty simple process) — the old feeds won’t disappear until I’m sure I’ve got the redirects working correctly. All my old feed addresses have been redirected to point to the FeedBurner feeds, so you should now automatically be receiving the FeedBurner feeds in your newsreader. However, if you’d like, feel free to stop by my subscriptions page, pick your preferred RSS feed, and grab the new FeedBurner URL.

And…actually, I think that’s it. I’ve kept the same design, and you still have your choice of four stylesheets to choose from (more may show up eventually, but as I’ve been making that particular threat for a good few months now, no reason to hold your breath).

iTunes “Kamennoi Ostrov” by 101 Strings Orchestra, The from the album Soul of Russia, The (1996, 10:11).

Server Switch

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If you’re seeing this entry, it means that the transfer to my new server has gone through.

Expect images to be broken for a while as I get them transferred over — all the actual information should be here, though.

More details to follow, most likely…

Looking for a little assistance

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Okay, I’m hoping someone out there might be able to give me a hand here.

I’m working on moving Eclecticism from TypePad over to my own server. I’ve got 95% of the site framework finished (i.e., the design and the slight tweaking to account for differences between TypePad and MovableType, enabling TypeKey registration, and so on), but I’ve got one little thing that’s causing me issues.

Here, I keep my linklog in the sidebar as a separate weblog, using an SSI command to insert the last fifteen posts of the linklog into my pages. Quick, easy, and very simple to do — and I’m having a bear of a time getting it working on my server.

Here’s what I’m dealing with…

First consideration: I don’t want to break any of the links to the existing pages when the site moves to my server. Because of this, I don’t want to change the extension on my pages to .php or .shtml, so the SSI needs to work within a standard .html page.

Second consideration: My current intent is to take advantage of MT3.1’s dynamic rendering ability, so that only the index pages of the site will be static files on the webserver, all archive pages will be dynamically generated.

Now, one can tell Apache to process every .html page as an .shtml page, but that tends to induce a performance hit as Apache then has to actively look at every single page as it sends it out, rather than just pumping static pages out the pipe and only having to fiddle with dynamic pages. So it’s an option, but one I’ve so far been avoiding.

Apache recommends using the XBitHack to get around this, so that any file sent out that has the ‘executable’ bit set will be treated as an .shtml file, regardless of extension. However, as I want to use MT’s dynamic abilities, there won’t actually be files to set the executable bit (and if I turn off MT’s dynamic rendering, I have no idea if I can tell MT to set the executable bit on the files it generates).

If my pages had a .php extension, I could use a simple PHP include command. However, in order to preserve any and all existing links to my site, I need to keep the .html extention. Now, somewhere in the back of my head I seem to remember reading that there may be some way to include PHP commands within MT templates, now that MT is more PHP friendly (and uses PHP for the dynamic rendering) — if this is true, than it could be an easy solution. However, so far I’ve yet been able to track down any information on whether this is actually the case, or if I was just hallucinating somewhere along the line. So for the moment, I’m going with the assumption that this isn’t an option.

Creating a JavaScript include seemed like it would be an easy solution — have the linklog create an ‘export.js’ file that uses document.write('whatever'); commands, then call the script with JavaScript (using the same basic technique that I use to add things like my Technorati badge, my blogrolls, my Flickr badge, and so on). However, for some reason, that refused to work — nothing ever appeared (and, because of the way JavaScript works, I couldn’t even look at the source for the rendered page to see if it was calling the JavaScript file correctly, as no matter what the browser displays, the source just displays the script call link). I’m not at all sure why this isn’t behaving.

I even poked around at some of the plugins available at the MT Plugins Directory. At first I didn’t think that they would be an option, as they wouldn’t update every time I added something to the linklog, and the list of links on my main page would only update when that page was rebuilt. Some of the multiple blogs plugins looked promising — I even installed MultiBlog, as it includes a way for an update to one weblog to force a rebuild of a different weblog (i.e., adding a link to the linklog would force a rebuild of the Eclecticism blog, keeping the list of links current), but that won’t work either — firstly, it only rebuilds the indexes (so the linklogs on archive pages would only be updated when their particular page rebuilt), and secondly, it doesn’t play nice with MT3’s dynamic rendering (all dynamically rendered pages returned errors — this makes sense to me, though I’ll be buggered if I can actually concisely explain why, so just trust me on that).

So at this point, I’m stuck — every single approach I’ve looked at for getting my linklog working under the new installation has crapped out.

Anybody have some ideas or pointers for me to look into? I’d really appreciate it.

