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Mon, 19 Nov 2007

Trying again to install Subversion on my server

This time, I'm trying to install an earlier version (1.3.2): from the forums of my hosting company I learned that nobody has managed to install its latest version yet. When I tried first, I didn't get anywhere before installing the dependencies as well - I wonder what will happen this time. It's probably not an issue with the older version.

Even if I succeed, I may not be able to actually run Subversion on the server and do anything useful with it. But I guess it's worth a try.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:47 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Blosxom blog headlines in WP blog sidebar

Using the RSS module provided by the K2 theme, I added headlines of entries in this blog to my "entries" blog. I'm still not 100% sure if it's actually a good idea to make my "Traces" so easily accessible ...

In the same way, I added the RSS feed from my Twitter page.

Since I'm not so fond of posting photos, videos, chats ..., I decided that Gelato CMS and Tumblelog (which integrates into WordPress) are not for me.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:20 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader

I've started using keyboard shortcuts - Binny VA has drawn my attention to their existence. Nice!

These are the ones I use most often:

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 11:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sun, 18 Nov 2007

What Tor can be used for

It's interesting what you can do with Tor - set up an exit node and monitor other people's traffic for example. Apparently, this is what a guy named Egerstad did; he found lots of usernames and passwords associated with e-mail accounts used by embassies - and later posted these username/password combinations on his blog. Now he's in trouble with the police. But has he done anything wrong?

It's interesting, too, that quite a lot of Tor users still don't seem to understand that Tor does not provide strong anonymity - even though the Tor website clearly states this. A lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between Tor and end-to-end e-mail encryption. Well, too bad for them ...

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 20:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 16 Nov 2007

K2 and Rubin combined

In spite of what I wrote yesterday, obviously I couldn't keep myself from playing around with the stylesheet. I managed to integrate the colours of my "Rubin" theme into K2. I kind of like the result I've got now - and hope my dear readers will agree. And not turn away in disgust ...

The static pages on the "entries" blog - "About" and "My other sites" - are a lot less difficult to find in this new design. The navigation in the header is a real strong point of K2, I think.

Posted on 16 Nov 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Thu, 15 Nov 2007

Better go for the latest K2 version

It's dawning on me that that database problem isn't caused by any supposed incompatibility between K2 and WordPress 2.3.1 - I guess I should just use the latest K2 release candidate for the Amity website. The problem is, I adapted quite a few things in the core of K2! Of course I should never have done that ... Especially since it's so easy to add custom stylesheets etc. That was really stupid!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Finished adapting my K2

K2 now looks like it should. After some experimenting, I decided to go with the default colours - good-bye, my dear Rubin theme! I went for 3 instead of 2 columns, added a few things to the sidebars, moved the title and tagline to the right and made the header a bit narrower; otherwise, it's a K2 out of the box. Bulleted lists are fine, blockquotes display nicely, even the groups of pictures look good. This is very satisfying!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

The K2 sidebar manager ...

... is extremely slow, but if you give it the time it needs, it delivers the results you want.

Now it's time to push the blog title and tagline to the right - and maybe change some colours, after all.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 18:14 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior blocked its first intruder

I installed Bad Behavior an hour ago - and already it blocked an intruder! Akismet, in the meantime, is lazing in the sunshine ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:34 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Indenting text with CSS

I created nice indented bulleted lists for the entries on my "entries" blog. <ul> lists are used in the sidebars, too, but there I don't want to see any bullets or indentations. In the entries, yes. CSS has nice things like these:

What would I do without selfhtml?

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Installed Bad Behavior

How could one not install something with such a nice name? Bad Behavior is a blog comment spam killer. I saw that, even when I had turned all comments off on the "entries" blog, I still got tons of spam comments. How can you prevent the bots which send out such stuff from reaching your blog in the first place? Bad Behavior just might be the solution. I'll give it a try.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 15:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Struggling with my newsfeeds

I'm already struggling with my newsreader again - if I don't go through my subscriptions every day, things get out of control. Do I have too many subscriptions? Well, I just added another one ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 12:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Wed, 14 Nov 2007

K2 and WordPress

I thought about using K2 for the "entries" blog. On the K2 downloads page, it says that you should make sure you run WordPress 2.2+. So 2.3(.1) isn't a good choice for K2? Well, that settles it. I'm not going back to version 2.2.

