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I suppose I’m in the minority here. I want to work on some website updates, but I can’t, because my host’s SSH and SFTP servers are down for maintenance. Thats fine, I can configure a PHP script for doing photo galleries, “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com, I was going to set up for Madalene. Oops, no dice, “Sourceforge”:http://sourceforge.net is down for maintenance too, so I can’t download the scripts. And with Sourceforge down, I can’t commit any changes for “iScrobbler”:http://audioscrobbler.sf.net/iscrobbler.php either. Nor can I check out the XMMS code I wanted to look at.

I suppose I’ll just have to ‘relax’ or something. What do you people DO on a Sunday afternoon?

I’m currently going through and categorizing every last one of my posts. Why go to such horrifying extremes, as to slog through page after page of entries, pigeonholing each and every one? Well, the reasons will soon be obvious. When I’m done categorizing them, I can implement new features, like browsing and searching by category. Couldn’t care less about computers? Well you’ll be able to leave out all the computer related posts! Love my witty rants? Well they’ll all be collected into one nice little place. How exciting!

Here are just a few random status updates..

iScrobbler development is coming along very nicely, and things are basically ready for release. As anyone interested in the project knows, RJ is in the process of moving “AudioScrobbler.com”:http://www.audioscrobbler.com to the new servers, which has occupied quite a bit of his time recently. The new servers are being very kindly provided by “Jahingo.com”:http://www.jahingo.com/, and should help matters greatly. Once RJ has taken care of that, the receiving end of iScrobbler will be put in place, and I’ll send out betas to people who were interested. Some new iScrobbler features include automatic version checking, and detailed error reporting to aid in bug submission.

“Josh at SpeckledPaint.org”:http://www.speckledpaint.org has agreed to design a schnazzy icon for iScrobbler! We’ll see what he comes up with, I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll be good.

This site was mentioned on “Neural.it”:http://www.neural.it, an Italian technology website. Here is a direct link to the “article that mentions the iScrobbler”:http://www.neural.it/nnews/audioscrobbler.htm. The site looks quite interesting, though saddly I can’t read any of it! They do have a small “english version”:http://www.neural.it/english however that you can check out.

This brings up an interesting possibility, which is that iScrobbler will be very easy to make multilingual. Unfortunately, you know what they say, “If you know three languages, you are trilingual, if you know two languages, you are bilingual, and if you only know one language, you are an American” and uh, I’m an American. However, if anyone is interested in translating iScrobbler, the process is pretty easy, and can be done by a non-programmer. All that is required is basic familiarity with the Terminal, basic familiarity with Interface Builder (which isn’t hard to learn at all, especially for a rather simple program like iScrobbler), and a good understanding of English and the target language, including knowledge of basic technical terms in both languages. Just email me if you are interested.

In other news, “Moveable Type 2.62″:http://www.moveabletype.org was just release, which fixes an annoying text plugin bug, and some other little quirks. Its advised that anyone who previously upgraded to 2.6 or 2.61 upgrade to 2.62 in order to take advantage of the fixes. Along with the update comes a “Kung Log”:http://www.kung-foo.tv/kunglog.php update to match. Very handy.

On a personal note, I’ve been feeling very erratic recently with regards to my sleeping schedule. I seem to just wake up and fall asleep at totally random times of the day and night, and my circadian rhythm is all but shot. It seems to be a combination of narcolepsy and insomnia that causes me to have this erratic schedule. Hopefully I’ll sync back up to the rest of the world soon.

“Moveable Type 2.6″:http://www.moveabletype.org is installed, after a short issue stemming from my flagrant misuse of the -fr switches for rm. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, well… I just hope you don’t have to. Let me just say that backups are cool.

Also, “Textile Formatting (Great Stuff)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php has been implemented by your friend and mine, “Brad Choate”:http://www.bradchoate.com. Textile formatting is a syntax for formatting web text ‘on the fly’ that was developed by Dean Allen at “Textism”:http://www.textism.com that allows for semantically valid markup that is easy to type, and unobtrusive to use. Instead of having to write out whole link tags, I just use a simple markup, and it fills in the details. It escapes HTML entities, supports the acronym and cite tags, linking, paragraphs, block quotes, emphasis tags, wiki tables, lists, and knows how to deal with the pre tag and tags I input myself and more. In short, if you write a weblog, and want to produce cleaner, more effective markup without being annoyed with tons of taggery in your text, then this is the plugin for you. If you want to try it out in its original form, check out the “original Textile page”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ and give it a whirl. The syntax is the same as the adapted version for Moveable Type.

