Over at Aces Full of Links James talks about leaving the blogging game. I haven't been posting nearly as frequently as of late, and I thought I'd take his cue to mention it. If you've been coming by often looking for new material, I apologize for the inconvenience. I'm sure you're already checking back less frequently, and you should probably keep that up. It may be a few weeks before things get back to normal, but thanks for noticing me.
Recently in Site Issues Category
So yeah, I've managed to break my individual archive template. I don't have time to figure out how. Please be patient over what will probably be the next few days as I figure it out and get it back up and working. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I've decided that I'll start rolling out the new design tonight. Let me know if and when you see problems and I'll try to fix them up. Thanks for your patience.
I few weeks ago (I looked, I can't find a post in my own archives... I suck) I mentioned that I was having trouble with pings in Movable Type timing out. I've since determined that the problem was caused by not emptying out my activity log. Once I did that, build times improved greatly. If your install is having problems, check that out.
Now if I could only make the double trackback pings stop...
Let me tell you. I missed you.
Last Monday the server that hosts this site had massive hard drive failure. Tuesday a restore was done. It crashed. Wednesday a restore was done. That restore crashed. At that point tech support determined that the failure was with the server and not just the drives. The server was replaced. A restore was done. The site came back up. MovableType did not.
Due to the fact that this site exists in a virtual hosting environment, there are many configuration issues to deal with after a restore is done. One such issue was modifying the permissions so that I could once again access the directory structure for my site. That happened last night. This morning I was able to login and repair the permissions on my MovableType installation.
Throughout the process Ron at MongoHosting has been as helpful as he could. His fulltime job as a tech was busier than normal due to the power outage and he also had some medical emergencies in his family. Nonetheless, he kept his clients up to date as he got new information and worked as hard as possible to get us back up and running. The same cannot be said for the asshats at RackShack. Theirs is a joke of an operation. Their poor support and assistance lead to lost customers and probably lost sales for MongoHosting. The situation is completely unfair.
In the past I've wondered to myself about why I maintain this site, sometimes unable to figure it out. Given forced separation, though, I felt voiceless. I may not know each and every one of you who ever stops by, but this site of mine is a hobby, and one I enjoy. I've missed you all, and I hope you've been well. I look forward to getting caught up.
I'm looking for ways to block referrer log spam. Got any?
A new feature: If you mouse over the name and date of a new comment in the righthand sidebar, in modern browsers the title of the post the comment was made in relation to will appear as a tooltip.
I've started a little experiment here at BTB. I want to know if those wacky googlers stick around after their messed up search strings bring them in. Here's what I've done:
- Assigned each user a session id
- logged the time they visit, the page the came from, and the page they're going to
- set it up so when they close their browser, their cookie resets
This means I can't tell if you come here often, because you don't keep your cookie. I can't tell if you look at porn, because, well, I just can't. All I can do is try to figure out what your path through my site was. I'm not big brother, and the only thing this does is satisfy my curiosity. If the site asks you to accept a cookie, please don't be alarmed...
In today's referrers, the search string "how to make your boobs stand up/not lose". That's so friggen funny, I almost pissed myself. Thanks, dooce, as it was partly a quote from you that helped me turn up in that result list...
I've been working on a new template for the site and it's coming along pretty well. I'm kind of excited. Such a geek, I know.
In other news, I have a collection of links to share with you guys, but I have to get them all in here. One link at a time is easy and quick. Twenty or thirty get much harder. I'll try to do it tomorrow. After I deal with the student loan consolidator who keeps stalking me...
Over the last week I've gotten a few comments and emails from people who read the site but who I don't know. That always gets me pretty excited, as it just goes to show that even though most days I work on this site because I enjoy it, someone else likes it too. Someone else besides the people looking for American Idol porn.
In other news, Zeldman has a new stylesheet up. It's orange. There's a picture of a woman in the bottom corner. Save her and look at her. If you can tell me how he optimizes his images like that, I'll love you.
Have a good night all, and look forward for my pathetic commentary on American Idol tomorrow.
Made some changes to the templates, fixing the about page finally and adding perma-links to the comments for direct comment linking. Let me know if you find any problems.
