Site Housekeeping, Redux

So I just looked at my site in Internet Explorer on a Mac and noticed that several of the little boxes are, um, off. Oddly, the boxes are not messed up in IE for Windows.

sigh...

Another bit to look into. This web publishing stuff can be a giant pain in the ass sometimes.

Site Housekeeping

I think I've pretty much fully migrated this site to HostGator. Still have some things to tidy up when I get a chance, which probably won't be until everyone in the house is healthy.

• I need to update the stylesheets for the main site. The colors are kind of out of whack, and many of them were just temporary placeholders any way.
• I need to update the stylesheets for the Gallery pages. I got Gallery installed, but haven't had a chance to tinker with the styles, so they're using the default templates. Ugly, ugly, very ugly.
• Comments are currently restricted to those with TypeKey accounts. I did this because my site was being overrun with comment spam, and it was increasingly difficult to keep up with it. I haven't decided if I'm going to re-enable comments, leave them the way they are, or disable comments altogether.
• There's other stuff to fix, like creating custom "404 Page Not Found" pages, etc. No idea when I'll get to those kinds of things.
• The archiving scheme for this site has changed as part of the move. Previously, individual archive pages were simply named with a number, something like 000114.html. Now they are named in a much more sensible manner. But this means that any existing links to individual pages are now broken.

Almost back...

I got the photo gallery installed. It went pretty smoothly, although I still have the default styles applied, so I'll have to go back and upload all the old stylesheets. Or maybe I'll update those, too.

Next on the list is to install Gallery2, which is completely different from Gallery v1.5.

Update:

Wow, the skins that come with Gallery are ugly. U-G-L-Y. So, it's the default (bright) blue until I can hack the CSS until I find something acceptable.

Webhost change

I've changed webhosts, and the DNS update is propagating. Slowly.

For some reason, netbuie.net seems to resolve just fine, but www.netbuie.net does not. I assume that will sort itself out as the DNS records catch up. Once all the kinks are ironed out I'll post details on the switch.

I haven't installed Gallery yet, so any attempts to view the photo gallery will reach dead links. I hope to take care of that in the next few days.

So Sad

How depressing it is to look at the logs for this site and see that one of the most frequent referrals I get is from a Russian web site where hackers list the sites they've hacked.

Yes, my site has been hacked twice in the last month, really just somebody overwriting the index.html page with some garbage. Nothing else gets modified, but it's still a pain in the ass. And my webhost was not very pleased.

Anyway.

Probably going to be making some changes here in the next couple of months. The webhost I've used for the last 4 years was sold to another company, and in comparing what they offer to what's available with other hosts I've decided to consider switching. Switching will be painful, I'd have to move everything over, re-install Movable Type and Gallery, recreate all the Movable Type templates and Gallery templates, fix all the links in all the individual pages, update DNS, etc.

Not to mention the disruption to my email. It makes me tired just thinking about it all. Might be a good project for the end of year break coming up, but I'm not sure I want to spend my vacation sitting in front of a computer. That's how I spend my non-vacation time, as it is.

Most influential Sci-Fi films

Another list...

This one is a list of most influential science fiction films.

1. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
2. Akira
3. Alien
4. Aliens
5. Alphaville
6. Back to the Future
7. Blade Runner
8. Brazil
9. Bride of Frankenstein
10. Brother From Another Planet
11. A Clockwork Orange
12. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
13. Contact
14. The Damned
15. Destination Moon
16. The Day The Earth Stood Still
17. Delicatessen
18. Escape From New York
19. ET: The Extraterrestrial
20. Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
21. The Fly (1985 version)
22. Forbidden Planet
23. Ghost in the Shell
24. Gojira/Godzilla
25. The Incredibles
26. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
27. Jurassic Park
28. Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
29. The Matrix
30. Metropolis
31. On the Beach
32. Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
33. Robocop
34. Sleeper
35. Solaris (1972 version)
36. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
37. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
38. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
39. The Stepford Wives
40. Superman
41. Terminator 2: Judgement Day
42. The Thing From Another World
43. Things to Come
44. Tron
45. 12 Monkeys
46. 28 Days Later
47. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
48. 2001: A Space Odyssey
49. La Voyage Dans la Lune
50. War of the Worlds (1953 version)

Google Blog search

I'm not surprised by this. I kind of wonder what took them so long.