Also, the wonderful new release of “Kung-Log”:http://www.kung-foo.tv/kunglog.php fully supports the pluggable text formatters, with a handy-dandy drop down menu to select the formatter of your choice. It also supports pinging URL(Universal Resource Locator)s, which is a feature I was hungering for. Boy, its a good day for the software world, at least in the little weblog corner of the software world. Expect to see lots of interesting new plugins coming out soon.

Here are a few of MT2.6′s features that got me excited..

* Pluggable text formatting.
* The ability to close comments. You can end the discussion if you want, yet keep the existing comments available for reading.
* Built-In support for Brad Choate’s “Sanitize”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mtsanitize.php plugin.
* Trackback autodiscovery.

Lots of goodness. Anyway, since things are fluxing a bit here, let me know if anything is tweaked to heck and broken or something.

I added an “About” section to the site. All the other sites have them, so I figured I needed one too. The part about me is boring, but it also has information on the site in general, and some of the technology used to run the site. That is bound to be more interesting to people. Its not very fleshed out at the moment, but it will be as I make more detailed write-ups of the scripts and snippets that drive this site.

There is also a slick little addition that calculates current statistics for the entire site, including word count, unique word count, probability of a word being unique, average number of words per entry, and a slick calculation of the Flesch Reading Ease Score, a value between 1 and 100, where higher values equal more comprehensible writing. A good Reading Ease score does not replace clear and intelligent writing, but many writers, particularly ones writing technical documentation, legal copy, textbooks, etc, find themselves producing writing that is far more difficult to read than it should be. Readability indexes, like the Flesch Reading Ease Score can help identify problem areas, and aid in making difficult writing more ‘plain english’. Values between 60 and 70 are considered optimal for adult readers. I’m proud to say that at the time of this post, my reading ease score is ~65! I know its a silly thing to be proud of, but I feel that I have reasonably clear writing, and have felt that my writing has improved since I’ve started blogging. [Edit: Its a very silly thing to be proud of, because I am living proof of my statement that, "a good Reading Ease score does not replace clear and intelligent writing." However, my error is now fixed, so go home.]

For comparison, the average Reading Ease score for comic strips is 92 (very easy). The Readers Digest has an average score of 65 (by design, of course). The Wall Street Journal has an average score of 43. The Harvard Law Review has an average score of 32. Standard Insurance Policies have a dismal average score of 10. Ever wonder why you can’t understand those little tiny pamphlets you get with your insurance policy? Its not your fault. Almost everyone has difficulty parsing and understanding writing with a reading ease score that low. Keep in mind that the subject matter of the writing does not play into its Reading Ease score. Even documents of a highly specialized and technical nature can have high Reading Ease scores if their authors pay attention to good writing practices.

I’ve updated the styling of Flexistentialist a bit, and I rather like the change. It may look the same to you at first glance, but try resizing the window. Instead of having the main area stay a fixed size, it is now fluid, changing with the size of your window! Thats a welcome change, I feel. Also, the logo image is now comprised of three layers. The background color, which is a dark blue, then a background image, set not to repeat, of clouds, and then a 24 bit PNG of ‘Flexistentialist.org’ with alpha-channel transparency (look at the pretty drop shadow). The words follow the right edge of your screen, and stay nice and pretty looking over the clouds.

If you aren’t seeing that, please let me know in the comments! In particular, the browser I’m concerned about is IE 5 for Windows. I’m using a small hack (I feel bad about using them, but the alpha channel PNGs are just so pretty, I had to give it a try..) to give IE 5 and up the PNG served up through one of Microsoft’s special filters that apply alpha channel transparency, because IE for windows itself does NOT support it. Despite the fact that the specification has been around for 7 years, IE/Win just can’t seem to get around to supporting it! However, using a DirectX filter, we can convince IE to render the alpha channel transparency.