I've started work on the markup behind my site. Tonight I removed some redundant classes and fixed some anchors so that they're on titles and not above them. Some alignment issues have arisen, but other than that things seem to be ok. Please let me know if you see any changes or problems.
1) You'll notice the search title has a line under it now. I'm not sure why it didn't before, to fix it I had to do something dumb, and for all I know it will break again. Stupid web...
2) If you try to make this page validate, you'll notice that it won't. You may also notice that all the lines that break reference trackback data. Smarter people than I have tried to fix this problem, and failed. Again, stupid web.
Oh yeah, Happy New Year.
Well now. It's been a few days since I've gotten back into posting regularly, and that's because some times real life can be a drag. I'm working on a few side projects right now for the site, but if you've looked around closely, you'll notice that a few things are still broken. C'est la vie.
In any case, yesterday, the Patriots won. The papers today said they dominated the Bills. Dominated? I'd say no. the 49 to nothing whooping the Cardinals got a few weeks ago sets the new definition for dominating. I mean otherwise, you could say that Houston dominated the Steelers yesterday. You wouldn't say that, would you? ::wink wink::
I was sad to see Bledsoe lose, even though it means the Patriots are heating up, and that's a good thing for those of us who enjoy post-season football; the kind of football where you can get up on Saturday and see a great game, and then get up on Sunday and do the same. Ah yes, football makes life sweet.
I'd like to see the Patriots continue to get hot, and finally meet up with the Bucs in the big dance. Two teams built around crazy defenses with decent offenses duking it out. Yes, even if we lose, how often do the defending champs make it back to the Super Bowl? I don't think too often.
That's the end of my football rant for now. I have a lot more to say, and even some to say about baseball (Epstein anyone?). However, tonight I've said enough.
Well, the DNS changes have taken effect. I took a little vacation for the weekend, and now I'm back in RL and in Blogaria. I have a few things to do, such as checking some broken links, getting my email straightened out, and fixing some database connections, but for the most part things should be back to business as usual. Sweetness.
Yesterday I wrote a little screen scraper that reads my recommended reading list from New Door and posts them here on my page. Based on what links I've written about and posted on my page my recommendations change, showing me new links. This also happens as I include and exclude sites. I thought this would be pretty neat, especially since the first few lists I read through seemed to be on the money.
Apparently, so did Doc Searls, as he linked to my site yesterday. Repeat after me: "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy..." Doc is the Senior editor of Linux Journal, has written for numerous publications, and is a pretty well known blogger. It all makes me feel kind of special.
Being linked by Doc meant that suddenly my site was exposed to a larger audience than usual, and one of the people who linked me was Andy. He's got a nicely designed site and a good sense of humor, as proven by the fact that he too liked the latest post from the Dooce. Word. Word. Word..
I've never explicitly asked someone to link to me, but I do enjoy it when it happens. I guess what this proves is that if you build it, they will come. If you keep at it and give back to the community, eventually people notice, and it makes it all worth while. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: personal publishing rules.
Due to some server side changes, binarytoybox.com will not be seeing any new posts throughout the weekend. Apologies to all for the interruption. In the meantime, go check out some more strongbad emails, my scrigidies.
pottymouth
I've done a little work on pottymouth. More to come. Keep scrollin on, my scrigidies....
Testing some changes to the referrer listing code.
I'd like to draw your attention to the right hand sidebar where you'll now find links to the five latest comments. Specifically, today, take a look at Dave's comment.
First of all, Dave, I have a small community here, so I can't be too picky. However, if you could tone down the caps a little I'd appreciate it.
Secondly, I'm not sure, but I'm bet the sniper isn't just taking aim from the nearest sidewalk. I'm sure having a quarter of the population of DC filming everything might get something on tape, but the cops would have to watch tons of video with no idea what they were looking for, nevermind the fact that someone would have to have the camera pointed in the right direction at the right time to get anything worth even looking at. Can you say "needle in a haystack"?
Finally, I'm pretty sure you could have come up with something better than "jerks" to describe these fucking losers. If not, maybe you should swing by pottymouth.