Google blog search.

And it works, too!

Theme switcher

Wierd.

I put in the code for switching stylesheets, and the first time the page loaded, it didn't load any of them. It was just a lot of unformatted text. Once I clicked on one, it worked fine after that. Wonder if it's because cookies are used to keep track of which one was selected...

Have to check on that.

Switchable color schemes

Like most every change I've made to this site, the next change arises from boredom. I've gotten bored with the way this site looks, so I decided to tinker with it. Some.

Many weblogs and photologs have user-switchable color schemes. Clicking one of the style links executes a javascript that forces the page to use a particular stylesheet. The script also sets a cookie, so once the stylesheet is changed, that change will persist when the visitor moves among other pages on the site.

It's actually quite simple; the instructions and the script can be found at A List Apart. What's not so simple is finding good color schemes that work well across platforms. Once I find some schemes I like, I'll implement the facility on this site, and probably on my photolog as well.

It does look like there are better ways to achieve this functionality. Guess I'll get around to trying it that way, eventually.

Sloppy HTML Pt. II

I spent some time trying to untangle the mess, and actually made some progress.

The housekeeping tasks are:

• Write php for images to use a template page
• Write php for site pages to use a template page
• Clean up the CSS and stylesheets
• Finish photoblog
• Write up stuff for archive pages

The original random image generator used whatever images were in the photos directory on my site. This created two problems: first, all images in that directory were duplicated elsewhere, resulting in wasted space on the webserver; second, the thumbnails for the images were linked only to the large images alone, rather than to a larger image contained within some sort of template page that looked like the rest of my site.

I handled the image issues by having a text file with one line for each image in the rotation, for example:

<a href="photos_nc.php?image=02pb10"><img src="tnails/02pb10-sm.jpg" class="littlepic" /></a>

Instead of copying the jpegs into a photos directory, I'm just pointing to my Gallery albums directly. There is a separate template page for each album, and a php variable is set to the individual filename by clicking on the thumbnail itself.

There is a line in each template page that places the correct image in the middle of the page:

<img src=albums/central-NC/<?php echo($image) ; ?>_lg.jpg class="mainpic">

Because Gallery creates separate directories for each album, I took the path of least resistance and creates separate php templates for each album. I was still able to save several 10s of mb by deleting all the duplicate images.

I used the same technique to create a template for all the other sub-pages on my site. There is one template, or skeleton, page that contains all the stuff I want all my pages to have (menubar, links, copyright statement, etc), plus the following line:

<?php @ require_once ("$page"); ?>

Any time someone clicks a link, say to the Photos page, the link points to the template page, and the variable gets set to the correct *.txt file, and the above code places that *.txt file in right spot.

All the links have been updated, so instead of a link to

<a href="about.html">

there's a link to

<a href="skel.php?page=about.txt">

There's a single template to modify now, and a whole bunch of plain text files that get loaded into that template when someone clicks on the appropriate link. Much simpler to maintain.

The last thing I had to do was put a redirect at the top of all the original html pages like so:

<?php header("location: ../skel.php?page=about.txt"); ?>

So, I still have a bazillion html files, but they all redirect to the new php-based pages. When I decide to rework my page design, I'll only have to modify the single template page.

A note on the php redirect, that line has to go at the very top of the html file for it to work.

I still have to work on tidying up the CSS, as some pages look fine and others look... not so fine. And I have to write the Movable Type archive pages.

But, I finished the photoblog, so that's done. Now if I could only get some people to come look at my pictures...

Sloppy HTML

A consequence of having had a website for a number of years, and of having a short attention span, is that I have dozens of old files that I don't recognize sitting in various places on my web server. Even though this site isn't all that complex, there are still several dynamic elements like the random quote and image generators. Also, since I use Movable Type to manage much of the content now, I have multiple versions of many of the page templates. I have found that I just don't have enough time to sit down and sort through the mess that my website has become.

I did manage to purge some old image files, and rework most of the pages to use the photos in my photo gallery. This has saved me around 20 mb of space.

While going through this housecleaning, I got the bright idea to run my site through a validation exercise to see how big a mess my html and css really is.

Yow.

Wish I hadn't done that. Now I have way more work than I had before. Based on the validator's output, I'm amazed my site is even viewable... Guess I'll start fixing things, one page at a time, until it's cleaned up. This will probably take months, which will leave me way behind in everything else, I'm sure.