Take a look at my source code if you are curious how it works. It uses a bit of Javascript to see if your browser is IE 5 or up for Windows. If it is, then it changes the properties of the image tag a bit to cause IE to use the AlphaImageLoader that it has to view alpha transparency of PNGs (why it doesn’t just support the alpha transparency like it should is something I don’t understand.

I’ll probably be making a few little tweaks here and there, but the design is stable for now. Once again, please leave any comments, particularly if you are using IE 5 for windows, as that is the one browser I haven’t had a good chance to test.

A fun new feature has been added to Flexistentialist that you might find rather keen! Using the magic of PHP, and a script addition for Moveabletype, visitors to the site via a search engine get a special treat. The script identifies from your referrer information whether or not you came from a search engine, such as Google. It then strips the search terms out of the URL, performs a comprehensive search of my entries, and displays a little box at the top of the site proclaiming that I noticed you arrived from a search engine, and lists the top 5 entries from the local search.

This is great for blogs, because frequently I get people who arrive searching for odd things like “beethoven symphonies free downloading” or “a rabbit costume in fast motion video” or “honda aero 125″. Those people, when they arrive at my home page, are left wondering where the heck the info on the relevant search term is to be found! This way, they will be quickly presented with some links to the posts containing the info they seek. There is also an option to highlight all the search terms! If you want to see how it works, click here and click on the first link Google pops up. That will take you back to this page, but via google, and you will see what I’m talking about. Neato keen, huh? If you’d like to implement a similar thing, and are using Moveable Type, then check out the developer’s page for MT-RefSearch! As always, if you need help getting it working, feel free to contact me.

If you would like a similar feature for your site, but aren’t using Moveable Type, then you can get a similar effect by using Google Hilite by Dean at Textism.com. It will work with any site, and simply detects the search term used to reach your site, and then highlights that term anywhere it appears on your page. It works purely through PHP, and is a snazzy bit of programming.

I’ve got a few plans for Flex that I’d like to implement soon. Namely, categories, and searching. I’ve got enough posts now (around 180) that finding the specific post you want to find is nearly impossible. Searching functionality would solve that little problem. The other problem is that I have visitors coming to the site looking for computer information, like my posts about installing Linux on computers, or fixing various OS X problems, and there is no way to find just posts about computers, without slogging through post after post of mindless jibber-jabber. Catagories would be fairly transparent to readers, in the sense that all the posts I make would be put straight onto the main page, but it would give people the ability to filter out posts of a certain nature if they wanted too. How this will be implemented, I haven’t decided yet.

If anyone has good ideas or suggestions for Flexistentialist.org, let me know, since I’m in a productive mood.

UPDATE: Search function has been enabled! Fire any comments you have about it my way. I’m going to take a break, then hit up this whole catagories business.

UPDATE II: Search function now adds google results. This was a bit of a trial, but i wanted to do it, just for shits and giggles. Check out this thread at the moveabletype support forums for more info on how I did it. The categories thing is bothering me, because it seems that I can’t set up a search exclusion based on the category, which is what I wanted… I’ll have to brainstorm that one for a while. Also, I consolidated some of my little link badges to another menu float at the bottom, Badge Soup. Anyway, I’m dirty, so I’m going to shower, and then go to bed.

The switch to the new host is complete, and things should be rather transparent. I’ve sped the site up a bit, as well as converted all the pages to PHP. This lets me do more includes, and involve little random content here and there. The include system is more powerful than SSI, as well.

Also, as I was hipped to by Josh, this site is now compressed in gzip format prior to being sent out to you. That means the pages are about 30% the size that they were originally! There is a slight server overhead involved, but so what, I’m paying for their server time, so by god I’m gonna use it! Besides, its not like this site is getting thousands of hits per hour or anything. If you want to do this too, then you can! The only qualifications is that your server has PHP version 4.1 or better, and your pages are parsed by PHP. Most servers these days have a new enough version, and if your pages end in .php, then that means they are being parsed by PHP. If that is the case for your page, check out this link on Textism on how to set up compression. Its very easy, only one line of PHP needed.

If your site isn’t being parsed by PHP, because the extension is something ‘normal’ like .html or .shtml or .htm, and you are running the Apache web server, then here is a trick you can do to make your site parsed by PHP. This will increase server load a little bit, because all your pages will be parsed, even if they don’t have much php content, but if you want to compress them all, or use some of php’s other super-cool features, then its worth it.