I hope if you come back, Dave, you're not pissed at me for the things I've said. It's just that I have really strong opinions about these rejects of society and the stupid bastards trying to catch them. I'm also not to happy with the media's sloppy intervention, and I'm convinced there are already one too many cameras involved making things more difficult than they should be. Sorry I took out my frustrations on you.
I've completed the upgrade to Movable Type 2.5. It seems to have gone pretty smoothly. I'm not taking advantage of much more than the ability to ping blo.gs (which I had to go in to my preferences and set for those of you who'd like to do that as well). I didn't try the new default stylesheet, so I don't know if it includes a search box by default, but I know this version has it. So, what I'm saying is: Look for the ability to search this site in the near future.
This concludes this test of the emergency broadcasting system... or something like that...
binarytoybox :: potty mouth - A dictionary of swears and dirty phrases made of user contributions
Don't forget to make a contribution to pottymouth. Hey, why not make a few? I know you want to!
I've kicked off a new section of the site, potty mouth! You should check it out and contribute.
Coming soon: random word/phrase of the day as well as a potty mouth search engine.
So I started working on a swear word/phrase dictionary... People would be able to post a word and its definition. Then you could view them, or maybe display a random one on your page...
It's half done, but I don't know if its worth finishing. I mean, I'd just be perpetuating the porn/smut/vulgarity on the internet, right? And just because I have a mouth like a truck driver, doesn't mean everyone else does too, right? Ah well... If you think you'd like to see it finished, let me know... Otherwise I think I'll just leave it unfinished.
Openwire - Moveable Type Search
Well, a fresher version of the MT search engine has been released. I'm still waiting for my host to install the perl package I need to convert over to mysql. Once that happens, I'll hopefully be able to try out some of the search ideas I've been working on.
I started to work in the rest of the changes I learned about at Mark's site during his Dive into Accessibility series. This includes everything from some structural changes to changes in the way font sizes are declared. I'll be working on the accessibility stuff soon and moving the changes into some of the other templates (currently they only have been added to the index). Let me know if you experience any problems so I can resolve them.
Ok. I've been looking into this searching thing for days now. I'm up to my neck in character sorting, fulltext indexing, trie's, and more. Here's what I found.
If you're using mysql, its pretty easy to have a pretty powerful and quick engine by using mysql's ability to generate indexes on text, such as the comment, the title, etc. However, if you're using an even newer version of mysql (of the 4.x alpha variety) you will have access to a complete set of boolean operators for searching. Even better.
That's with mysql. If your copy of MT uses DB_File instead, I'm still looking into it. DB_File doesn't store robust record sets, it only stores key/value associations, from what I've read.
Oh well. I might never end up doing anything with any of this, but its interesting to research at least.
Required reading: Advanced mysql Searching.
As of right this second, this page lists my blog as similar to Meg's at megnut.com.
Meg was co-founder of pyra, the company that created blogger. Her blog is in my list of blogs to read regularly, and I'm very psyched about being listed on the same page as her... All I have to say is this: I find this whole web thing to be utterly fascinating and exciting, and revel in it like a little kid in a candy store. Thanks Google, for making my day.
Well, I have to learn about this trackbacking thing. People are starting to do it, and I'm not. Better get my but in gear.
As a sidenote, What if you were Ben or Mena? It's got to feel really neat being the ones who thought it up, and programmed it in. Having an idea, and then seeing it through to useage has got to be pretty neat, especially when it involves creating social networks. In his book, Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee talks about the web as a medium where people can post and edit, and trackback kind of allows that, as I understand it: I read your comment, I make my won, it shows up on your page and creates a dialog. Neat neato.
In other news, I have a really weird referrer showing up that ends with commands/script or something like that (I'm too lazy to look). When I try to visit it, I get a poopy authentication box. If anyone knows where its coming from, drop me a line. I'm kind of interested...
Update: Duh... I pinged my own site, and discovered that the IP involved was my own IP, so I stopped displaying those entries. I don't know what was causing it, because I don't recognize the cll, or the port it was against, but it's gone now.