Actually I'm using K2 with WordPress 2.3.1 on the Amity website - maybe this is why there are some small problems with the MySQL database. Apart from these problems, which don't really seem to matter, this combination works just fine. But it's probably better to stay with my "Rubin" theme for the time being.

Or does 2.2+ mean "2.2 or later"? But if it does, what causes those database problems?

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 19:40 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Habari blogging platform

Habari, as it says on the project's homepage, "is a next-generation free software blogging platform". Well, it's definitely not this-generation: the project has reached version 0.3 and is still beset with lots of bugs; work on Habari doesn't seem to be going on particularly smoothly. Still, the "free software blogging platform" part sounds interesting; and if we are to believe what it says in the FAQ, Habari just might be the answer to bad things like comment spam.

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 02:00 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 13 Nov 2007

Positioning the calendar

I learned how to create columns with CSS - fine. Decided I don't like it for this blog after all, though. So what I did is I simply positioned the calendar where I want it, up there in the right corner, and made a few other small adjustments. There are several divisions (in <div> tags) now in the HTML code to facilitate the use of CSS.

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 20:34 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Creating columns with CSS

Even though I want to keep this blog really simple and don't want to add sidebars with lots of stuff - link lists, categories, archives, this kind of things -, I'm still interested in how to create a website layout which has several columns. Not using a table is, of course, a point of honour. So CSS is the answer.

I've just googled for "columns css" and found a couple of useful sites right away. Now I'm trying things out, hoping that the calendar up there will move to the side before long.

(Yes, sure, I've figured out by now that Blosxom is quite dead. Still, I like it as it is, and trying things out "by hand" is always fun.)

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 19:43 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Mon, 12 Nov 2007

Schizophrenic programmers

All of us are schizophrenic, as Binny V.A. points out. He should know! Yet I find myself in his post, too.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 13:20 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

FTP client: sftp

I find I like the text-based sftp even better than the graphical gFTP. Austere? Perfect for me!

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 12:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tor upgrade

I upgraded to Tor 0.1.2.18. Had to install libevent-devel and openssl-devel before the configure script ran all the way. Apart from that, a breeze.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 12:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

A remarkable website

That's the website of a UK-based family business specialising in old music, above all recorders. The website is unusually well made, almost nerdy, and has a lot of links to interesting resources, e.g. a music dictionary or a collection of composers' biographies, but also unrelated stuff such as free software, online radio and a link to the UK national rail enquiries website. The world news section has links to news sites - and sudokus.

Weird. A webmaster's hobby-horse? Have a look yourself: www.dolmetsch.com.

Posted on 12 Nov 2007 at 10:29 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sun, 11 Nov 2007

Updated the stylesheet again

I put more of the style info into the CSS file and made the name of the blog (at the top of the page) clickable - this makes it easy to go back "home" from wherever you are in this blog.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 17:07 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Double slashes in RSS links

I just realised that I get those double slashes only in the RSS feed link on the main page, i.e. for the "root directory" - not in the RSS feed links for other directories (/technology/internet and the like). Seems strange to me!

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 17:02 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Another blog I found on the way

That's Jason Clark's weblog, where I got the "moreentries" plugin for Blosxom.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 15:04 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Website start page slightly changed

I made some changes to the start page of my site - mostly cosmetic, but I finally threw out the link to my Twitter page (which I've grown sick and tired of) and added some other links to make the page more usable. Above all, I added a link to this blog here.

Posted on 11 Nov 2007 at 13:56 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 09 Nov 2007

Gmail supports IMAP?

Apparently it does! I have to explore this!

Posted on 09 Nov 2007 at 12:23 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Thu, 08 Nov 2007

WordPress update

I updated the new English Amity website to the latest WordPress version. This took no longer than 20 minutes altogether - and this is without Subversion.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 15:44 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

How to edit a file within WordPress

OK, that was easy again. Files in the folder of the theme which your WordPress blog is using will show up in the "Theme Editor" (in the "Presentation" section) if they have the file extension ".php". So I renamed the file "announcement" "announcement.php", changed the file which loads the announcement box accordingly - and that was it.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 11:48 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

How can I edit a file within WordPress?