Create a .htaccess file in the root directory of your webspace. If there is already a .htaccess file there, then we’ll just use it, leave anything else in there thats already there. .htaccess files allow you to override the Apache server settings to your specific needs. Most web servers allow .htaccess files, but some do not, so if this doesn’t work, then talk to your administrator.

In the .htaccess file, put a line like this:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

This will make Apache use the x-httpd-php application to parse anything that ends with .html! Your .html files have now become php files, but you didn’t have to go through and change all your links and filenames to .php! If you are using .shtml, like me, then you need to make two changes. First, simply change .html in the above example to .shtml, thats pretty obvious. The second is you need to add the following line ABOVE the line we specified above:

RemoveHandler .shtml

This line will make Apache NOT try to server-parse the .shtml files. .shtml files are usually used when you are using Server Side Includes to add things to your pages. A page cannot be parsed by both PHP and the server for SSI calls! You’ll need to remove any SSI you have in your page, and replace it with equivalent PHP. If you are just using the SSI include virtual call, then you can easily replace it with:

<?php include("filename.txt"); ?>

Pretty much anything you can do with SSIs, you can also do with PHP, so if you have a lot of complex stuff in there, you may need to do some research to figure out the best PHP way to do it.

Anyway, this is how my page is now PHP, yet is claiming to be .shtml. Through the magic of .htaccess and server-side scripting! Yay!

However, my elation is softened in the realization that despite all the momentous changes none of you will notice a functional difference in the page, except that it will load faster. Lucky you. If you don’t mind, just be a little bit proud of me, that I did all that codey stuff just for you!

Well, yesterday I found a host I liked, ECP Hosting and signed up for an account. The guy who I spoke to there was very friendly, they offered all the services I need, and the price was right. However, after signing up, I asked to have SSH access turned on, as their FAQ noted that SSH was included, but had to be requested. I got a reply that they had to stop offering that service, as it had become a security risk for them. The guy was sincerely regretful that the webpage hadn’t been updated, and offered me a full refund. I was bummed, because he had everything I needed, and most of all, he seemed like he genuinely cared about providing good service. They have a forum that was filled with helpful responses from him, his webpage was impeccably friendly, and he was very prompt with his email replies. Saddly, as an oldschooler, and a bit of a tinkerer, I can’t deal with just a web-based control panel, I need to be able to get into the shell.

After being rather distraught, as it had taken me months to decide on going with his service, I looked through my second and third choices, and ended up talking to a guy at Intense Servers who offered me a good plan, with everything I need. They seem to be pretty well rated, so hopefully this will work out. Its a multi-domain system, so both Flexistentialist.org and Cowboysofjustice.com will be hosted there. I’m moving Flex over first, so I can figure out how the email transfer will work out, and then I’ll move Cowboysofjustice.com. Hopefully with moving Flex as the ‘test run’, the cowboysofjustice.com transfer should be rather painless. I’ll send out emails letting people know what they should do, when it comes time to, uh, do stuff.

Ignore the post unless you are a cowboymail user. You know who you are.

Curses! Cowboysofjustice.com has expired, and I don’t have the correct administrative access to the domain, so I can’t renew it yet, and the hosting sucks anyway, and blah blah blah. Anyway, cowboymail is down for the moment. I sent out a bunch of emails, and have to wait until they respond until I can do anything. There is a possibility that I’ll be almost immediately switching hosts, as this is the last straw with sterlet.net. I’m backing up all your email, but unfortunately, I will probably have to reset all your passwords. So get ahold of me, 314-725-3791, or email through my contact form and I’ll fix your account. Sorry this has been such a hassle! I truly am!

Here is the current roadmap. Expect the domain to start working again in a few days. At that point, you’ll have access to your email again. Save anything important. I’ll try to send out an email at that point telling you what your password is likely to change to. Then we’ll switch hosts, and I’ll reset your password. I’ll put info on the cowboymail homepage letting you know how to log in. I’ll try to restore your old emails, but unfortunately, I can’t make any promises.. You know how this crazy internet is. Save anything important once Cowboysofjustice.com comes back online. I’ll send this info out as an email once the domain comes back online. See you on the other side.