I got a Referrer script hooked up. The code is from LGF. However, I made a few modifications. They are as follows:
1: The referrers are numbered.
2: The User Agent string is stored. Currently, I have a crude mapping that decides if the user agent is either Mozilla, Netscape, IE, or Opera. It displays this information in a tool tip (since its in the title attribute) which you can see if you hover over a particular refferer. In the future, I hope to have a better browser mapping (ie what version and more browsers), but for now it works. If you have any issues, please email me.
In the process of getting this to work, I also discovered that my host has a really powerful server intereface, as I was able to configure Apache to do some things that I thought required editing the httpd.conf file and restarting the server.
And now, in all its glory: binarytoybox referrer list
As mentioned in my last post, I've been viewing my logs a lot recently. not surprisingly, the more I post, the more people view my site. The more places I submit my site or leave my address, the more people visit my site. However logical it is, the kid in me is extremely excited.
I've always felt empowered by the web. With a few keystrokes, you can leave your mark. Over the last few years, I've read a lot of things, learned a lot of things, and expanded my skills. Until recently, I haven't brought them to bear on anything in particular, until I started this web log. Finally, I feel like I'm using some of the thngs I've learned, and, the great part is, I can see it paying off by the way my site visits are increasing.
I'm extremely interested by the communities that form on the web. Whether it be the warbloggers, the people who hang out in comp.lang.php, or the groups of people who post comments on any given website, its awesome to see people with such different backgrounds and locations coming together. Like I said before, I'm in love with the web.
So, in reviewing the traffic logs (in case you noticed, I'm doing that almost obsessively) I noticed a new bot hitting the site: Psbot. It belongs to a site called picsearch.com, which indexes images and allows users to search through them. Personally, I'm not a fan of having my photography ending up in a database for save to desktop thieves. Needless to say I learned how to use my robots.txt file to block the bot. I just created a file called robots.txt and added an entry that looks like this:
User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /
psbot is the name of the bot to block, and by using the / (or root) I have blocked the bot from my entire site. You can also specify certain directories, however, there needs to be a separate disallow line for each directory you wish to block. You can also use the wild card, *, to block all bots.
Open Directory - Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Technology
In other news, my site has finally been indexed by google, as well as added to Dmoz, who's link is above. I now understand where my new visitors are coming from. Hello!
As for dmoz, it has me listed as a personal blog about the internet, technology, and media. I guess I better start talking about some of that.
I purchased a book today called "Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java". So far, I'm learning, but I'm not enjoying the book. At the end of every section (even really small ones consisting of a sigle page) the author tells what will be discussed next. Now, if I'm trying to write a spider, don't you think I'm smart enough to read the heading half an inch down the page to figure out what the next section is about? I'm not even done with the first chapter, and I'm already annoyed. However, the code is well-commented and easy to understand. Maybe I'll have something written soon.
So it's come to my attention that some people have tried to view pages that don't exist and that some people are using Netscape 4.x to try and view this site. I wanted to point out a few things:
1. Not all of the 'within' links to the left are working yet.
2. This site isn't designed to work in Netscape 4.x. I'm working on at least making it readable. However, Netscape 4.x is a ragged old browser. Please, please upgrade to a newer browser such as Mozilla, Netscape 6.x (or better yet, help them test the 7 preview release), or Opera. I don't reccommend IE 6 due to its security issues, however, it will display this site correctly.
And now, back to our regular programming.
Well, as you might have noticed, I've done some re-designing. I began by using the 3 column layout from BlueRobot. I then modified as necessary to add my banner at the top. I realize that the banner image may be a little heavy, and I plan on working on that. On the flip-side, this page is xhtml transitional compliant, section 508 compliant, and has a stylesheet that validates. It is also W3C section A compliant, but until I can get AAA I'm not going to brag about that. If you'd like to ccheck up on me, use the validation links at the bottom of this page.
One note: I discovered that for links to validate properly, they can't have any ampersands in them. You must use the ampersand entity instead. You can get more info here: W3C XHTML Recommendation.
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Massachusetts, Jason, Male, 21-25!