How can I get WordPress to display the file containing the Amity "announcement box" alongside the stylesheet, PHP files etc.? It would be nice to edit the announcement box from within WordPress, instead of downloading, editing and uploading it with FTP.

Posted on 08 Nov 2007 at 11:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Wed, 07 Nov 2007

Time zones (cont'd)

Two things that help with time zones:

(Cf. Time zones, on this blog.)

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 22:32 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Further fumbling with the stylesheet

I can't help it, the Linux standard "serif" font looks best to me for this. Which is why I changed the stylesheet in a probably unusual way, putting "serif" before some other fonts I like too. Don't know how much sense this makes - not very much, I guess, because browsers will just go for their standard "serif" font and ignore the rest.

Still, I'm not too happy with the rendering of Chinese characters in this setting. They were clearer when I used a sans-serif font.

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 22:26 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Blogs found on the way

I came across two potentially interesting blogs when I explored Blosxom:

Posted on 07 Nov 2007 at 20:42 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 06 Nov 2007

Favicon

I stumbled over this "favicon.ico" file on my server, had a look at it, replaced it with my beloved moose ... Here we go (but you'll have to clean out your cache before you see any change).

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 17:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Added some style

I added a CSS file to this blog (whose only job, for the time being, is making the calendar a little smaller) and replaced "b" tags with "strong" tags for the title - in my ceaseless striving for web standards compliance. I guess with this Blosxom blog, there's still some way to go ...

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 17:35 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

WordPress blogging How-to - finished!

That didn't take long - just about 2 hours, and I already formatted my text using Word (blush ...) and printed it out. Which shows once again that WordPress is very well thought out and easy to use!

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 16:51 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Writing a WordPress blogging How-to

Since the new English Amity website is now up and running and I'm not the only person supposed to post articles there, I'm now in the process of writing a brief step-by-step manual:

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 14:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Subversion

Just in case I'll find out how to install it on my server, I put a link to the Subversion website here.

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 14:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Your subscription expired

My firewall and antivirus software subscription expired - 3 months ago, it seems ... so why do I get the order to renew it today? It's taking me hours to reactivate my account with the company (yes, I forgot my password, can you imagine!), renew the subscription, download the stuff (from a website which wants to run scripts from nine different sources!), install it, install the licence key ... The program which is supposed to download and install the thing doesn't work properly so I have to reboot the computer ...

After installing the software, I have to reboot again. Each time I reboot I get another reminder: Your subscription expired, please renew now. In the meantime, I have to make sure 4 times that they don't send me advertisements (spam, that is) in the future. Hey, this isn't even a free product! I'm paying for it! Finally the firewall and virus scanner are running again - and I'm informed that my registration is "pending". So I can't get updates, not even updated virus definitions. Great.

Finally, I can install the correct licence key and updates are downloaded. After that, I have to reboot for the third time.

Why on earth are we running Windoze at the office? Dreaming sweet Linux dreams ...

Posted on 06 Nov 2007 at 11:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Mon, 05 Nov 2007

RSS feeds don't quite work

Turns out it does matter that there are these double slashes. Firefox seems to ignore them and display the feeds all the same; Google Reader has a problem and can't subscribe me to such a defective feed.

Another problem: although the blog is now in UTF-8, the feeds aren't. Chinese characters aren't displayed properly in the feeds.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:49 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

RSS feeds seem to work

After quite a lot of "trial and error", the RSS feeds for this blog seem to work, too. See bottom of this page, or of any page here.

Strangely, sometimes there are double slashes in the actual link locations. I don't understand why they're there. They don't seem to matter though, clicking on an RSS feed link takes me to the feed alright. I don't understand this either.

It's great that Blosxom provides a separate feed for every category. Also, they're rather easy to get at (so you can add links pointing to them to a page) with the help of some variables.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

UTF - success!

Once again, that was easy. Simply putting a file named "content_type.html" into the Blosxom "data folder" on my server did the trick - this file makes sure that browsers recognise the character encoding as UTF-8. It contains just one line: "text/html; charset=UTF-8". A look at the FAQ and I got all the info I needed. 太好了!

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:18 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink


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