I’m doing some tweaking to the site. I’ve sped it up a bit by changing the size of the background images to be a little larger. Counter-intuitive, yes, but its faster to redraw fewer instances of a 64X64 image than many instances of a 8X8 image. And it shows with a more responsive page. Sweet.

I’m working on a new main logo, any ideas? I’m fresh out, so it will stick with this original one for now until I think of something.

The site is now wider, which feels good, it doesn’t feel so cramped. However, I have a problem that maybe a CSS ninja could help me with… When you resize the window, the main div stays centered, and when the div shrinks beyond the point where the entire div fits on the screen, it still remains centered, cutting off the right and left sides. With no scroll bar. Contrast it with this site, which is static layout like mine, but when you shrink the window, the left side ‘sticks’ and a scroll bar appears letting you move to the left. Why doesn’t my site behave that way? Crazy… I’ll tweak with it for a while, see what I can figure out.

Please, gimme any suggestions you got.

—- UPDATE:

Fixed a goofy thing with IE for Windows. It seems to be totally incapable of correctly calculating the sizes of a box model in CSS. Why? I have no idea. Mozilla, Konqueror, IE for Mac, Chimera, Opera, etc, all do it just fine. If you are curious what the problem is, look in the code for the conditional comments. They are a ‘feature’ of IE that lets you reveal code to IE that accesses its ‘advanced functions’ while hiding the code from inferior browsers. However, I’m using it against IE, by showing it a span tag with the wrong CSS info that IE needs to get over its problem with calculations. Other browsers skip over it and use the right info. Still haven’t figured out the margins thing…

I feel a partial site redesign coming on…

I think Flex is too narrow. No one uses 640X480 screens any more. I’m thinking about a nice fluid layout, with a minimum width around 640. The image on the titlebar has to be updated a bit, it looks like the title image for a church or something. I like clouds, but it could stand to be a little more, I dunno, edgy.

The image could be fluid too, using transparent PNGs. PNGs are sweet.

Also, the side bar is too darkly colored, and its too wide. The main font size could stand to be a little lower, and maybe a new font face is in order.

Fortunately, because its all CSS, those are easy changes. Anyway, if you see some changes over the next few days, don’t be surprised, k?

The upgrade to version 2.5 of Moveable Type was largely uneventful. Which is exactly how an upgrade should work! There are some nice new features, including trackback code that validates! I’m a stickler about valid code, and so I chose not to use the previous version of trackback because of validation problems. These seem to be fixed though, so trackback will get re-enabled.

Trackback, for those who don’t know, is a system through which people can notify my website if they make a post that relates to one of my posts. Also, I can notify other people’s websites if I make a post that relates to one of theirs. Basically, each post will have three links at the bottom. The first link is the ‘perma-link’ that links directly to the post in the archive. That is what you can use if you want to link to one of my posts directly, instead of having to scroll down through and find it later. The second link is for comments, where you can comment on my posts, leave feedback, etc. The third link, which I will activate later (I need to spank up another template), will be the trackback link. If you have a trackback enabled blogging tool, or a blogging tool that supports ‘RPC Pings’ (look in the documentation), you can copy the link, and put it in the trackback section of your new post, or in the “URLs to ping” section when you are creating your post. When you publish the entry, your website will send your name, the title of your post, and a small excerpt of the post to my website. A link will appear beneath the post you referenced showing that I have one trackback. Clicking that link will take us directly to your post. Handy!

Through trackbacks and pings, blogs can have ‘conversations’ between each other, notifying one another when they reference each other’s posts. Readers can follow the various trackback links, and trace the thread of the conversation.

If you have any questions about trackback, or want to enable it on your weblog and don’t know how, get in touch with me!

Moveable Type (the software that powers this site) just released version 2.5, with a ton of new features! It is also the software’s one year anniversary! If you use this tool, or are looking for a good server-side blogging tool, I can’t recommend Moveable Type highly enough! Its totally free, but with donations requested. If you donate, you get to ping their site and get added to their ‘recently updated’ list, and you get personal tech support from the authors of the program, and of course, you get the satisfaction of supporting a great piece of software written by a nice couple.

I’ll be updating flexistentialist.org tonight, so there may be some downtime as I get the new system installed.