What is that all about you ask? Check it out at http://danpadua.kit.net/.
Daypop - a current events/weblog/news search engine
I added my site to daypop in an attempt to actually have people read this site. However, for that to happen I need to do more than just ramble on about the actual act of blogging and actually write about something that's not "dry and boring". Umm yeah... I'm thinking movie reviews and such... Stay tuned.
Well, all my old posts (few in number) have been imported into the system. Wasn't too much work. Now that almost everything is back to normal, its back to regular programming.
Well, the template is back to the one I had been using before; things are starting to look like they did. I found a folder today that I had downloaded from my site that contained the archive with all of my posts in it from before things got screwed up so I'll be working at putting all of those back in. I'll also be trying to remember everything I saw between when my site went down and when it came back that would have been interesting so I can put it back up. Stay tuned.
I added some links to the links section of the template. They aren't an exhaustive list of sites I frequent, but it's a start. I also noticed that the template that this version of movabletype uses as its default is different from the one that the old version I had installed uses as its default. Therefore, the site does look a little different. I'll try to move it back to the way it was tonight. In the meantime, check out the links I've posted, or try catching up on Mark's month of accessibility.
Well, if you've been checking back regularly (and I know there are a few of you), you know there hasn't been much changing. That was due to some changes on my hosts side that I couldn't do anything about. In any case, its fixed now, and I'm back. I lost some of the posts from before, so everything that was here won't come back (at least there wasn't a lot of it). Some of it will, though. Please disregard the changes that will be ocurring as I put everything back to the way it was.
Update: It works!
Yup. I checked the box that automagically tells weblogs.com that I have updated my site. I wonder if it will increase traffic or something? Guess I'll have to keep an eye on my server logs. In any case, if you do by some chance happen to stumble across this site because of the pinging thing, feel free to be the first to comment on something.
I just modified the templates a little bit. They've been tested in Moz and IE 6.0. The entire system is designed to be really nice in modern browsers, but when I tested it in Netscape 4.x, it blew up and died... Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's ok, however, I need to find a way to warn the poor buggers... Maybe I'll use the @import hack... In any case, let me know if you find any issues with the changes I made.
I moved all of my old posts (like all five of them or something, complete with spelling mistakes) over to the movabletype system. One thing that I found is that it isn't completely easy to add php to a post because every carriage return in the PHP gets convereted to an html break, which throws errors in the PHP (did that make sense?). So, I had to do some man handling to get it to work. Maybe in a newer version, they'll check for the PHP opening tag and then not do anything inside there, if I can find a way to explain it that doesn't sound like I'm babbling...
So I tried installing movabletype again. This time, though, it worked. I'm digging it so far. The admin interface is smooth as ice, although a little daunting with all the options and configurability (if that's even a word). I'll be moving my other posts over (although they are few, not many) and will be trying to get the content from here into my own layout. We'll see what happens.
So I tried to install Movable Type two nights ago with no success. The admin screen for my website provided by my host is non-functional as of late. I have an email in, but have received no response as of yet. That's ok, though, since they usually respond extremely quickly. I'm only trying Movable Type becuase Kottke did it... Talk about follow the leader. I've been trying to write my own blogging software, but due to difficulties setting up a test environment, the going is slow. Oh well. I waited to log on to the net until tonight. By doing so, I missed the 1.0 release of Mozilla. I've been using it for years now (I downloaded milestone 4 I think...). I'm glad to see it being successful. Download it and try it. I bet you'll like what you see.
I've placed this page up in order to have a foundation to work from. Currently looking for work, I have some time (finally) to work on my own site. My portfolio has been drafted and posted, this page is up, and hopefully there will be more to follow. I'm currently not using the site software I wrote, but hopefully, as I get my home network back together, I'll be able to get it back up and running.
In other news, the Celtics lost again tonight. I'm beginning to think the Nets are just a better team. I've seen the Celts play extremely well, but they're not showing it right now. Tired? Long season? I don't understand sine they play for this: the playoffs. Oh well... The Red Sox are still ahead by one and are on a 3 game winning streak heading into their next round with the Yankees... Got to look on the bright side!
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