Perl nightmare

Well, it's more of a perl annoyance, really. Not an actual perl nightmare. I've had those, and this isn't quite that bad.

A few days ago I decided to add a photoblog to my site. Seemed like a not-too-difficult objective to achieve. I should have known better.

I figured the only real issue I'd have would be figuring out enough CSS to be able to come up with a decent layout. Of course, I haven't even gotten to that point yet.

Where I appear to have gone astray is in trying to allow Movable Type to create the thumbnails automatically, using Imagemagick. MovableType has hooks into the ImageMagick perl module, which is installed on my server, and can (allegedly) generate thumbnails of a specified size upon upload.

Only I can't get the damn thing to work!!!! I've tried switching to NetPBM (per the documentation), and get the same error:

Premature end of script headers: /path/to/mt/cgi-bin/mt.cgi

I've looked the mt.cgi script, and cannot figure out why this is not working. The workaround is to tack a step onto the end of the Photoshop action I use to generate my web images, and have it make thumbnails too. Then, I just upload both the thumbnail and the full-size image.

But that's a pain. I want the thing to work as it's supposed to, and make the thumbnails for me. Grrrrrrrrr.

Bad publicity better than no publicity??

It appears as if I've named my site after a Trojan horse: From the Symantec Security Response Database, Trojan.NetBuie.A is a Trojan horse that comes disguised as an XBox emulator. According to Symantec,

Its only purpose is to produce periodic hits on a specific Internet Web page. (At the time that this write-up was published, the Web site had been removed.)

Truthfully, I registered my domain long before this virus appeared, but nobody will care about that. All that will matter is that my site has the same name as a documented Trojan horse.

That's just great. Thanks to the losers that wrote the thing. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before my site is blocked by URL filters everywhere. My company uses Webwasher, so I'll know the reason when I won't be able to access my own site from work.

Nuts.

Not a fake

My first thought when I saw this thing on Michael Alderete's web page was not that it was a Photoshopped fake. My first thought was "Holy Shit. What the hell is that!?"

It's a mobile strip mining machine. Those Germans... It wouldn't have occurred to anyone else to put such a thing on wheels. OK, not exactly wheels. More like treads. Like the treads on the thing they used to transport the old Saturn rocket.

But still. A mobile strip mining machine.

Finally...

They're gone! All 3000 spam comments are finally gone.

It took upgrading to Movable Type 3.11 and installing MT-Blacklist, but I managed to get rid of them all. Sure hope the Blacklist thing works. I had given up on trying to delete the comments from online casinos and erection enhancers. I just don't have the time to delete over 500 comments a day.

The down side is that now I don't have any comments to read...

Too much work

I've upgraded to MovableType 3.11. I sure hope it worked, because I'm tired of sitting in front of this damn computer!

Installing MT-Blacklist did not work, however. More work to be done to figure that out.

All this effort to keep people from spamming my site with bogus comments. What a waste of time.

Finally

The DNS change went through WAY faster than I thought it would. It only took about 4 hours total to reinstall Movable Type, recreate all the scripts, customized pages, etc.

Would have gone a lot faster if the crappy GUI ftp client I was using hadn't munged up the permissions on my entire directory tree. I had no idea it was next to impossible to recursively chmod files and directories from an ftp prompt...

Anyway, everything is back (I think) except the web Gallery. Not going to worry about that yet. I'm done staring at a monitor for a while...

ugh

I got an email from my ISP the other day. They're decommissioning the server my site is on, so I have until December 1st to move my site to the new server. Which really means I have until Monday, since I will be out of town next week. And I'm on call this week, so I won't really have much time at all to work on this.

The bad news is that I can't just ftp everything over. I tried putting everything on the new server last night with the ftp mode set to "auto" and that was a disaster. I expected most of the scripts would break because paths to files and directories have changed, but nothing works. It looks as if the ftp client just uploaded everything as binary, which is bad for scripts. So nothing works.

My plan is to re-ftp all the static pages, re-install Movable Type and Gallery from scratch, and attempt to re-construct everything. I doubt that I'll have time to do all that before December 1st, so who knows what this site will look like in a week...

Updates

I've changed the stylesheet for the index page to something more interesting than white, blue and gray. Now they're brown, blue and gray! Much better.