Auto-generating iTMS links with affiliate info

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I thought I was going to need help figuring this out — turns out I’ve got more iTMS link-fu than I thought. :D

Earlier this month, I was accepted into the iTunes Affiliate program. All well and good, except that at that point, I couldn’t find a way to link directly to individual items with my Affiliate ID — I could put up the generic iTunes badge (which now resides towards the bottom of my sidebar), or I could put up Apple-designed ad blocks (which, aside from the Björk ad on my original post, I’ve yet to do, mostly because they apparently need to be rotated out manually), but I couldn’t link to any particular track.

As of today, however, Apple now provides a tool to let me do just that, in the form of an addition to the iTMS Link Maker. This is most definitely a Good Thing — however, it’s still a lot more cumbersome than I’d like things to be. While it will be serviceable when I want to mention a particular track or album during the course of a post (for instance, right now I’m listening to William S. Burroughs’ spoken word album Dead City Radio, a must for any WSB fan), what I really wanted to be able to do is use ecto‘s ‘now playing’ feature (which I use to insert the currently playing iTunes track information into the bottom of posts I make at home) to autogenerate iTMS search links that include my Affiliate information at the beginning.

Back when the iTMS first debuted, some enterprising people figured out the URL structure that would allow you to create links to iTMS searches — in theory, all I should have to do is slightly adjust that URL structure to match the URL structure of Affiliate links, and I’d be good to go. As it turns out, that theory was right — for instance, here’s an iTMS search for U2 that passes through my Affiliate information.

Full gory details are in the extended entry…

Read more

One million plus, baby!

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Onemillion

Yowza!

I haven’t been checking often enough to know exactly when this happened, but at some point in the past few days (sometime on Friday, I think), my hit counter passed one million.

Over one million hits to this little weblog.

Now, that’s hits, not visits, for those of you more picky about the fine print than I. Even so, that’s still a really big number.

Pretty damn cool, I’d say.

I’m an iTunes Affilliate

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Single of the Week

Earlier this week, I tossed a link to my linklog to Apple’s new iTunes Affiliate program, but didn’t write up anything more about it, as at that point, I didn’t really know much at all. While I was there, though, I went ahead and tossed in an application…and what do you know, last night I got my e-mail telling me that I was accepted into the program (a little amusing, as they turned down my favorite online soap opera, As the Apple Turns!).

So far, it seems to be fairly straightforward. Basically, once you’re accepted into the program, you’re given a selection of Apple-approved and created text links and banners that can be placed into web pages or e-mail messages that have a special ID in them, so that any sales initiated by a click on one of your links sends a few pennies your way. So far, so good — rather like the Amazon Associates program, in fact.

The one aspect of it that I haven’t figured out yet is how to make links to individual items or searches within the store that tie to my Affiliate ID. Either that part of the program isn’t active yet (since this all just started up this week), or I just can’t find the information on how to do it anywhere. Linking into the store without an Affiliate ID is already easy enough — right-clicking on items in the store gives you their target link, and there are ways to link to iTMS searches — but neither of those includes my Affiliate ID to track the sales.

Once I figure out that part of the process, then it will be extremely similar to the Amazon Associates program — any iTMS link on my site that prompts a sale will send a few pennies my way, and every little bit helps. For now, even though I’m not able to set up links directly to individual items, I have added an iTunes logo in the lower right of the sidebar, and small iTunes links to the “what I’m listening to” line at the bottom of posts. Hey, I may be selling out to The Man and including advertising on my site, but I’m at least making an effort at making it as unobtrusive as possible! ;)

One minor criticism, though (hopefully nothing that’s going to get me rather suddenly dumped from the program): as a web geek, it really bugs me that the provided HTML code to create the links is a little dodgy. No width or height arguments in the img links, un-escaped ampersands, and for some reason, the img tag is capitalized (as IMG), even though all other tags are correctly left lower-case. Nothing that’s terribly difficult to fix, of course, but it is a minor little grumble.

Anyway, that’s that. Should you feel like going shopping at the iTMS, I wouldn’t complain at all if you kicked off your shopping spree by clicking through one of my links…

iTunes “Last One” by Days of the New from the album Days of the New (1999, 4:42).

Comments from the Peanut Gallery

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I spent a little time last night reorganizing the blogroll on the site. Actually, I split it into two, and added a bunch of links.

Since I had the phrase “comments from the peanut gallery” running through my head for no discernible reason whatsoever, I went into the e-mail folder where I dump all the comments that I receive on the site, sorted them all by sender, and started scrolling through. Anytime I saw an address with a good number of comments, I snagged any URL that was left with the comments, and added them to the new ‘Peanut Gallery’ blogroll in the sidebar.

So, in theory, I should have caught most, if not all, of the most frequent visitors that leave comments, as long as they have a site to link to. If I’ve missed anyone, or if for some reason I’ve linked to you and you’d rather I didn’t, please let me know!

The next step is making sure that all of those sites are tossed into NetNewsWire…

iTunes: “Gumbo” by Phish from the album A Live One (1995, 5:14).