The colors are the same that I used in the Photo Gallery. Since the other pages use a different stylesheet, I'll have to make those changes some other time.

CSS Roolz

I just finished updating all the internal pages to get formatting from one of two stylesheets. I'm sure the proper way to do it is to have a single really well-organized stylesheet, but I'm not organized. So I have two.

Stylesheets are just cool. Saves lots of time, once you go through the effort of figuring the dang things out. Mine are only half-assed, and yet everything looks so much better. At least it does to me...

Cable vs DSL

Since DirecTV DSL has gone belly up, I had to find another ISP. I ended up going with Earthlink Cable, mainly because Earthlink gave me so much hassle when I called to sign up for their DSL service. 12 month agreement, etc, and I wasn't on the phone a minute before they started pushing the cable service. So, what the hell, cable it was.

As it turns out, the cable service has been (so far) much faster than my old DSL connection. With DSL, the fastest speed I ever got was around 1200 bps (1.2 megabits, mostly between 1.0 and 1.1).

With cable, I'm averaging around 2003 bps down (2 megabits), 260 up, and a transfer rate of 245 kb/sec. Pretty danged fast...

2003-01-31 21:13:09 EST: 2002 / 265
Your download speed: 2002030 bps, or 2002 kbps.
A 244.3 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 265533 bps, or 265 kbps.
--
2003-01-31 21:14:35 EST: 1972 / 212
Your download speed: 1972800 bps, or 1972 kbps.
A 240.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 212652 bps, or 212 kbps.
--
2003-01-31 21:16:11 EST: 2032 / 201
Your download speed: 2032989 bps, or 2032 kbps.
A 248.1 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 201267 bps, or 201 kbps.
--
2003-02-01 00:01:33 EST: 2153 / 237
Your download speed: 2153037 bps, or 2037 kbps.
A 262.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 237360 bps, or 237 kbps.
--
2003-02-01 12:09:01 EST: 2030 / 325
Your download speed: 2030663 bps, or 2030 kbps.
A 247.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 325812 bps, or 325 kbps.
--
2003-02-02 11:06:29 EST: 1783 / 278
Your download speed: 1783667 bps, or 1783 kbps.
A 217.7 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 278706 bps, or 278 kbps.
--
2003-02-02 11:08:54 EST: 2046 / 316
Your download speed: 2046822 bps, or 2046 kbps.
A 249.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 316230 bps, or 316 kbps.

Not a Good Thing

Great.

So much for Macromedia. Better get the latest versions of Dreamweaver etc now, before they get bastardized into some Windows-only pieces of crap software.

Frickin Microsoft. At least there's still Adobe.

Dammit

Guess there is an advantage to going with a giant faceless corporation for your broadband access, as opposed to a medium-sized faceless corporation. DirecTV, which bought Telocity DSL, is scuttling their broadband service. Seems they were losing money on the thing...

What a pain in the ass. Guess it's Earthlink for my DSL.

CSS is cool

But a giant pain in the ass.

Getting all this stuff to layout right using css isn't that bad, really. What kills you is trying to make the layouts look even somewhat consistent across all the different browsers. I've checked Mozilla on Solaris, Win NT, and Mac OS X. Looks fine, as far as I can tell. It even looks ok on IE 5.x on Windows, after much wrangling.

Sheesh. Gotta wonder if it's really worth it...

brain not big enough

Once upon a time, back in late 1994, I learned html and started making web pages. It was easy, everything was straightforward, but the content and design was boring. Pretty much all anyone had on their websites was lists of links, maybe a few photos. But I was current enough that I could call myself a web geek without anyone paying me to create web pages.

In the meantime, while I was making nice static pages with static content, the web world moved out from under me, and I'm having a hard time catching up. I learned a little php when I rebuilt this site last spring, so I could load random quotes and random images into the top section of my pages. It occurred to me then that I should learn enough php to make my entire site modular, and enough css to make redesigns easy. I put it off, and did it half-assed, so there's lots of static content, and a little flexible content.

And then I started looking into this blogging stuff, Movable Type, and others, and I've discovered that I'm behind, way behind. You can do some way cool stuff, but man, it's a lot to keep track of. So I'm stuck editing these entries by hand until I have the time to sort through all the implications of implementing Movable Type on my site.

I think I'll probably just back everything up and give it a try. See what breaks. Not like anyone's reading this stuff anyway...